Volume 650 Issue 8100, 5 February 2026

Hindering studies involving fetal tissue will impede the development of the alternatives intended to replace it, while slowing the search for new medicines.

The world faces energy shortages as fossil fuels are phased out. Research can’t go on as normal.

Field pennycress could become a valuable winter crop, with benefits for both carbon storage and farm profitability.

Engineered Escherichia coli could open the door to more sustainable routes to new drugs and other chemicals.

The six-year results from the Dark Energy Survey highlight unresolved tensions in standard cosmological theory.

Geopolitics made Greenland the unexpected focus of the world’s attention. But the territory has long been a unique region for science.

De-synchronized electrical activity marks the loss of awareness.

Metabolites in mouse and human breath correlate to gut-microbe populations and might be helpful in diagnosing disease.

Scientists have launched a fresh effort to find out what could be producing oxygen at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Scientists seek to understand the factors that have allowed people in Brazil to reach their 100th or even 110th birthdays despite facing adversities.

A molecule produced by cancer cells can shield the brain from Alzheimer’s disease in mice.

A researcher has created a chatbot that is indistinguishable from human participants in online surveys. Some researchers fear that a workhorse of social science is now under threat.

New director-general Mark Thomson discusses fundraising efforts and future priorities for Europe’s particle-physics laboratory.

People with aphantasia are offering a window into consciousness.

A string of surprising advances suggests usable quantum computers could be here in a decade.

Social media can help to raise awareness of health conditions — but the wealth of dubious information online might do more harm than good.

She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

The stalled multinational effort to protect environmental and human health from plastic pollution is salvageable, with a revamped negotiation process.

The vision of human-level machine intelligence laid out by Alan Turing in the 1950s is now a reality. Eyes unclouded by dread or hype will help us to prepare for what comes next.

Data sonification helps researchers to build connections and communicate their science to a broader audience.

A machine-learning method that reasons and adapts has been developed to solve one of the most time-consuming bottlenecks in battery development.

How did eukaryotic cells with complex architecture evolve from simpler prokaryotic cells? DNA analyses offer possible answers.

Fundamental particles called quarks can be created in quantum-correlated pairs. These correlations can be passed on to larger particles that form from the quarks.

Two studies suggest that T cells with stem-cell-like properties could work with antibody therapies to control HIV after a person stops taking antiviral pills.

A book about witches casts a spell, and arguments about whether blue-green algae should be called blue-green bacteria, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

Eyes on a face’s front or side enable a brain to perceive images. Fossil evidence suggests that two light-sensitive organs on top of ancient vertebrate heads generated images, too.

Improved technologies facilitate the detection of molecules linked to neurodegenerative brain changes at very low concentrations in the blood, complementing the clinical evaluation of suspected neurodegenerative disease.

First-principles molecular dynamics driven by density functional theory is used to show that silicate and hydrogen are completely miscible over a wide range of plausible core–envelope pressure–temperature conditions.

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrates evidence of spin correlations in \(\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }\) hyperon pairs inherited from virtual spin-correlated strange quark–antiquark pairs during QCD confinement.

The nuclear clock transition of ^229mTh in ²²⁹Th:CaF₂ crystals is characterized as a function of doping concentration, temperature and time, demonstrating high reproducibility and identifying ideal operating characteristics of these crystals as nuclear clocks.

The existence of a long-lived, prethermal regime in many-body systems with tunable heating rates, driven by structured random protocols, is observed using a 78-qubit superconducting quantum processor.

Transition of superfluid to insulator is observed in the layer-imbalanced regime of bilayer magnetoexcitons.

Lasing with multi-pass gain is achieved in a diamond-based X-ray cavity at the European XFEL, opening a path to next-generation X-ray science.

The fluorooxoborate crystal NH₄B₄O₆F shows promise as a nonlinear optical material for vacuum ultraviolet light sources through second-harmonic generation, demonstrating record output energy and efficiency resulting from optimized arrangements of fluorine-based units creating asymmetric sublattices.

Fibre integrated circuits created by first preparing circuitry on extremely thin and flexible substrates and then mechanically rolling them up demonstrate microdevice density reaching 100,000 transistors per centimetre and excellent stability under harsh service conditions.

Discovery Learning, a machine learning approach integrating active learning, physics-guided learning and zero-shot learning into a human-like reasoning loop, is described for predicting the battery cycle life of new designs from minimal experiments, reducing prototyping requirements.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the deep Northwest Atlantic was only about 2 °C colder than today, suggesting sustained production of relatively warm North Atlantic Deep Water during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The Ocean Equity Index provides a systematic, twelve-criteria framework to assess and improve equity in ocean initiatives, projects and policies, producing structured data that guide evidence-based decisions and support more equitable outcomes for coastal communities and ecosystems.

Analysis of eukaryotic gene sequences using a relaxed molecular clock methodology indicate that eukaryotes emerged 3.0–2.25 billion years ago as a result of mitochondrial endosymbiosis with complex archaea that already possessed an elaborated cytoskeleton, membrane trafficking, endomembrane, phagocytotic machinery and a nucleus.

A survey of the reconstructed gene set of the last eukaryotic common ancestor shows a consistent link between Asgard archaea and the origin of numerous, functionally diverse eukaryotic genes, demonstrating the dominant Asgard contribution to eukaryogenesis.

Early vertebrates, particularly myllokunmingids, possessed four camera-type eyes (a pair of lateral eyes and pineal and parapineal organs), which indicates that these structures functioned in image formation, in support of the hypothesis that the four camera-type eyes represent an ancestral vertebrate trait.

The genomes of 28 ancient southern African individuals dated to between 10,200 and 150 years before present offer insights into the evolution of Homo sapiens.

The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

A mode of brain organization that connects visual and bodily reference frames may translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats that are useful for action, social cognition and semantic processing.

The prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease neuropathological changes is reported based on blood-based biomarkers in a Norwegian population-based cohort.

Combination immunotherapy approaches might be effective in inducing sustained control of HIV by slowing rebound and improving CD8⁺ T cell responses.

Immune features and T cell characteristics that correlate with post-intervention control of HIV-1 viraemia inform the development of combination immunotherapies that may enhance the ability to elicit durable HIV remission.

Together with a companion paper, molecular details of immune responses in a pig-to-human xenotransplantation are identified through dense longitudinal multi-omics profiling of the xenograft and the host recipient, across the 61-day procedure.

Xenotransplantation of a genetically edited pig kidney with a thymic autograft into a brain-dead human for 61 days with immunosuppression resulted in stable kidney function without proteinuria, and xenograft rejection was treated and reversed by the end of the study.

Lung adenocarcinomas bearing the ID2 mutational signature display increased LINE-1 retrotransposon activity, which contributes to their fast evolutionary dynamics and aggressive phenotype.

The ALPK1 agonist UDSP-Hep stimulates tumour-cell antigen presentation, macrophage–DC cross-priming and differentiation of protective memory T cells.

An intestinal organoid model recapitulates human microfold (M) cell function and transcriptomic profiling and biochemical assays demonstrate that M cells uptake and present antigens to the immune system via the class II major histocompatibility complex.