Volume 640 Issue 8059, 17 April 2025

Potential treatments need to be subject to the highest standards of safety and efficacy.

Resource constraints hobble analyses of how digital technologies affect mental health, and take a huge toll on the scientists working to make the online world safer.

Investors and the public should know what quantum devices can and, more importantly, can’t do.

Heaviest known elementary particles and their antimatter counterparts are detected after nuclear smash-ups at the Large Hadron Collider.

People from modern Pakistan imported their musical technology all the way to what is now Oman.

Damage done to the skin can increase the risk of an allergic reaction in other organs.

Hubble Space Telescope data show that the time taken for the planet to revolve around its axis is almost half a minute longer than was thought.

Researchers solve the mystery of a disease outbreak through long-term surveillance of wildlife in Africa.

Funding for the National Science Foundation, which finances research at US bases on the icy continent, has already been reduced, and the agency faces steeper cuts soon.

Scientists working on artificial intelligence are more confident than the public that the technology will benefit people.

Communities of researchers worldwide are taking on the toxic research cultures that drive poor psychological health among academics.

Advances recognized by science’s most lucrative awards include Large Hadron Collider experiments and groundbreaking weight-loss treatments.

US National Science Foundation announces lowest number of Graduate Research Fellowship Program recipients in 15 years.

DNA sequences for chimpanzees, orangutan and more will help scientists to determine what sets humans apart from other apes.

Induced pluripotent stem cells are being tested to treat blindness, paralysis, Parkinson’s disease and more. Approvals might be around the corner.

A Nature analysis reveals the 25 highest-cited papers published this century and explores why they are breaking records.

Some studies have received hundreds of thousands of citations, Nature’s updated analysis shows.

An analysis for Nature reveals the studies that appear most in the reference lists of current publications.

More Everything Forever dissects the techno-utopian vision gripping Silicon Valley and Washington DC.

Two books discuss how these space rocks are entwined with science, commerce, policy and life.

US global dominance in science was no accident, but a product of a far-seeing partnership between public and private sectors to boost innovation and economic growth.

A graduate student from southeast Asia, now based in a European country and missing her homeland, agonizes over her next career move.

Digging in overlooked regions has opened up a world of discovery for palaeontologist David Lovelace.

Tiger numbers in India are starting to rebound after decades of being perilously low. This recovery offers lessons for conserving other rare animals.

Porous crystals have been engineered to trap ‘oily’ molecules — enabling X-ray structures to be determined for these compounds that defy standard crystallographic analysis.

A bacterium makes a molecule that kills drug-resistant fungi in an unusual way — by targeting various phospholipid molecules in membranes.

The nuclear pore complex is the gateway to the nucleus of cells. Now an in vivo imaging technique can track the way in which molecules move through this complex.

High-resolution observations of ocean topography from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission reveal that small surface structures have a larger-than-expected impact on the ocean’s total energy budget.

A 250,000-year-old footprint preserved in ash, and the effect of a polluted atmosphere on health and the economy, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

A global analysis of species in fragmented-forest landscapes reveals species losses in fragments, and that the changes in species composition across fragments is not enough to benefit biodiversity over entire landscapes.

The status and prospects of the memristor industry are analysed and the obstacles and pathways to their implementation are discussed.

The development of multimodal foundation models, pretrained on diverse omics datasets, to unravel the intricate complexities of molecular cell biology is envisioned.

Non-classical correlations between two photons in the near-field regime give rise to entanglement in their total angular momentum, leading to a completely different structure of quantum correlations of photon pairs.

Ambient-pressure superconductivity onset above the McMillan limit in bilayer nickelate epitaxial thin films is reported, paving the way for comprehensive investigations of superconductors and for exploring superconductivity at higher transition temperatures in heterostructures.

A general reinforcement-learning algorithm, called Dreamer, outperforms specialized expert algorithms across diverse tasks by learning a model of the environment and improving its behaviour by imagining future scenarios.

