Volume 648 Issue 8092, 4 December 2025

Europe must reform the ways in which science is evaluated. To boost innovation, it must improve research culture.

Artificial intelligence promises rapid and polite feedback on papers — but we must first review the reviewer.

A study of the effects of COVID-19 policies highlights the underexplored impacts of commercial cooking on air quality.

‘Emerald’ or ‘Paris’ green was once a highly popular pigment among painters, but the chemistry behind its slow decay over time has been unclear.

Studying trapped antimatter could help to explain why our world is so full of matter.

A specially trained algorithm could aid the search for biological activity both on the early Earth and on other worlds.

COP30 negotiated efforts to protect forests and ramp up financial packages for climate action, but with one glaring omission: a road map to cut fossil fuels.

Hackers are ramping up attacks on academic institutions to access valuable data and to demand ransoms.

Neurotechnology company Paradromics will test its device in a trial aimed at safely restoring speech for people with severe motor impairments.

Scientific meetings that support Black, Latino and Indigenous researchers are grappling with funding cuts and other restrictions.

Engineered T cells that have been used to treat ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus show promising results.

Gel-based device inspired by the cooling powers of milk assesses peppers whose burn ranges from mild to dangerous.

Technical advances allow researchers to trace the genetic changes that occur over time.

Scientists are testing whether GLP-1 drugs can help to cut cravings for cigarettes, alcohol and opioids — as well as food.

Astrocytes make up one-quarter of the brain, but researchers are only now realizing their true value.

The imminent birth of Oren Harman’s third child leads him into a sweeping exploration of the changes in form that animals experience throughout their lives.

Bibliophile Andrew Robinson reveals 10 essential science reads from the past year.

The protein, reverse transcriptase, has become an essential tool for making DNA copies of RNA.

Information about the roles of each author of a paper can help to build trust, integrity and responsible research assessment. Coordinated efforts are needed to consolidate progress.

Academia is unprepared for the rise in chatbot use among students — but with the right AI tools, personalized learning could soon become a reality.

Unlike my colleagues, I faced a five-year wait to publish my PhD project. Here’s how I coped.

Science has become obsessed with publishing numbers. With this new satirical proposal, have we reached peak metric?

Enkhbayar Erdenetulkhuur works as a field geologist in the Altai mountain range in northwestern Mongolia.

A fall can have consequences such as life-changing bone fractures and even death. A clinical trial shows success with an approach to reduce the risk of falls occurring.

A particle called the sterile neutrino could explain anomalies in high-energy physics. The range of conditions in which it could be found has become narrower.

Light reflected from satellites pollutes the images taken by telescopes orbiting Earth, as well as those on the ground. Without mitigations, this will only get worse.

Genome editing has been used to generate a type of transfer RNA that overcomes the harmful effects of ‘nonsense’ gene variants — a possible remedy for a range of diseases.

AI systems rely on data that often lack diversity, perpetuate biases and violate intellectual-property rights. An ethical human-image data set addresses these problems.

Communication between epithelial and mesenchymal cells in pancreatic cancer leads to a poor prognosis. The molecular basis for this signalling has now been revealed.

Evidence of a particle made up of four tightly bound quarks tests physicists’ understanding of the force that holds protons and neutrons together.

A large biobanking effort captures genetic and health data from half a million people in Taiwan, widening the diversity of genomes used to predict disease risk.

Rapidly growing satellite constellations pose a substantial threat to astronomical observations, with projections indicating that future space telescopes will have more than 96% of their exposures affected by satellite trails, necessitating urgent mitigation strategies.

The CMS Collaboration reports the measurement of the spin, parity, and charge conjugation properties of all-charm tetraquarks, exotic fleeting particles formed in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

Data obtained from the MicroBooNE liquid-argon time projection chamber are used to exclude the single light sterile neutrino interpretation of the LSND and MiniBooNE anomalies at the 95% confidence level.

The analysis of the energy spectrum of 36 million tritium β-decay electrons recorded in 259 measurement days within the last 40 eV below the endpoint challenges the Neutrino-4 claim.

A glasses-free three-dimensional display, which is as large as a conventional desktop screen and has a viewing angle larger than 100°, is achieved by an artificial intelligence-powered optimization algorithm, which adapts the virtual images sent around each eye in real time.

A molecular interfacial layer optimizes hole transport in tin-based perovskite solar cells, improving energy-level alignment and enhancing hole extraction efficiency.

A matrix-confined molecular layer of compact surface coverage and good conductivity is developed as charge transport substrate to fabricate perovskite solar-cell devices with high efficiencies, which shows application potential for scalable production.

The Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE, pronounced ‘Feebee’)—an image dataset that implements best practices for consent, privacy, compensation, safety, diversity and utility—can be used responsibly as a fairness evaluation dataset for many human-centric computer vision applications.

The regulatory landscape controlling Hoxd gene expression in tetrapod digit development was probably co-opted from a pre-existing cloacal regulatory mechanism, as evidenced by the effects of genetic deletion experiments in zebrafish fin, cloaca and mouse urogenital development.

The Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative (TPMI) has built a cohort of more than half a million individuals with Han Chinese ancestry, providing a rich resource of genetic and medical data for this group.

The Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative recruited and genotyped more than half a million Taiwanese participants, almost all of Han Chinese ancestry, and performed comprehensive genomic analyses and developed polygenic risk score prediction models for numerous health conditions.

Combined behavioural, circuit-level and cellular approaches are used to demonstrate how hypothalamic neurons integrate hunger and oestrous state to drive a switch in how female mice interact with pups.

Emotional experience evokes signalling in astrocytes, which form an ensemble that is reinforced by secondary astrocytic state changes resulting from repeated experience, leading to memory stabilization.

PU.1^low CD28-expressing microglia may act as suppressive cells in Alzheimer’s disease, mitigating its progression by reducing neuroinflammation and amyloid plaque load, indicating potential immunotherapeutic approaches for treatment.

The bacterial ubiquitin ligase NleL evades host defence mechanisms both by inhibiting pyroptosis and by preventing infected intestinal epithelial cells from being extruded into the lumen and expelled in the faeces.

Capillary-associated macrophages are selectively lost over time, contributing to impaired vascular repair and reduced tissue perfusion in older mice.

Mapping of spatial metabolic gradients in the mouse liver and intestine identifies fructose-induced focal derangements in liver metabolism.

A new strategy that uses prime editing to convert an endogenous tRNA into a suppressor tRNA shows therapeutic potential for multiple genetic diseases that are caused by premature stop codons.

Mutual paracrine regulation of the cytokines GREM1 and SPP1 mediate mesenchymal and epithelial cell fate in pancreatic cancer.

KCTD10 interacts with the DNA replication machinery and the RNA polymerase complex, inducing ubiquitination and removal of the transcription machinery in the event of co-directional transcription–replication conflicts.

Ion-channel conductance levels are controlled by the bending patterns of pore-forming transmembrane helices in the heterotetrameric neuronal channel GluN1a-2B N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor.

Studies of the G-protein-coupled receptor NTSR1 show that the G protein selectivity of this receptor can be modified by small molecules, enabling the design of drugs that work by switching receptor subtype preference.