Volume 644 Issue 8078, 28 August 2025

Private companies can track many changes on Earth from space, but both public and commercial satellite missions are needed to understand and protect the environment.

Organ models with hallmarks of the disease show marked improvement when a protein’s levels are restored.

Chemical profiling traces the source of water in one of the brightest known comets to keep returning to the Solar System.

Output of the powerful greenhouse gas by China’s energy sector peaked in 2014, an inventory shows.

Rat-sized carnivore called the ampurta makes speedy comeback despite unprecedented drought.

Stunning results in mice herald gene-editing advances for neurological diseases.

Analysis uncovers seasonal patterns of the mosquito-borne disease across the Americas, which could anticipate future outbreaks.

The journal Science has lifted an expression of concern on a paper claiming evidence of Majorana quasiparticles and added new details.

Manipulating the microbial communities involved in cocoa-bean fermentation could make chocolate even more delicious.

As a demonstration, artificial-intelligence system helps to make a miniature, high-speed animation of physicists’ favourite feline.

A brain–computer interface decodes in near-real time the imagined speech of people who have difficulty enunciating words.

Most people can get enough protein from food, but certain groups can benefit from protein powders and related products.

Test run shows how a team of three autonomous robots could search for extraterrestrial environments suitable for sheltering humans.

Single-celled species that often stick together in colonies have researchers rethinking the origin of animals.

RFK Jr has vowed to find out what’s responsible, but scientists say he is ignoring answers from decades of research.

Gilbert White’s journals reveal his intimate relationship with his surroundings — and call attention to changes wreaked by climate change today.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

There’s nothing intuitive about quantum theory — six physicists debunk some of the most common misconceptions.

Persuasive physician who brought research evidence to the heart of global policy decisions.

Without artificial-intelligence technologies, balancing human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions with carbon removals by 2050 is out of reach. Action in five areas is needed to keep this goal alive.

Annual updates to ‘climate forcing’ data sets would allow simulations to keep pace as global warming accelerates.

Coral cryobiologist Mary Hagedorn wants to bank biological samples at the frozen lunar south pole.

Biologist Lorenzo Cozzolino examines how these tiny particles are affecting the behaviour and physiology of molluscs, crustaceans and seaweeds.

Gullies are incising into rapidly developing tropical cities. An analysis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo casts light on the extent and effect of this on city dwellers.

For life to emerge on Earth, peptides must first have formed without the aid of enzymes — but how? Reactions of sulfur-containing molecules might have been key.

Single-cell analysis reveals the extent of genome doubling in ovarian cancer, its variability and its role in enabling tumours to evade the immune system.

Two distinct computational approaches provide opportunities for bringing together different theories of cognition.

The protein NINJ1 enables cells to break open during certain types of cell death. Modulation of physical forces on the membrane reveals how NINJ1 acts.

An infant with an inherited life-threatening metabolic condition has responded to a tailored therapy that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to correct a specific mutation.

An optical system that induces random fluctuations in a laser beam could be faster and more efficient at generating images than conventional computers are.

A doped quantum antiferromagnet is obtained by using a Rydberg tweezer array comprising three levels encoding spins and holes to implement a tunable model that allows the study of previously inaccessible parameter regimes.

The ultrafast optical control of resonances in temporally symmetry-broken metasurfaces allows resonances to be created, annihilated or programmably manipulated, which is useful for applications that require active real-time tunability.

Optical generative models are demonstrated for the rapid and power-efficient creation of never-seen-before images of handwritten digits, fashion products, butterflies, human faces and Van Gogh-style artworks.

An asymmetric self-assembled monolayer improves the efficiency of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells compared with symmetric self-assembled monolayers, resulting in a certified power conversion efficiency of up to 34.58%.

A microphase crosslinking strategy, leveraging aziridine-based crosslinkers, is used to render organic thermoelectric materials stretchable and elastic.

Environmental transmission electron microscopy reveals distinct atomistic pathways for the reduction of NiO to metallic nickel by CO and H₂, with H₂ more effective in transforming the entire bulk material.

Aminoacyl-thiols reacting selectively with RNA diols over amine nucleophiles and demonstration of chemically controlled formation of peptidyl-RNA in water at neutral pH suggest an important role for thiol cofactors before the evolution of enzymes.

A direct proxy for past dissolved organic carbon signatures using co-precipitated organic carbon in iron ooids enables reconstruction of marine dissolved organic carbon signals dating back to the Palaeoproterozoic.

An assessment at the scale of the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows that urban gullies are a growing problem, with 118,600 people displaced between 2004 and 2023.

Temperature-related risks among the climate-sensitive diseases in northwestern and southwestern China have been historically high, with associated hospitalization burdens projected to rise consistently.

Data from nine European and North American countries reveal that the disparity in earnings between immigrants and natives is largely a result of segregation of immigrant workers into lower-paying jobs.

Analysis of a fossilized front flipper of the Jurassic ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus that preserves details of soft tissue indicates the presence of a serrated trailing edge that would have reduced noise generated while swimming, enabling stealth hunting and hiding from predators.

Gene regulatory network architecture and complex dosage effects from paralogue diversification converge to shape phenotypic space, producing the potential for both strongly buffered phenotypes and sudden bursts of phenotypic change.

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cognitive strategies and neural mechanisms.

A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language, even in previously unseen situations.

Human brain morphodynamics are explored using organoids.

Cryo-electron and atomic force microscopy shed light on how fibrils of the protein tau, which accumulate in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s disease, can be disassembled by short peptides, providing a possible route towards developing treatments.

Experimental perturbation of soil pH leads to a generalizable model of the soil microcosm comprising three functional regimes with distinct mechanisms linking environmental change to metabolite dynamics.

Microbiome analyses of living trees show that a single tree can host approximately one trillion bacteria, with microbial communities distinctly partitioned between heartwood and sapwood and with minimal similarity to other tissues or ecosystem components.

Zip promotes the accumulation of free phages in bacterial lysogen communities, safeguarding phage progeny.

A newly identified bacterial strain (YB328) isolated from the faeces of patients who responded to immune checkpoint blockade therapies can promote antitumour immunity through the activation of tumour-specific CD8⁺ T cells.

Calcium imaging of the mouse jejunum shows that specific nutrients in the intestinal lumen are detected by epithelial cells, which activate specific sets of enteric neurons through a serotonin-mediated signalling process.

A single-cell sequencing study using more than 30,000 tumour genomes from human ovarian cancers shows that whole-genome doubling is an ongoing mutational process that drives tumour evolution and disrupts immunity.

The NINJ1 protein regulates plasma membrane rupture by altering membrane biomechanical properties, independent of cell death programs.

Using viral barcode tracing to detect interactions between glioblastoma cells and non-malignant astrocytes in patient samples, investigators discovered a pathway that reduces tumour-specific immunity and identified potential therapeutic targets.

Three-dimensional structures of two natural RNA nanocages reveal unique quaternary structures without the contribution of proteins.