Volume 648 Issue 8093, 11 December 2025

A region unused to tropical cyclones has had three in a week. The world needs to ask why this happened, not look away.

National laboratories have been instructed to broaden access to their data sets to accelerate research as part of the federal government’s AI platform. But who stands to benefit?

The single-celled organism can grow at 63 °C, a record for eukaryotic life.

Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that pigeons sense magnetic fields by detecting electric currents in their inner ears.

Since it was unveiled in 2020, Google DeepMind’s game-changing AI tool has helped researchers all over the world to predict the 3D structures of hundreds of millions of proteins.

The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

Better ways to measure cognitive exhaustion could point to treatments for long COVID and other debilitating disorders.

An ambitious book challenges long-held assumptions on diet and nutrition and exposes gaps in public-health guidance.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

From flaming raisins to robots and rockets, the institution’s Christmas Lectures have educated and entertained for two centuries.

Her experiments on the heaviest elements deepened our understanding of radioactivity.

A global drop in public and private investment in agricultural science in the past four decades is partly to blame for high food prices, an analysis reveals.

Misunderstanding and hubris have broken public trust in governments’ use of science, but it can be restored.

Students and a financial planner give their advice on budgeting, saving and investing during doctoral studies.

By studying caves near his home in Johannesburg, South Africa, geologist Tebogo Makhubela ventures into places people have never been before.

An assessment of death rates in India’s coastal megacity of Mumbai reveals the impact of rain, high tides and flooding. Climate change will probably exacerbate the effects.

A fresh twist on a classic chemical reaction widely used for organic synthesis avoids the use of dangerously unstable compounds — a huge benefit for chemists.

New evidence answers the question about whether some fossils are Tyrannosaurus rex juveniles or a different species, with implications for decades of published science.

An artificial-intelligence algorithm that discovers its own way to learn achieves state-of-the-art performance, including on some tasks it had never encountered before.

The emission of photons by excited nuclei has been explored for timekeeping and sensing, but nuclear processes that eject electrons offer practical advantages.

Conversations with AI can sway people’s political views. Concerningly, a chatbot’s facts are not always accurate, especially when it supports right-wing positions.

A Review of the impacts of short-lived halogens on air quality and climate identifies gaps in our knowledge of short-lived halogen emissions, chemistry, and the environmental and climate impacts.

Laser-induced conversion electron Mössbauer spectroscopy, which detects electrons emitted by ²²⁹Th nuclei in a thin ThO₂ sample excited by vacuum ultraviolet light, is demonstrated, opening the possibility of a conversion-electron-based nuclear clock.

The ALICE Collaboration provides details on the microscopic mechanism that ends up creating antideuteron in high-energy proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

An autonomous method discovers reinforcement learning rules from the cumulative experiences of a population of agents across a large number of complex environments, and the discovered rule achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks.

Ultralow-power ferroelectric field-effect transistors are used to achieve low-power NAND flash memory, overcoming the trade-off between multi-level capability and power efficiency and paving the way for next-generation storage memory.

Experimental observations in small-grained polycrystals suggest a new concept of considering metallic grain boundaries not as defects but as separate defect-containing lattices, providing a potential explanation for the deformation behaviour of nanocrystalline metals.

A pooling–deconvolution algorithm identifies cooperative catalyst behaviours with low experimental cost while accommodating potential inhibitory effects between catalyst candidates.

A safe, versatile deaminative method converts aromatic amines into diverse C–X and C–C bonds via N-nitroamine intermediates, enabling broad one-pot cross-couplings without hazardous diazonium salts.

Higher-income neighbourhoods rebuild and improve after disasters while lower-income areas do not return to pre-disaster conditions.

A well-preserved skeleton of a nearly mature tyrannosaur from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, USA supports the existence of a second Nanotyrannus species, Nanotyrannus lethaeus sp. nov., and validates the recognition of Nanotyrannus as a genus separate from Tyrannosaurus.

Genomic sequencing of the thermotolerant coral species Oculina patagonica, single-cell transcriptomic analyses of symbiotic and non-symbiotic specimens and comparisons with obligate symbiotic coral species reveal adaptations that provide resilience to coral bleaching.

The most recent common ancestor of the stony coral Scleractinia dates to about 460 million years ago and was probably a solitary, heterotrophic and free-living organism.

Coupling live-cell imaging, machine learning and genomic sequencing, the MAGIC platform enables investigation of the cellular context, mutation rates and triggers of spontaneous chromosomal abnormality formation, shedding light on fundamental determinants of chromosomal instability.

Human–artificial intelligence (AI) dialogues can meaningfully impact voters’ attitudes towards presidential candidates and policy, demonstrating the potential of conversational AI to influence political decision-making.

Thiorphan is identified as a new and effective drug treatment for spinal cord injury that can be adopted across nervous system disease states in the development of new therapies for human neurological disorders.

Synthetic fibril strain 1B is a pathogen that is capable of self-replication and inducing glial cytoplasmic inclusions in vivo in mice, and the structural features of 1B may underlie the pathology of individuals with multiple-system atrophy.

Ants evolved a transcriptional-interference-based mechanism to express a single odorant receptor from an array of Or genes with functionally similar promoters.

High-resolution rainfall, tide and mortaility data are used to quantify the impact of rainfall and flooding on urban health in Mumbai, India, revealing an order-of-magnitude discrepency between observed and officially reported mortality impacts, with slum residents bearing most of the burden.

Viral NblA accelerates the cyanophage infection cycle, directs degradation of the host phycobilisome and other proteins, and reduces host photosynthetic light-harvesting efficiency.

An investigation of plant receptor-like kinases identifies regions of these proteins that control whether immune or symbiotic signalling pathways are activated, with minimal changes to specific residues in one of these regions being sufficient to alter signalling specificity.

Single-cell transcriptomic analyses of Plasmodium falciparum and Anopheles gambiae reveal key developmental stages, processes and factors in parasite–mosquito interactions and identify potential targets for blocking malaria transmission.

The fast skin-permeable polyzwitterion poly[2-(N-oxide-N,N-dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate] may enable non-invasive transdermal delivery of insulin, and potentially facilitate the use of other protein- and peptide-based therapeutics through transdermal delivery.

De novo design of Ca²⁺ channels with ion selectivity that can assemble appropriately and mediate Ca²⁺ conductance when expressed in cells is described.

A combined cryo-electron tomography and cryo-electron microscopy pipeline was developed to inflict axonal damage and monitor the cellular response induced by epothilone B, revealing that microtubule polymerization at and beyond the lesion site promote axon regeneration.