From the archive
Genetic evidence from the deep Pacific Ocean shows that many microbes carry genes to make food from inorganic carbon using carbon monoxide and sulfur, rather than relying mainly on ammonia.
Adult mice that lose their hearing quieten signals in their visual cortex, selectively sharpening their peripheral vision for fine, still patterns.
Living in an industrialised society is linked to gut microbes swapping genes and expanding their protein toolkits to adapt to new environments.
Physicists have shown that polariton waveguides can direct spin currents across 92 micrometres at room temperature by tapping into dark excitons.
In mice, eating high-fat food for just four days at the start of an illness permanently worsened immune flare-ups, matching the damage seen in chronic obesity.
By mining historical chemistry archives with machine learning, scientists identified 33 overlooked materials and created several new rare earth-based variants in minutes without sustained external heat.
Ancient genomes from Colombia show that local groups began eating maize long before outside migrants arrived and replaced them.
Rapid east-west homing flights desynchronise the internal clocks of Manx shearwaters, leading to predictable navigation errors. Even when coastlines are visible, the seabirds continue to rely on their Sun compass.
Digital tests show that sinking rock slabs near Asia pulled on the Pacific floor, sending stress thousands of miles away to tear open the Gulf of California.
In the common field poppy, plant self-incompatibility is controlled by two separate, unrelated gene pairs that share no common ancestry instead of a single shared gene family.
