Volume 656 Issue 8129, 27 August 2026

The plan to force some scientists to register with a professional body could protect people and the environment, but the current version lacks clarity.

Rather than racing to replace people, we should build AI tools that amplify human expertise and expand opportunity.

Health-care partnerships can provide other nations with cheap diagnostics, medicines and more — but global institutions should help to ensure that they also strengthen local capacity and preserve sovereignty.

Tests on uncrewed NASA mission showed garment could spare astronauts the worst effects of solar storms.

A pair of massive shield volcanoes have been pinpointed by lunar spacecraft.

Female treefrogs select less carefully when hearing a chorus of males.

Adding albumin to popular antibody-based medicines helps to block their passage through the placenta.

Models of how the brain changes over time could help researchers to understand how diseases affect the organ later in life.

An autonomous AI agent can write and execute quantum computing code, but it sometimes needs a human touch.

Analysis of neighbourhoods in more than 100 US cities finds no evidence that rising numbers of undocumented immigrants are linked with violent crime.

Moderna’s newly approved vaccine could allow manufacturers to respond more rapidly to changing influenza strains.

Research on people 110 years and older reveals an immune system that continues to adapt.

Many researchers are unaware of an upcoming law that will require them to register with a regulatory body, as is the case for engineers and health-care professionals.

The drug, called Orzeyful, takes aim at the root cause of the sleep disorder rather than at its symptoms.

Scientists and publishers are testing a new breed of software that promises impressive accuracy at spotting AI-written text.

The world’s most popular antidepressant drugs are under fire. But are they really harder to quit than heroin?

A book outlines how the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology and philosophy have neglected a key aspect of consciousness: the body.

Governments need to keep their procurement processes as open as possible, or they will face risks of technological lock-in down the line.

Technologies that promise better-than-usual sleep could improve people’s performance and health but also turn the need for rest into an auditable obligation. Ethical norms and regulations are needed.

Scientists share help and advice on how they got their research discussions flowing.

Ecologists have long wondered why some tropical forests store more carbon than others. A global satellite survey offers an explanation.

Since 2020, snowfall has largely counterbalanced the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. The atmospheric effect that causes this has been identified — and it’s temporary.

Rather than just scrambling neural activity, the psychedelic substance psilocybin also reorganizes brain dynamics so as to align with a person’s context and experiences.

A topological description of ‘knittability’ can be used to design yarn patterns that are resistant to unravelling.

A review of the current state of the field of systems vaccinology discusses the challenges in translating insights into clinical and regulatory practice.

Deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging of the ultra-diffuse galaxy UGC 9050-Dw1 reveals an extragalactic globular cluster stream, with analysis and modelling probing the rich dark matter content of the host galaxy.

Analysis of tracking data from Mars orbiters reveals time-variable gravity field behaviour reflecting the structure underlying the Martian crustal dichotomy and indicates the preservation of a 200–400 °C thermal anomaly in the present-day mantle below the southern highlands.

Quantum oscillation measurements map the g-wave altermagnetic order parameter in CrSb, establishing it as a prototypical unconventional magnet with momentum-dependent spin splitting.

In a self-assembled monolayer molecule with a donor–acceptor–donor structure, the electronic resonance increased the negative charge density at the acceptor-anchoring group, improving the certified efficiencies of rigid and flexible perovskite solar cells.

A new method for practical scaling up of enzymatic thiophosphorylation is described, making use of a two-kinase system along with recycling of the very expensive ATPγS, providing a pathway for thiophosphate-containing modalities in drug development.

A three-dimensional printing method transforms hydrogel particles into aligned microfibres during extrusion, creating structural anisotropy to accelerate muscle tissue regeneration.

Global photovoltaic waste will reach 297–402 million tonnes by 2060, and regionally adapted recycling strategies and international cooperation will be needed to provide equitable and scalable PV waste circularity.

Recent Antarctic ice mass gain was linked to a recurrent atmospheric teleconnection, but this recurs about once per decade in observations and historical simulations so does not yet reflect a global-warming-driven moistening of Antarctica.

An analysis of the relationships between aboveground biomass and various climatic factors in three major regions of tropical forest shows that understanding the complex interactions between climate, topography and soils is crucial to predict how climate change will affect carbon storage capacity.

Aggregative multicellularity was key to the evolution of the multicellular animal genetic toolkit.

A Bayesian generative framework that integrates longitudinal electronic health records with genetic data to identify latent disease signatures is presented.

The psychedelic psilocybin reorganizes brain activity into structured, context-aligned patterns that integrate internal and external processing, providing a neural basis for the felt continuity between self and world, elucidating how the psychedelic state translates into psychological change.

Pharmacological screening and behavioural assays in ants identify two specific neuropeptides that have key and opposite effects in regulating brood care, and that link nutritional state to age-dependent changes in parenting behaviour.

A connectome of the brain and ventral nerve cord of an adult female fruit fly is reconstructed and annotated, providing an open resource that reveals neural control of behaviour to be distributed, parallel and embodied.

Using the Global Burden of Disease Study data across Asian countries and territories, life expectancy trends and the effects of cause-specific mortality and risk factors on changes in these trends are analysed.

In senescent cells, mitochondria-derived acetyl-CoA promotes histone acetylation and increases chromatin accessibility at inflammatory gene loci. Inhibition of SLC25A1 attenuates these effects, underscoring the therapeutic potential of targeting mitochondrial metabolism and its epigenetic crosstalk to delay age-related functional decline.

Renal cell carcinoma tumours containing tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) are enriched for exhausted CD8⁺ T cells, including tumour-specific clonotypes with stem-like progenitor features and reduced terminal exhaustion.

Intramucosal GPR15-guided regulatory CD8⁺ T lymphocytes—which are diminished by deleterious GPR15 genetic mutations in severe, early-onset disease or by cell deficiencies in sporadic ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease—restrain macrophage-driven inflammation and present new potential therapeutic avenues for inflammatory bowel disease.

Integrated multi-omic profiling of glioblastoma reveals GPNMB as a shared antigen in tumour cells and the surrounding microenvironment, and GPNMB-targeted chimeric antigen receptor T cells demonstrate therapeutic activity in vitro and in animal models.

TROP2 marks poor-prognosis colorectal cancer cells with fetal-like, therapy-resistant states, and therapeutic targeting of TROP2 with antibody–drug conjugates in combination with chemotherapy enhances treatment efficacy by modulating tumour cell plasticity and overcoming resistance.

Different RNA modifications elicit different translation elongation rates for in vitro transcribed mRNAs that result in disparate translation outputs and fidelity, as shown here for N⁴-acetylcytidine versus the industry standard for synthetic mRNAs, N¹-methylpseudouridine.

De novo design, combined with a high-throughput receptor-diversion microscopy-based screen, complementary display methods and functional assays, enabled the development of G-protein-coupled receptor-binding miniprotein agonists and antagonists targeting receptors implicated in itch, pain, cancer, metabolic disease and migraine.

The structure of the Hdr–Vhu–Fwd super-assembly reveals a lineage-specific and modular 8 MDa complex with the ability to adapt to diverse anaerobic niches.