Volume 652 Issue 8111, 23 April 2026

Civil nuclear technology comes with unlikely but dangerous risks that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Study of gene expression also finds age-related increases in men’s vulnerability to certain cancers.

Storms that cross exceptionally warm ocean waters intensify more quickly and do more damage than storms that do not.

Most of the individuals in a seventeenth-century-Switzerland burial site had performed strenuous manual labour and died before the age of 20.

Modelling suggests that the layer beneath the planet’s acidic clouds is comprised of particles from outer space.

Hungary’s new leader has promised a ‘system change’ — but researchers say that rebuilding science will take more than a reversal of Victor Orbán’s laws.

Quantum science and AI research are big winners just a year after the US funding giant slashed its Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards in half.

State-of-the-industry report finds that, despite the limitations of artificial-intelligence systems, researchers have embraced them.

The missing samples — reported to include chikungunya and dengue viruses — have been recovered, but questions linger over motive.

Repository would require US universities to register research fraud and workplace harassment.

More than 40% of traded mammalian species share at least one pathogen with humans, compared with only 6% of non-traded mammals.

Study of almost 28,000 people also identifies genetic variants that raise the risk of gastrointestinal side effects from GLP-1 medications.

Fourteen months after treatment with engineered immune cells, the recipient has no symptoms and doesn’t need to take medication.

Researchers are increasingly sounding the alarm that artificial intelligence could end humanity. But such doomsday warnings carry their own risks.

Researchers are gaining a new appreciation for the genes on the X and Y chromosomes and how they shape sex differences in health and disease susceptibility.

Two experts unpack how trends in climate and geopolitics might unfold to shape the far north.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

A fresh approach to trialling treatments for rare genetic diseases could make their production an economically viable prospect at last.

The people who work behind the scenes to keep research moving say that there should be more recognition for their roles.

Computer scientists share their advice for ensuring that your scientific software does what it’s supposed to do.

A model of the early Solar System that cools too quickly to reach chemical equilibrium generates mineral regimes resembling important classes of meteorites.

Neuroscientists have created a continuous atlas showing how patterns of functional connectivity between brain regions change from birth to old age.

Ace — an AI-controlled table-tennis robot — shows that autonomous systems can compete with humans at complex, fast-paced, interactive tasks.

It was thought that the thymus serves its purpose for the immune system early in life. Insights about the organ in adults reveal its importance for later well-being.

Spiders and scorpions belong to a group called chelicerates, which are arthropods with pincers at the front of their head. Fossil evidence reveals how this group evolved.

An oriented spin space group description is proposed that unifies the spin space group and magnetic space group frameworks, enabling a comprehensive symmetry classification of the magnetic materials on a large scale and identifying spin–orbit magnetism as a distinct phase.

LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA’s fourth Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog shows evidence of a clear pair-instability gap in the distribution of binary black-hole secondary masses but is absent in the larger primary masses.

Shelves rather than shorelines may be better topographic indicators of oceans on Earth and Mars.

An autonomous robot system, Ace, combines event-based vision and reinforcement learning to compete with elite human table tennis players, highlighting the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks.

A monolithic mode-locked semiconductor laser with a continuously and widely tunable repetition rate is achieved by using a microwave driving signal that induces a spatiotemporal gain modulation along the entire laser cavity.

Monolithic three-dimensional (3D) integration of tantalum pentoxide on a lithium niobate substrate enables scalable, multifunctional photonic systems and the incorporation of nonlinear optics directly into existing and emerging photonics infrastructure.

Operando birefringence microscopy measurements of the stresses around growing dendrites in solid electrolytes show that stresses decrease as current densities increase, revealing a linkage between electrochemical and mechanical stability that informs the design of solid-state batteries.

Cryogenic electron microscopy images and micromechanical fracture modelling of mechanically soft lithium dendrites fracturing hard ceramic electrolytes suggest the mechanisms driving the phenomenon as well as design implications for solid-state lithium metal batteries.

A new platform using a recyclable selenanthrene reagent that mediates alkenes desaturation to alkynes under mild conditions is described for improving existing methods for the conversion of alkenes to alkynes, which originate from the 1860s.

A time-dependent model shows chondrite precursors formed by non-equilibrium condensation: cooling rate and pressure alone generate three mineral classes with increasing oxidation, matching enstatite, ordinary and carbonaceous chondrites without large redox variations in the solar nebula.

Megachelicerax cousteaui gen. et sp. nov. is a large soft-bodied arthropod from the middle Cambrian of Utah featuring massive three-segmented chelicerae, along with five pairs of pseudobiramous prosomal limbs with non-foliaceous exopodal rami, and plate-like lamellae-bearing opisthosomal appendages.

A distinctive population with high hunter-gatherer ancestry persisted 3,000 years later than in most European regions, contributing to later Lower Rhine–Meuse Bell Beaker users.

Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

fMRI data from individuals of a wide range of ages (from a few days to 100 years old) are used to map the key organizational axes of functional connectivity in the human cortex throughout the lifespan.

Post-transcriptional regulation of mRNA translation was explored using Ribo-STAMP and single-cell RNA sequencing to reveal cell-type-specific and isoform-specific translation patterns across hippocampal neuronal and non-neuronal cell types, highlighting functional differences between CA1 and CA3.

Biochemical and structural studies show that the bacterial dGTPase CloA is activated by virally produced dTTP and inhibited by 5′-triphosphothymidyl-3′5′-thymidine produced by its regulatory partner CloB, and thereby balances antiviral defence and immune-mediated toxicity.

Assessing thymic function and health has highlighted the lifelong importance of the thymus as an organ that could be targeted to improve health outcomes, protect against disease and promote healthy ageing.

A deep-learning approach applied to routine CT scans is used to quantify the health of the thymus in a cohort of patients with cancer, and shows that thymic function is associated with immunotherapy outcomes.

The ZFTA–RELA fusion, an oncogene for ependymomas, promotes the production of itaconate, and its dependence on this metabolite represents a new therapeutic target for this cancer.

Individual supratentorial ependymoma tumour subgroups have two distinct progenitor-like cell states—neuroepithelial-like and embryonic-like—that are reminiscent of early human brain development and diverge in the extent of their neuronal or ependymal differentiation.

Single-nucleus chromatin and RNA sequencing identifies epigenetic chromatin domains that confer vulnerability to paediatric brain tumours such as ependymomas, providing insight into the development of such tumours despite ‘quiet’ genomes.

An intracellular protein-based recorder called CytoTape is capable of tracking cell activities over weeks and at scale.

The fluorescence-based protein assembly platform GEMINI is able to record the history of individual cells by leveraging a computationally designed protein assembly as an intracellular memory device.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of nucleotide excision repair complexes reveal the roles of the constituent proteins XPA, XPB, XPC, XPD, XPF, XPG and RPA in DNA bubble formation and excision of the lesion strand.

HIV-1 integrase forms an RNA-binding module on the luminal side of the mature capsid lattice.