Volume 640 Issue 8058, 10 April 2025

The 50th anniversary of a landmark biosafety conference is an opportunity to ensure its spirit lives on in today’s scientists.

Academics can drive policy innovation — but they must shift their focus from publishing papers to creating practical products.

Lessons from environmental and other social movements can help researchers to protect scientific integrity from attack.

Multi-year episodes of the climatic pattern are much more frequent now than they were seven millennia ago.

The sunflower star, which can be bigger than a hubcap, escapes a wasting disease by hunkering down in fjords.

Lunar soil processed to form ‘moonglass’ allows the creation of efficient, radiation-resistant solar panels.

A single dose of the drug nitisinone could render a person’s blood lethal to mosquitoes for five days, modelling suggests.

In shock move, four institute directors at the US biomedical agency are removed from their posts.

Study finds genetic imprints in three generations of Syrian refugees. Researchers urge caution in interpreting findings and call for replication.

Improvements to brain–computer interfaces are bringing the technology closer to natural conversational speed.

‘Supershear’ quake moved fast and far, amplifying the damage and human toll.

Thousands of 3D protein structures locked up in big-pharma vaults will be used to create a new AI tool that won’t be open to academics.

More than 1,600 readers answered our poll; many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada.

The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

The European Union’s new research chief Ekaterina Zaharieva speaks to Nature about attracting disaffected US scientists and cutting grant bureaucracy.

Researchers are studying why the energy factories are moving between cells and whether the process can be harnessed to treat cancer and other diseases.

Gene editing and many other useful biotechnology tools came from studies of bacteria fighting off viral invaders. But scientists have only begun to unlock the secrets of this ancient arms race.

Finspan is visually stunning and brilliantly captures the intricacies of the ocean’s ecosystems.

Without clear protocols to catch errors, artificial intelligence’s growing role in science could do more harm than good.

Evidence shows that science and scientists remain highly trusted. But genuine scientific voices are not shouting loud enough over the noise to hold sway.

Curious about using artificial intelligence to boost your research? Here are the programs you shouldn’t miss.

Spatial proteomics is helping biologists to uncover how cells work by mapping where proteins operate.

Ecologist Cecilia Soldatini tracks the movements of magnificent frigatebirds.

A large consortium of scientists adds functional data to neuronal wiring maps, seeking to crack the computational circuitry of the mouse brain.

Research on cannabis was hotting up 50 years ago, and accessible lectures on the physics of matter from Nobel laureate William Bragg, in this week’s dip into Nature’s archive.

A non-contact wearable device measures the skin’s ‘microclimate’ for continuous, real-time monitoring of wounds and wound healing.

Comprehensive maps of mutations in healthy and diseased gastric tissue give clues about how cancer arises and could inform early-detection strategies.

Computer processors that exploit both electricity and light could improve the performance of artificial-intelligence systems while consuming less energy.

In forest experiments, tree species capable of high rates of photosynthesis grow more slowly than species with lower maximum rates of photosynthesis — with implications for tree-planting projects.

Neural recordings from parrots and songbirds reveal the ways in which vocal production is encoded in the brain, highlighting remarkable similarities between how parrots and humans learn to produce sounds.

This Perspective offers a guide for researchers, peer-reviewed journals and funding agencies to make quantitative intersectional approaches a standard part of science and technology research design, where relevant, in efforts to enhance precision in science, and ultimately global equity and environmental sustainability.

Measuring acoustic oscillations in 27 stars within the M67 cluster presents evidence of a rapidly evolving convective zone as stars evolve from subgiants to red giants.

Certifiably random bits can be generated using the 56-qubit Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer accessed over the Internet.

Spin space group theory is applied to identify more than 200 collinear magnets with unconventional magnons; high-throughput calculations with spin–orbit coupling find that most of these unconventional magnets are dictated by the Heisenberg exchange interaction.

