Volume 656 Issue 8128, 20 August 2026

Talent schemes helped to propel China to the forefront of global science. But the system places undue emphasis on prestigious titles as a means to secure career prospects, putting pressure on young researchers.

Letting powerful academics off the hook and punishing the people they bullied sends the message that abuse is acceptable in academia.

Growing traffic on inland waterways could offer an opportunity for cutting emissions.

Targeting shared proteins could help to control bacterial subtypes that current vaccines do not protect against.

Airborne camera gathers data about the high-energy particles emanating from the core of our Galaxy.

A mixture of proteins in snake blood can prevent the death of mice injected with an otherwise lethal dose of venom.

Proposal to put political appointees in charge of research grants could be halted temporarily if lawmakers’ efforts are successful.

High sea surface temperatures are expected to weaken ocean carbon sinks and damage coral reefs.

QED Science says that its metrics reduce bias by assessing papers solely on the basis of their originality and validity.

Scientists have been predicting the existence of a particle made of gluons for a long time, but detecting it has taken decades.

Numerous studies have shown that separating childhood jabs will delay protection and increase costs for families.

Funding is being terminated for projects including a future CERN experiment and the iconic Lovell Telescope.

People from Chinese, Dutch and Greek cultural backgrounds have the same ‘tickle hotspots’ on the body. And ticklishness is stronger in rarely touched areas.

Robotic supports were once designed for clinical use, but researchers are now developing cheaper, smaller devices aimed at everyone — from people with ageing knees to 20-somethings seeking to climb mountains.

Massive genomic newborn-screening studies are under way all over the globe. But questions about scalability, feasibility and net benefit remain.

History shows that breakthroughs are often sparked by innovative instruments, and AI’s ability to help design them might be its most important scientific contribution.

Earth’s four-billion-year-long conversation with its resident life forms has shaped our world, and holds lessons for our future.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

As climate change ramps up, scientists must urgently understand how night-time heat makes it harder for our bodies to rest and recover.

Building on the region’s oil infrastructure, investment funds and shipping corridors, Gulf nations can thrive in the clean-energy economy.

The career market is difficult to navigate — and academic achievements feel like they’re no longer enough, says Daniella Watson.

As 3D printers become cheaper and easier to work with, researchers are finding new ways to incorporate the technology in their studies.

Engineering of polymer crystals has vastly increased the activity of these materials as catalysts for producing hydrogen fuel from water, using only sunlight.

Three studies in non-human primates show that strategically designed vaccines could prime a population of B cells to produce effective antibodies against HIV.

Observations of a magnetized stellar core indicate that in an ultra-strong magnetic field, empty space can polarize light.

Researchers grapple with the causes of evolution, and a sea voyage is blighted by storms, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

In the fly gut, stem cells keep the balance of cell types by undergoing eight rounds of cell division to form absorptive cells, then one round to form secretory cells.

The Review examines rapid LLM adoption in clinical care, outlining emerging security and safety risks across development stages, key protective layers, clinically relevant threats and current mitigation responsibilities in a single integrated framework.

Polarization measurements of the magnetar 1E 1547.0−5408 provide strong evidence that vacuum birefringence shapes X-ray propagation, offering an important observational test of quantum electrodynamics in extreme magnetic fields.

High-spatial-resolution observations of the solar photosphere reveal a far more complex and dynamic solar scene than previously observed and show that ubiquitous Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities drive plasma mixing on the Sun.

A cold-atom quantum simulator reveals the pseudogap metallic state in the Hubbard model, mapping its phase diagram and advancing understanding of doped Mott insulators and high-temperature superconductivity.

A high-quality, pristine monolayer cuprate superconductor with a single CuO₂ plane is fabricated and used to identify two quantum critical phenomena emerging between the Mott insulating phase and the superconducting phase.

Introducing a photo-transformable additive called 4-[3-(trifluoromethyl)−3H-diazirin-3-yl]benzylammonium salt (TDB) into the precursor solution of wide-bandgap perovskites reduces halide separation and improves the efficiency of the resulting solar cell.

A strategy using polymeric carbon nitride crystals induces out-of-plane carrier migration by means of internal electric fields applied on facet-selective nanofilms placed on polymer photocatalysts, increasing the apparent quantum efficiency for overall water splitting.

Super-potent photoreductants enable single electron transfer reactions with selectivity independent of substrate redox potentials, opening new pathways for coupling difficult-to-reduce organic molecules.

Tracing cascading continental-scale medieval megafloods across Europe indicates that current flood management is unprepared for such sequences, highlighting the urgent need for proactive flood risk management strategies that account for unusual series of extreme flood events.

The EUROPE-IGM-ATLAS reveals spatiotemporal trends that characterize the changing geography of opportunity in Europe and its relationship with regional innovation.

Microtomography reconstructions and phylogenetic analyses of Urokodia aequalis from the Chengjiang biota of China provide an updated interpretation of the evolution of anatomical structures in chelicerates.

Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversification.

The Pakistan Genome Resource compiles biobank data from 173,303 individuals with high familial relatedness, broadening the catalogue of human genetic variation and establishing a population-specific genomic reference for Pakistan.

A comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution is described.

Multispecies evidence supports the multinodal induction–exclusion in network development model, in which sensorimotor-to-association patterning is governed by competing processes of induction and exclusion driven by two opposing transcriptomically defined programs.

Chronic reactivation of distinct herpesviruses and anelloviruses occur during acute and long COVID-19, and track with disease severity, inflammation and outcomes, revealing immune signatures with prognostic potential.

A germline-targeted HIV-1 Env (CAP256.OPT4) increases the efficiency of V2 apex broadly neutralizing antibody precursor priming by 30–400-fold compared with wild-type HIV-1 Envs and induces neutralization breadth in more than 90% of rhesus macaques, including Asn130-containing viruses.

Germline-targeting vaccines can reproducibly elicit prespecified classes of broadly neutralizing antibodies to prespecified epitopes under endogenous conditions.

Monotherapy with the HIF-2α inhibitor casdatifan achieves meaningful, durable responses linked to HIF-2α biology with manageable safety in the treatment of individuals with clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

In Drosophila, cell fate switching in adult intestinal stem cells is determined through an epigenetic mechanism in which these cells count divisions, switching from producing enterocytes to producing an enteroendocrine mother cell every ninth division.

An ATAC-seq-based approach is used to classify acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) into 16 epigenomic subgroups, and provides insight into the role of non-genetic mechanisms in determining pathogenesis, clinical behaviour and drug sensitivity in this disease.

A methodology for mining protein structure databases on the basis of the distinct intrinsic structures of metal-binding active sites in enzymes enables the discovery of new families of radical halogenases.

Integrated pharmacological, biochemical, biophysical and structural analyses of small-molecule β-arrestin inhibitors show how they block β-arrestin engagement with activated GPCRs, revealing their mechanism of action and uncovering a previously unrecognized allosteric regulatory site.