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Most studies assessing food self-sufficiency look at calories and neglect nutrient gaps. Comparing food demand and potential food production under land and water constraints, this study quantifies 9 key nutrient gaps for each of African’s 54 countries.

Phototrophic bacteria could be used for chemical manufacturing from various carbon sources. This Review discusses the pathways, engineering and potential application of solar chemical biosynthesis.

Neural crest cells are migratory cells unique to vertebrates. Here they show that NR6A1 is a key regulator of neural crest cell formation and survival by downregulating pluripotency-associated genes, while upregulating neural crest cell specifier genes and epithelial cell to mesenchyme cell transition.

Guidance on how to decarbonize the economy while limiting impacts on jobs and ensuring stability is scarce. Now a study finds that relying on a carbon tax alone falls short, whereas combining industrial regulations, subsidies and a modest tax is the most promising approach to achieve sustainable growth with green jobs.

Genome-wide association meta-analysis identifies 58 independent risk loci for major anxiety disorders among individuals of European ancestry and implicates GABAergic signaling as a potential mechanism underlying genetic risk for these disorders.

Oceans provide essential ecosystem services to human society, yet the climate impacts on blue capital have long been ignored. Incorporating the latest works on ocean science and economics, researchers show that accounting for the potential damage would almost double the social cost of carbon estimation.

The authors conduct a national inventory on individual tree carbon stocks in Rwanda using aerial imagery and deep learning. Most mapped trees are located in farmlands; new methods allow partitioning to any landscape categories, effective planning and optimization of carbon sequestration and the economic benefits of trees.

Achieving mitigation from forests aligned with #NDCs requires $20–72 billion annually by 2030. Global coordination could double mitigation with the same level of finance, revealing major efficiency gains and informing next generation climate targets.

MultiSuSiE is an extension of the Sum of Single Effects fine-mapping model that allows causal effect sizes to vary across ancestries. Applying MultiSuSiE to quantitative traits in All of Us identifies fine-mapped variants not implicated by other methods.

Identifying jets originating from heavy quarks plays a fundamental role in hadronic collider experiments. In this work, the ATLAS Collaboration describes and tests a transformer-based neural network architecture for jet flavour tagging based on low-level input and physics-inspired constraints.

N¹-Methylpseudouridine enhances the translation of synthetic mRNAs, independently of innate immunity.

Wild pollinator loss in Europe could cut crop yields by 8%, reduce exports, and raise food prices. Despite market adjustments, global annual welfare would decline by €34 billion in 2030, with EU consumers in states resisting biodiversity policies hit hardest.

A wide range of policies and actions can be used to address energy insecurity, and there are many actors and institutions to carry them out. This Perspective provides an overview of the many levers, or opportunities, that electricity sector actors have to reduce energy insecurity and affordability in the United States.

Moral-Sanz, Fernández-Carrasco and colleagues identify senolytic properties of sea anemone-derived pore-forming toxins, with selectivity mediated by senescence-associated lipid profiles. An optimized senotoxin improves the efficacy of chemotherapy in mouse models.

Our 10 most read news articles in 2019. Discover what drew in our readers: from STING to phages, and what's next after CRISPR.

In the US, the cropland and non-cropland conversion from existing uses to cellulosic feedstocks for sustainable aviation fuels reduces the net greenhouse gas emissions intensity, according to a framework that combines economic, biochemical, and feedstock-specific process engineering models.

Metabolite signatures were identified for subtypes of dietary carbohydrate, including added sugar, whole grain and refined grain, and showed different associations with type 2 diabetes, providing an objective measure of dietary risk.

Owing to its short atmospheric life, methane’s contribution to agricultural emissions and climate change may vary substantially depending on the temporal scale considered. Based on projections from three agricultural economic models, this study reveals how different appreciations of methane’s global warming potential may affect the cost-effectiveness of carbon pricing and low-meat diets.

Burnout in healthcare is not merely a by-product of overwork, but a systemic issue driven by a culture of relentless productivity and insufficient support. Self-care practices such as exercise and mindfulness offer temporary relief, but do little to address the root causes of burnout embedded in the healthcare system. By promoting self-compassion and collaboration over competition, healthcare can move beyond burnout, restoring the ‘human being’ in every ‘human doing’ and creating a sustainable, supportive system for all.

TIRTL-seq is a high-throughput method for paired T cell receptor sequencing at the cohort scale.

The effects of expanding electric vehicle charging stations on housing values are unknown. This study fills the gap with data for California and finds that properties near charging stations show a higher price, while traffic slightly increases and particulate matter (PM_2.5) emissions decrease.

High reproduction is often associated by higher mortality in models with well-mixed populations. Here, the authors model spatially-structured populations, finding that variants with proportional increases in birth and death rates become disadvantaged, even when they have a higher lifetime reproductive output.

Camerer et al. use standardized experiments across thousands of students to demonstrate empirical regularities in two-person bargaining and trading in markets. Bargaining outcomes lean toward equal sharing, and markets rapidly create prices that match supply and demand.

Representative microbial isolates and patient-specific biobanks are crucial for microbiome investigation and management. Here, authors develop laser-assisted microbial culturomics, combining high-throughput, precise bioprinting on diverse media with rapid, non-invasive analyses.

The development of robust catalysts that could work under high current densities brings promise but is a challenge in CO₂ electroreduction. Here, the authors report a wettability-engineered electrode design for ethylene electrosynthesis that operates over 1000 h without salt precipitation.

Epidemiological methods are used to show that the Great Fear of 1789, a series of peasant insurrections in rural revolutionary France, was driven by deliberate political action rather than spontaneous fear.

Achieving a net-zero future requires that hard-to-abate sectors be addressed. Co-production offers an opportunity to mitigate chemical and steel sector emissions by extracting H₂ and CO from steelmaking off-gas and using them for chemical syntheses. The authors examine carbon mitigation and costs of co-producing chemicals and steel in China.

Roer et al. analyze genomes of Escherichia coli clonal complex 38 from humans, animals, and food to investigate its spread and host associations. They find distinct human and poultry lineages and identify plasmid markers linked to animal adaptation and zoonotic transmission.

Adopting today’s best available construction technologies could reduce embodied CO₂ emissions from structural materials by about 73% compared to business as usual by 2050, while still meeting construction demand in low and middle income countries.

China’s coal-dominated power system is a source of carbon emissions, local air pollution and water stress. This study presents three power system development scenarios that run until 2030 in China, where coal strategies are optimized under current environmental regulations and varying prices for air pollutant emissions and water.

Reduced dependence on wild-caught fish in favour of crop-based ingredients for feeds has supported aquaculture growth. An analysis of ingredient origins versus feed composition shows that origin must be considered to assess the environmental footprint of feed production.

The recent drop in oil prices is having a profound impact on global energy markets, raising questions about how these markets might evolve over the long term. This study uses scenarios to assess the energy and emissions impacts of diverging oil price futures and which uncertainties they depend upon.

Enzymatic recycling is an emerging technology to circularize the ubiquitous polyester poly(ethylene terephthalate). Here the authors evaluate and implement multiple process changes to improve the scalability and viability of this recycling technology. Process modeling demonstrates that these changes could enable cost competitiveness and greatly reduce overall life cycle impacts.

Brazil is known to supply an important share of China’s increasing demand for proteins, but the exact pressure on land and water that results from this is unclear. This study addresses this gap, focusing on soybean trade, showing the persistence of indirect deforestation associated with soy cultivation expansion.

The authors identify flip probability as a universal quantity in random explorations. Here, the authors show it follows a simple inverse law across Markovian, non-Markovian, and real-world systems.