Volume 638 Issue 8049, 6 February 2025

If the 193 remaining member nations want the WHO to succeed, they must find a way to pay for it.

Government scientists in the US must be clear-eyed and continue to serve the public.

Brain regions linked to the sense of smell in adults were activated in infants exposed to the odours of petrol, strawberry and more.

A flexible dart with a weighted tip can have 60% more kinetic energy than a rigid one, experiments show.

The large carnivores are spreading out of remote mountains and into areas settled by humans.

One of Jupiter’s biggest moons has the potential to harbour life in a subsurface sea. The nature of its core will provide information about that ocean.

DeepSeek-R1 performs reasoning tasks at the same level as OpenAI’s o1 — and is open for researchers to examine.

At-home DNA testing is no longer in high demand — and critics have raised concerns about unreliable tests and privacy.

H5N1 is adapting to new mammalian hosts, raising the possibility of the virus spreading between humans.

Climate models predict that the number of heat-related deaths could soar in cities over the coming century, even when efforts are made to keep people safe.

Grafting patches of lab-grown muscle to the surface of the heart could offer a lifeline for people waiting for a transplant.

Amid pandemic upheaval, researchers have gained fundamental insights about how the body fends off infections.

Real-time imaging shows how plastic-stuffed cells form clumps that affect mouse movement.

A world-first facility has a new way to break down ‘unrecyclable’ plastic waste.

Search engines, GPS maps and other tech can alter our ability to learn and remember. Now scientists are working out what AI might do.

Ingenuity and decades of planning enabled the mission’s success.

An immersive show in Paris leaves you humbled by the awesome power of quiet.

A fossil found in South Africa 100 years ago provides insights into the emergence of a crucial — and unusual — life stage.

Quantum mechanics depicts a counter-intuitive reality in which the act of observation influences what is observed — and few can agree on what that means.

An early love of construction toys led the Scottish chemist to thread molecules together, opening up a new field of chemistry.

Romance and relationships are research topics for some scientists in academia and the private sector. Nature asked them for their insights.

So far, microorganisms have been research subjects or contaminants on space stations, but could they assist longer missions?

Conservation biologist Jose María Gil-Sánchez dodges landmines and installs camera traps to document little-known Saharan mammals.

Overcrowding can lead to disaster, and yet the dynamics of dense groups of people are poorly understood. Analysis of a festival uncovers collective rotational movements that emerge at critical densities, which could be universal.

Immune cells can destroy cancer, but tumours often evade such responses. The bidirectional transfer of mitochondria between cancer and immune cells is a newly discovered mechanism that thwarts anticancer defences.

A superconducting state can be induced in a twisted carbon-based material, but it can’t be described with conventional theory. A technique using high-frequency circuits could reveal the mechanism behind this fascinating state.

Older female mice show poor spatial memory when their paternal X chromosome is inactive and only the maternal copy is active. This phenomenon could be responsible for variation in age-related cognitive decline among women.

A rapid and efficient method developed to create stem-cell-based 3D mini-organs derived from the cells of patients offers a way to evaluate personalized treatments using RNA therapies for rare genetic diseases.

This Review delves into the fungal kingdom, exploring the relationships among fungi, animals, plants and the environment, and investigating both the threats posed by fungi and their potential benefits.

Combining Indigenous insights with neuroscience methods through Two-Eyed Seeing can broaden the understanding of brain function and mental wellbeing by merging reductionist and holistic perspectives across various domains, while promoting allyship, humility and inclusive communication.

By measuring the tidal deformation of Io as it orbits Jupiter using Juno Doppler and historically available data, the hypothesis of a shallow global magma ocean in Io is shown to be false.

Combining the infrared capabilities of JWST and synthetic tracking techniques, the detection of some of the smallest asteroids ever observed in the main belt is reported; their large abundance reveals a population driven by collisional cascade.

A hybrid analogue–digital quantum simulator is used to demonstrate beyond-classical performance in benchmarking experiments and to study thermalization phenomena in an XY quantum magnet, including the breakdown of Kibble–Zurek scaling predictions and signatures of the Kosterlitz–Thouless phase transition.

