Nature Communications has been striving to support Early Career Researchers (ECRs) through different pilot schemes including the peer review mentoring programs and co-review mentoring initiative. The 2^nd Rising Stars workshop, held at the Henry Royce Institute on the 9^th of February, 2024, aims to celebrate and support rising stars within underrepresented groups in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects and this greatly aligns with the aspirations in our journal. In this conversation, the experiences and advice shared by representatives from various disciplines in the workshop are translated to a wider audience in Nature Communications. Dr Alex Ramadan (Lecturer at the University of Sheffield), Dr Lucy Whalley (Assistant Professor at Northumbria University), Dr Maddison Coke (Senior Experimental Officer at the University of Manchester), and Dr Yi Liu (Lecturer at Loughborough University) discuss the opportunities and challenges they face towards their career with work-life balance, family and caring responsibility, and diversity and inclusion in their workplace, and share their experiences on how mentorship supports their personal and professional growth.

To build pathways to constructive and engaging peer review for the next generation of scientists, we invite all our reviewers to co-review with an Early Career Researcher in their group and let us know. We will ensure ECRs are recognised for their contribution.

Professor Sabine Oertelt-Prigione has been working in the field of sex and gender-sensitive research for the last 15 years. Her current work is focused on trying to understand how sex and gender-sensitive medicine can be successfully implemented in research and practice as well as methods to investigate gender in medical research. Dr. Brandon Turner is a resident physician in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has conducted and is involved in numerous studies looking to evaluate race and ethnicity reporting and representation in clinical trials. In this interview for Nature Communications, Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, and Brandon Turner share their knowledge about the biases that can occur in clinical trials and how they can be minimized.

Africa is undergoing a demographic transition¹ that has led to significant reductions in the number of individuals living in extreme poverty, and to positive shifts in related health outcomes, across its diverse populations². Building on these successes requires a consideration of intersecting factors that impact health metrics, which is the focus of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals³. To support researchers in their efforts towards reaching these goals, Nature Communications, Communications Medicine and Scientific Reports invite submissions of papers that advance our understanding of all aspects of health in Africa.

Recent discoveries reveal how cyanobacteria naturally overcome photosynthetic limits, supporting proposals to improve use of the solar spectrum. These insights could guide efforts to engineer more efficient crops and biofuel-producing organisms.

A rift has occurred within the scientific community between two formerly close-knit fields: condensed matter physics and electronic device engineering. What started as a union to understand the fundamental optical and electrical properties of semiconductors has been split by divergent interests. While the partnership has produced revolutionary changes in the way that information is processed and consumed by an increasingly interconnected society, now the two disciplines rarely speak to one another. As the years have passed, condensed matter physics has become enamored with delicate electronic effects in increasingly complex materials and geometries to the detriment of realistic applications. Meanwhile, device engineering has remained steadfastly focused on room-temperature performance and overall efficiency, prizing incremental improvement over potential disruptive advances using alternative materials and physics. Recent advances in topological electronic systems—in particular those exploiting Chern insulators—while elegant, prompt a necessary reexamination of the device engineering needs and the associated metrics with the goal of establishing a commonality within the blooming field of topological electronics. The purpose of this Comment is to initiate such a reexamination in the hopes that, with a better understanding of future device needs, perhaps the two areas may reunite to usher in the next electronic revolution via the use of topological phenomena.

NASA’s latest space probe Europa Clipper, was launched on October 14, 2024, and will study Jupiter’s moon Europa. Europa is covered by an icy crust and is thought to host a subsurface ocean of liquid water. Europa Clipper’s main mission objectives are to study the moon’s ice crust and its surface features, confirm the presence of a subsurface ocean, and determine its chemical composition. Ultimately, this mission will further our understanding of the potential habitability of icy moons in our solar system, such as Europa. In this Q&A we are talking with three scientists (Dr. Christopher Glein, Dr. Elodie Lesage and Dr. Annie Marinan) involved with Clipper, and what particular research questions they hope to answer during the mission.

Topology and chirality of fermionic quasiparticles have enabled exciting discoveries, including quantum anomalous Hall liquids and topological superconductivity. Recently, topological and chiral phonons emerge as new and fast-evolving research directions. While these concepts are separately developed, they are intimately connected in the context of Weyl phonons. The couplings between chiral and topological phonons with various electronic and magnetic quasiparticles are predicted to give rise to new quantum states and giant magnetism with fundamental and applicational interests, ranging from quantum information science to dark matter detectors.

Malaria vaccine research has progressed significantly, with RTS,S/AS01 and R21/Matrix-M receiving WHO endorsement in 2021 / 2023. These vaccines show promise, but challenges like vaccine adherence, strain variation, and resistance persist, highlighting the need for more effective, broad-reaching interventions.

The natural host for avian influenza virus (AIV) is waterfowl. However, certain subtypes have breached species barriers, causing epizootics in many avian and mammalian species with occasional zoonotic infections in humans. The ongoing spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) poses a significant and growing public health threat. Here, we discuss recent advances in viral detection and characterization technologies and their integration into the diagnostics and surveillance of AIV within a “One Health” framework.