Volume 644 Issue 8077, 21 August 2025

Enabling people to take more personal responsibility for their safety can reduce the risks posed by earthquakes and floods.

Encouraging people to test their local rivers and lakes with simple kits could spark a shift in how we manage water.

The individual workers in a crew of 15 weaver ants exert more force than a single ant working alone.

An icy body proved itself a survivor by reappearing in telescope images after passing close to the Sun.

A coffee variety called liberica, which is gaining popularity for the distinctive flavour of its beans, is actually three species.

Images on first-millennium coins hint at economic relationships across the region.

Researchers are alarmed that the move might upend a long-standing tradition of peer-review for grants.

Data reveal how this year’s back-to-back heatwaves are affecting populations and economies across Europe.

One version of the gpt-oss large language model can run on a laptop, and performs nearly as well as the company’s most powerful models.

A smudge of light spotted by the James Webb telescope near Alpha Centauri A could be the planet with the tightest orbit ever to be imaged directly.

Preprint servers are seeing a rise in submissions seemingly produced by paper mills or with help from AI tools.

The authors welcome ‘serious’ scientific rebuttals to report that some say misrepresents decades of climate science.

Steep population declines in most countries are expected to have negative impacts over the next several generations, but adaptation is possible.

Researchers argue over whether ‘novel’ AI-generated works use others’ ideas without credit.

As the planet braces for climate-change-induced fluctuations, the wisdom of communities living at the intersection of land and water could offer valuable lessons.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Pioneering artificial-intelligence scholar, whose influential work bridged cognitive science, philosophy and computer science.

To keep Earth habitable, humanity must recognize the value of Antarctica and seek to save it from irreversible damage.

Policies incentivizing electrified transport don’t seem to be working. Here’s what we need to do.

Anthony Waddle’s unconventional approach resulted in a stunningly practical solution to fight a deadly fungal infection.

Scientists are seeking to decipher the role of non-coding DNA in the human genome, helped by a suite of artificial-intelligence tools.

Stefan Guldin is a materials scientist who used to work on biosensors. Now, he’s developing meat alternatives.

Predation experiments using models of edible flies and stinging wasps provide some answers to a long-standing evolutionary puzzle in mimicry research.

Electrochemistry can boost processes that trap atoms inside a metal. A reactor uses these trapped atoms, combined with an ion beam, as fuel for nuclear fusion.

Cellular changes to adipose tissue after weight-loss surgery could point to pathways responsible for the metabolic benefits of this procedure.

A star that was stripped of its outer layers shortly before it exploded as a supernova offers astronomers an unprecedented glimpse of a stellar interior.

John Scopes convicted for teaching human evolution, and a discussion of international collaboration in X-ray astronomy, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Wrist evolution helped birds to conquer the air. Fossil data and analysis of a modern bird’s development reveal that this evolution preceded bird origins

Abrupt changes are developing across Antarctica’s ice, ocean and biological systems; some of these changes are intensifying faster than equivalent Arctic changes, potentially irreversibly, and their interactions are expected to worsen other impacts across the Antarctic environment and global climate system.

Observations of SN 2021yfj reveal that its progenitor is a massive star stripped down to its O/Si/S core, which remarkably continued to expel vast quantities of silicon-, sulfur-, and argon-rich material before the explosion, informing us that current theories for how stars evolve are too narrow.

A benchtop fusion reactor, called the Thunderbird Reactor, is described, showing that electrochemically loading a metal lattice with deuterium could enhance nuclear fusion rates when that metal is also bombarded by deuterium ions.

Screening by a graphite gate placed at 1 nm proximity to graphene produces transformative improvement in its electronic quality, reducing charge inhomogeneity by two orders of magnitude.

Photonic integrated circuits allow laser displays to be flattened into a compact form factor while improving efficiency and colour performance.

Lithium metal battery performance is optimized using a delocalized electrolyte design that induces a disordered solvation microenvironment, thereby combining the advantages of the solvent-dominated and anion-dominated structures of conventional electrolytes.

A new type of Fe/N–C catalyst composed of numerous nanoprotrusions dispersed on two-dimensional carbon layers with inner-embedded single Fe-atom sites has been developed that delivers a high-performance platinum group metal-free proton-exchange membrane fuel cell.

An Atlantic meridional overturning circulation slowdown drives widespread shifts in tropical rainfall through the propagation of high-latitude cooling into the tropical North Atlantic.

The main multidecadal variations in the PDO index during the twentieth century, including the ongoing, decades-long negative trend, were largely driven by human emissions of aerosols and greenhouse gases rather than internal processes.

An analysis of bowel samples from bowhead whales collected yearly from 2004–2022 indicates increasing algal toxin concentrations in Arctic food webs due to warming ocean conditions.

The forelimbs of two Late Cretaceous theropod dinosaurs show the presence of the pisiform bone, previously thought to have been lost early in theropod evolution and regained in birds during the evolution of flight, indicating that a birdlike pisiform appeared prior to the evolution of flight.

Birds have an excellent ability to learn to discriminate harmless insects from those that they mimic on the basis of subtle differences in appearance.

Whole-genome sequencing of an ancient male Egyptian revealed a mixture of North African Neolithic and eastern Fertile Crescent ancestry, suggesting human migration between Egypt and Mesopotamia by the Old Kingdom period.

A single-cell multi-omics atlas of rice is revealed, providing insight into cell-type functions and molecular programs.

Although the number of participants is important for phenotypic prediction accuracy in brain-wide association studies using functional MRI, scanning for at least 30 min offers the greatest cost effectiveness.

During visual learning, neural plasticity is driven by unsupervised learning in mice.

Basal ganglia output neurons fire dynamically in bidirectional and movement-specific patterns to license forelimb movements. 

Exposure of mice to high fructose during gestation or early postnatal life causes decreased microglial phagocytosis during brain development and leads to anxiety-like behaviour in adolescence.

An atlas study of adipose tissue in people with obesity undergoing weight loss and their lean counterparts reveals that weight loss reduces cell senescence but cannot reverse all the metabolic problems caused by obesity.

During chronic but not acute inflammation, chromatin remodelling is influenced by nuclear autophagy through WSTF interaction with ATG8 in the nucleus, leading to WSTF nuclear export and its subsequent degradation.

In a mouse model, maternal obesity during pregnancy can lead to fatty liver disease in the offspring, driven by aberrant developmental programming of Kuppfer cells.

Lipoprotein uptake dependent on sulfated glycosaminoglycans linked to cell-surface proteoglycans is a key determinant of ferroptosis sensitivity in cancer.

Using RFdiffusion, a general method for targeting intrinsically disordered proteins and regions for protein design has been developed.

Human chromatin remodeller SMARCAD1 exhibits a substrate preference for subnucleosomal particles over the canonical nucleosome.