A programmable quantum simulator based on Rydberg atom arrays is used to study the collective dynamics of a quantum phase transition and observe the phenomenon of quantum coarsening.

Measurements of the superfluid stiffness in twisted trilayer graphene reveal unconventional nodal-gap superconductivity, where the superconducting transition is controlled by phase fluctuations rather than Cooper-pair breaking.

Research on superconductivity in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene reveals unconventional behaviour, an anisotropic gap and a significant role of quantum geometry, using combined d.c. transport and microwave measurements, suggesting new insights into superconductivity mechanisms.

Longitudinal spin pumping is experimentally demonstrated using the magnetic phase transition of iron–rhodium, and the observed inverse spin Hall signal indicates that longitudinal spin pumping is driven by quantum fluctuations.

Analysis of the confined crowds at the San Fermín festival in Spain shows that dense crowds can self-organize into macroscopic chiral oscillators, coordinating the orbital motion of hundreds of individuals without external guidance.

Degradable thermoset multimaterials can be synthesized from a commercially accessible, biosourced monomer using orthogonal polymerizations in a single pot; after selective degredation, the resulting small molecules can be repolymerized.

A halogenase enzyme uses the copper in its active site to catalyse iterative chlorinations on multiple unactivated carbon−hydrogen bonds, enabling carbon−hydrogen functionalization that is not achievable with an iron-based halogenase.

Sea salt data from an ice core record show that Antarctica’s Ronne Ice Shelf survived the last interglacial, the last period of enhanced and sustained global warmth about 125,000 years ago.

A global multi-taxon extinction risk assessment of freshwater fauna for The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species finds one-quarter of species to be at high risk of extinction.

A new, nearly complete fossil skull of Vegavis from the James Ross Basin, Antarctic Peninsula, provides insight into its feeding ecology and exhibits morphologies that support placement among waterfowl within crown-group birds.

The maternal X chromosome in female mice impairs cognition through the silencing of certain genes and accelerates ageing of the hippocampus.

A spatially resolved single-cell transcriptomics map of the mouse brain at different ages reveals signatures of ageing, rejuvenation and disease, including ageing effects associated with T cells and rejuvenation associated with neural stem cells.

Cellular, transcriptomic and proteomic analyses of organoids derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells show that mTOR pathway hypoactivation is involved in two genetically distinct lissencephaly spectrum disorders.

A comprehensive single-cell RNA sequencing study delineates cell-type-specific transcriptomic changes in the brain associated with normal ageing that will inform the investigation into functional changes and the interaction of ageing and disease.

The development of a molecularly defined spatiotemporal atlas of pathogen-infected Arabidopsis thaliana leaves reveals specific cell states that have distinct roles in plant immunity.

Previously undescribed hierarchical arrangements in haematopoietic stem cells and their niches that mediate both regenerative potential and immune privilege are identified.

A family of host-derived bile acid–methylcysteamine conjugates functions as FXR antagonists, forming part of a microbiota-dependent metabolic network that regulates FXR-dependent physiology.

Mitochondria with mutations in their DNA from cancer cells can be transferred to T cells in the tumour microenvironment, which leads to T cell dysfunction and impaired antitumour immunity.

A scalable platform for generating patient-specific organoids for testing personalized oligonucleotide therapeutics is described.

Aspartate in the tumour environment activates the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor in cancer cells to induce cellular programmes that increase the aggressiveness of metastasis.

Motif grammar on nucleosome fibres acts as signpost elements, directing TF combinatorial binding to enhancers.

Structural studies of tyrocidine synthetase using site-selective crosslinking probes to link condensation domains with carrier protein substrates define key interactions and molecular mechanisms of non-ribosomal protein synthesis.

The condensation domains of non-ribosomal peptide synthetases use a concerted reaction mechanism in which the active site histidine probably serves as a crucial stabilizing hydrogen bond acceptor for the developing ammonium.