A RISC-V microprocessor capable of executing standard 32-bit instructions has been designed with 5,900 MoS₂ transistors and a complete standard cell library based on 2D semiconductor technology.

Quasi-elastic neutron scattering measurements show the existence of a body-centred cubic structure, similar to that of ice VII, where water molecules exhibit picosecond rotational dynamic and rapid orientational jumps characteristic of liquid water.

The acetylene hydrogenation activity and stability of a palladium single-atom catalyst are both controlled by the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital of the oxide support.

A metal–organic framework (MOF)–pillar[5]arene hybrid can bind small molecules with long alkyl chains, such that single-crystal structures of the host–guest complexes can be obtained and therefore small molecular structures determined.

A new synthetic method provides a coveted motif, the bicyclo[2.1.1]hexane scaffold, using the uncommon coupling of two strained diradicaloid fragments: transiently generated cyclic allenes and bicyclo[1.1.0]butanes.

Data from the recently launched Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite reveal the characteristics of submesoscale eddies and waves and suggest that their potential impacts on overall ocean circulation is much larger than previously thought.

Imaging of the mantle transition zone beneath the Lesser Antilles shows a basalt-rich region within the subducting slab near the proposed location of a subducted extinct spreading ridge, implying ancient tectonics play a role in influencing slab trajectories.

An analysis of habitat fragmentation using a dataset of more than 4,000 species worldwide shows that fragmentation reduces biodiversity at all scales, and that increases in β diversity do not compensate for the loss of α diversity.

A Homo aff. erectus individual dated to 1.4 million to 1.1 million years ago found at Sima del Elefante (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain) does not display the modern-human-like aspect of Homo antecessor found at the neighbouring Gran Dolina site (900,000–800,000 years ago).

A complete genome assembly of a crab-eating macaque, revealing 46% fewer segmental duplications and 3.83 times longer centromeres than those of humans, is presented, enhancing understanding of lineage-specific phenotypes, adaptation and primate evolution.

Adaptive decision-making often requires an understanding of our agency in a situation; however, chronic stress can disrupt agency and promote inflexible, habitual behaviour by turning off a brain pathway needed for agency and activating one that promotes habit.

Serotonergic enterochromaffin cells of the intestine exhibit distinct sensory, secretory and physiological properties depending on their location within the complex crypt–villus architecture of the gut.

Mandimycin, a polyene macrolide, exhibits strong antifungal activity and possesses a mode of action that is distinct from other compounds of this class.

Hepatic stellate cells regulate hepatocyte functions via R-spondin 3.

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome following SARS-CoV-2 infection results from increased serum levels of TGFβ, which impairs the reactivation of virus-specific T cells.

Stem-like CD8⁺ T cells specific for lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus are generated early during chronic infection, suggesting that this crucial fate commitment occurs irrespective of the infection outcome.

T cell exhaustion was thought to be strictly associated only with chronic infections and tumours, but it turns out that acute infections also generate a subset of precursor T cells with exhaustion-like phenotypes.

HIV-1 immune evasin Nef reduces activation-induced cell death and promotes survival of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells; thus, virus-like immune escape enhances therapeutic efficacy of allogeneic CAR T cells.

Functional connectivity between gastric cancer cells and sensory neurons offers a potential therapeutic target.

In a model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, extrachromosomal DNAs are shown to be a source of high-level focal amplification driving MYC heterogeneity and phenotypic adaptation.

High spatiotemporal precision tracking using 3D MINFLUX shows that nuclear import and export occur in overlapping regions of the central pore, providing insight into transport across the nuclear pore complex.

Two new methods, target chromatin indexing and tagmentation (TACIT) and combined TACIT (CoTACIT), enabled single-cell profiling of the epigenome and lineage tracing from mouse zygotes to blastocysts.

The unique structure and mechanism of chanoclavine synthase (EasC), a haem catalase that uses superoxide for substrate transformation in ergot alkaloid biosynthesis, are revealed in this study, challenging established catalase mechanisms.