Itinerant magnetism in rhombohedral multilayer graphene shows a large excess entropy from magnetic fluctuations above its critical temperature—typically only associated with local moments—which implies the decoupling of charge and isospin degrees of freedom, and results in the isospin Pomeranchuk effect.

A large-scale photonic accelerator comprising more than 16,000 components integrated on a single chip to process MAC operations is described, demonstrating ultralow latency and reduced computing time compared with a commercially available GPU.

A photonic processor capable of running advanced artificial intelligence models with near-electronic precision is introduced, marking a substantial step towards post-transistor computing technologies.

A non-contact wearable device that defines and modulates a microclimate adjacent to the skin can measure incoming and outgoing streams of vapourized substances, offering valuable insights into physiological health, wound healing and environmental exposures.

Deconstruction of rubber is achieved using C–H amination and aza-Cope rearrangement to provide precursors for epoxy resins.

A modelling study shows that the trace-element composition of Earth’s Hadean protocrust is similar to that of the current average continental crust, severely compromising geochemical arguments for when and how plate tectonics began.

Under field conditions, acquisitive tree species generally grow slowly, whereas conservative species show generally higher realized growth, owing to their ability to tolerate unfavourable environmental conditions.

The identification of tools dated to the time of Homo sapiens associated with microfloral evidence of wet tropical forests indicates that West African forests were occupied by humans much earlier in human evolution than previously thought.

A phased pangenome of potato constructed from 60 wild and cultivated haplotypes shows that substantial hybridization occurred during domestication and enables identification of many putative deleterious variants, providing a basis for the design of improved inbred lines.

Whole-gene sequencing of microdissected gastric glands from individuals with and without gastric cancer reveals distinct patterns of somatic mutations and provides insights into influences on the somatic evolution of the gastric epithelium.

Using advanced brain-recording techniques, parrots were found to have a brain organization for vocal control similar to humans, making them an important model for studying speech and for developing potential treatments for communication disorders.

Dense calcium imaging combined with co-registered high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction of the brain of the same mouse provide a functional connectomics map of tens of thousands of neurons of a region of the primary cortex and higher visual areas.

Using volumetric electron microscopy, the authors map and analyze the structure of cortical inhibition with synaptic resolution across a column of visual cortex.

The MICrONS mouse visual cortex dataset shows that neurons with similar response properties preferentially connect, a pattern that emerges within and across brain areas and layers, and independently emerges in artificial neural networks where these ‘like-to-like’ connections prove important for task performance.

A foundation model trained on neural activity of visual cortex from multiple mice accurately predicts responses to video stimuli and cell types, dendritic features and connectivity within the MICrONS functional connectomics dataset.

An analysis demonstrates that quantitative measurements of perisomatic ultrastructure features of neurons can be used to categorize them into cell types.

Neural Decomposition (NEURD) is a software package that decomposes neuronal data from high-resolution electron microscopy volumes into feature-rich graph representations to facilitate analysis for neuroscience research.

The authors use Patch-seq and electron microscopy datasets to relate synaptic connectivity to the transcriptomic cell type of different types of inhibitory neuron.

JNJ-9676—a small-molecule inhibitor targeting coronavirus M protein that shows excellent efficacy in Syrian golden hamster models—binds to and stabilizes the M protein dimer in an altered conformational state between its long and short forms, preventing the release of infectious virus.

High-throughput screening and hit optimization have led to the development of a small molecule, CIM-834, that targets the SARS-CoV-2 membrane protein and blocks assembly of the virus.

Phagocytosed bacteria can serve as an alternative nutrient source for macrophages, influencing their metabolic and immune responses through the recycling of microbial components, with the process regulated by nutrient-sensing mechanisms and bacterial viability.

Nutrient-starved tumour cells cooperate by secreting aminopeptidases that digest oligopeptides in the microenvironment, creating a shared pool of free amino acids.

Orthogonal acute inducible degradation cell lines are used to delineate the mechanisms of how extrusive cohesin, cohesive cohesin and condensin interact to remodel chromosome architecture from interphase to mitosis.