Volume 644 Issue 8075, 7 August 2025

Satellites, drones and artificial-intelligence tools can improve fire management — but they must be informed by wildfire science, or we risk worsening the problem for decades.

A meet-cute millions of years ago gave rise to the tubers of today’s potatoes.

Imaging suggests that more than one tattooist applied pigment to the hands and forearms of a woman who lived more than two millennia ago.

Warming in the Arctic shifts storm patterns, leading to reductions in wind speeds in places that rely on turbines for clean electricity.

Modelling suggests that data collected by JWST will be able to distinguish between planets that are molten to the core and those that are not.

But will the US–India mission be the last for NASA for a long time to come?

The institution agreed to increased federal oversight in exchange for restored grants and an end to government investigations.

Data sleuths and research-integrity officers have different views on how to handle allegations of wrongdoing in science.

When people viewed virtual avatars with coughs or rashes, their brains triggered an immune response.

Many Chinese researchers have received enviable benefits and positions after returning from training abroad.

Study of rotting human cadavers hints that a puzzling chemical marker in Neanderthal remains could be from eating the larvae.

For the first time, large language models performed on a par with gold medallists in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Colossal’s bold announcements have drawn criticism from many scientists, but the billion-dollar firm is not backing down.

Journals and funders are trying to boost the speed and effectiveness of review processes that are under strain.

Political thinking on global crises has become trapped. We need a new narrative.

Eighty years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, it is crucial that witness accounts are saved. Here is what one man told me.

Strategies for heat-health preparedness should concentrate on cooling people, not just the air.

The deployment of capable AI agents raises fresh questions about safety, human–machine relationships and social coordination.

Lonni Besançon has faced online abuse, threats and legal challenges. But he remains proud of his service to science and society.

Artificial intelligence models are too often assessed against flawed goals — a stumbling block for progress.

Technician Erasto Job assembles and fixes electric three-wheelers for TRí, a sustainable transportation company in Dar es Salaam.

A cellular atlas for a small, fast-reproducing primate could set the stage for scientists to use it as a model organism that has more human relevance than rodents.

Ecological modelling reveals that the range of habitats humans occupied in Africa increased before our species established a lasting presence outside the continent.

Neurons often receive organelles called mitochondria from other cells. It emerges that neurons donate mitochondria that support cancer-cell spread.

The protein glues used by organisms to cling to wet surfaces have informed an AI-supported strategy to discover highly adhesive hydrogels.

Experiments reveal that high-energy plasma events in the Solar System and beyond might be driven by magnetic fluctuations and turbulence that happen on very small scales.

Fieldworkers dodge monkeys’ rocky missiles, and abandoned plans to make cork mattresses, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

The ‘science fiction science’ method simulates future technologies and collects quantitative data on the attitudes and behaviours of participants in various future scenarios, with the aim of predicting impacts of future technologies before they arrive.

Observations from laboratory experiments involving two flux ropes show that electron beams induce magnetic turbulence and abruptly merge into a single structure, altering the magnetic topology in the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) regime — a process supported by three-dimensional (3D) particle-in-cell simulations.

Coherent quantum transition spectroscopy of the spin of a single antiproton is reported, demonstrating Rabi oscillations of the spin and enabling improved measurement of matter/antimatter symmetry using proton and antiproton magnetic moments.

Doppler-free laser spectroscopy is used to measure with high precision a rovibrational transition frequency of trapped and cooled \({{\rm{H}}}_{2}^{+}\) ions.

Real-space nanoimaging and theoretical analyses show the emergence of hyperbolic phonon polaritons on the surface of a non-hyperbolic material and that the polariton dispersions can be manipulated by varying the temperature.

A method combining scanning transmission electron microscopy with high-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy enables the observation of magnons and their dispersion, and provides a way to examine magnetic inhomogeneities with nanometre spatial resolution.

A data-driven approach integrates data mining, experimentation and machine learning to design high-performance adhesive hydrogels from scratch, tailored for demanding underwater environments.

A redox reaction network, comprising concurrent oxidation and reduction pathways, is described that can drive autonomous unidirectional motion about a C–C bond in a structurally simple synthetic molecular motor based on an achiral biphenyl.

A nickel-catalysed vicinal diborylation method is described, which can install two different boron functional groups on aromatic rings in a regioselective and site-selective manner, enabling the rapid synthesis of complex molecular building blocks.

Early-Earth geometry models are presented, producing magnetic field intensity and morphologies agreeing with palaeomagnetic data in the deep past and demonstrating the negligible role of fluid viscosity in the Earth’s early geodynamo.

Analysis of species distribution models in a pan-African database comprising chronometrically dated archaeological sites over the past 120,000 years shows major expansion in the human niche from 70 ka, driven by adaptation to diverse habitats.

Genome-wide sequencing of 180 ancient individuals shows a continuous gradient of ancestry in Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers from the Baltic to the Transbaikal region and distinct contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia, and provides insights into the origins of modern Uralic and Yeniseian speakers.

An analysis of data from the Sherlock-Lung study provides insight into the mutational processes that contribute to lung cancer in never smokers, and looks at the possible role of factors such as air pollution and passive smoking.

A brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis enables a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to synthesize his voice in real time by decoding neural activity, demonstrating the potential of brain–computer interfaces to enable people with paralysis to speak intelligibly and expressively.

Multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) together with deep-learning-based nucleus segmentation enabled the construction of a highly detailed and informative spatially resolved single-cell atlas of human fetal cortical development.

Human and mouse astrocytes express the protocadherin PcdhγC3, which promotes self-recognition of individual astrocytes, thereby contributing to normal astrocyte and brain development.

Together with a companion paper, the generation of a transcriptomic atlas for the mouse lemur and analyses of example cell types establish this animal as a molecularly tractable primate model organism.

Together with an accompanying paper presenting a transcriptomic atlas of the mouse lemur, interrogation of the atlas provides a rich body of data to support the use of the organism as a model for primate biology and health.

Escherichia coli uses curli fibres, oligomers of the functional amyloid CsgA, as a barrier to protect against the predatory bacteria Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and Myxococcus xanthus in a mechanism that is independent of genes required for biofilm formation.

R9AP is a key receptor for entry of Epstein–Barr virus into human epithelial and B cells, and interacts directly with the viral glycoprotein gH/gL complex to mediate virus–host membrane fusion.

The validation of inhibitors targeting PurF, a novel drug target for tuberculosis drug discovery, is described.

EchoNext, a deep learning model for electrocardiograms trained and validated in diverse health systems, successfully detects many forms of structural heart disease, supporting the potential of artificial intelligence to expand access to heart disease screening at scale.

Immune tolerance to dietary antigens is mediated by a circuit of dedicated antigen-presenting cells and T cells, ensuring protective effector responses without compromising the overall strategy of tolerance that ensures safe food consumption.

A CRISPR knock-in strategy that uses endogenous gene regulatory mechanisms can engineer ‘armoured’ CAR T cells that secrete proinflammatory cytokines directly within a tumour without causing toxicity, leading to prolonged survival in mice.

A study reports the development of a method to trace intercellular transfer of mitochondria, and demonstrates that cancer cells that receive mitochondria from neurons have enhanced metastatic capabilities.

The taurine–taurine transporter axis is a critical dependency of aggressive myeloid leukaemias.

The Tweety homologue TTYH2 is identified as the lipid transfer mediator for APOE-containing lipoproteins.

By combining structural biology and evolutionary genomics analyses, the evolution of enzymes over 400 million years is shown to be governed by catalytic function, metabolic network architecture, cost and molecular interactions.