Volume 650 Issue 8101, 12 February 2026

Geopolitical trends might be heading in the wrong direction, but economic forces are aligning around a future economy centred on clean electricity.

In an era of escalating conflict, a development-only approach to aid will yield fleeting results.

Melting point of nanoscale sodium particles differs from that of bulk sodium.

Airborne sensor shows that methane emissions from oil- and gas-producing areas can be five times higher than reported.

Evolution has trapped a species of beetle in an inescapable symbiosis with the aggressive velvety tree ant.

The gas giant’s shape and size, previously known only from data collected more than 45 years ago, have been updated at last.

Major reforms to the United Kingdom’s national research funding agency are aimed at boosting the nation’s economy.

Some human research will no longer be classified as a clinical trial, easing the paperwork burden, but not everyone agrees with the approach.

Officials at the US Department of Health and Human Services, which awarded funding for the controversial study, say it will proceed as planned.

The programme is designed to train more elite engineers who can help to boost the country’s innovation.

Many cancers are linked to two modifiable habits: tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption.

Could the next version of the DSM be a ‘living’ document that has more focus on the causes of mental illness?

Understanding the genetic controls of ageing could lead to more therapies that forestall it.

The external, artificial-lung system could be used to treat other people who are critically unwell and awaiting transplants.

Drug trials have typically excluded pregnant people for safety reasons. But that’s now starting to change.

A powerful book reveals the corrupt deals and human exploitation behind the global scramble for strategic metals.

Researchers need new bot-detection strategies that exploit the limits of human reasoning rather than AI weaknesses.

Increased geopolitical tensions are prompting some in China to argue that the country should go it alone in biotechnology. That would be a backwards step — for China and the rest of the world.

Inventor Josh Miele says that accelerating change requires uprooting social attitudes about blindness and other disabilities.

Documents that lay out a research group’s ethos and practical guidelines are becoming increasingly popular in the academic community.

A much-needed assessment of the scale of the effects of pesticides on soil biodiversity in Europe will support regulation and conservation efforts.

In 2016, the first direct observation of gravitational waves was reported. The measurements by the LIGO detectors gave astronomers a new way to observe the Universe.

Unexpected behaviours in G proteins could be exploited to design next-generation opioid drugs that provide stronger, longer-lasting pain relief.

Could the discovery of a catalyst in which aluminium shifts easily between oxidation states be the beginning of the end for costly transition-metal catalysts?

Fossils reveal that at least four types of hominin, including Paranthropus, were present in northern Ethiopia between 3 million and 2.4 million years ago.

Electrons can seem electrically neutral in some devices. Neutral states can be distinguished in real time by a measure of their electron pairing called odd or even parity.

Kinematic measurements of the Perseus galaxy cluster reveal two drivers of gas motions: a small-scale driver in the inner core associated with black-hole feedback and a large-scale driver in the outer core powered by mergers.

Amplification and optimal noise filtering in hyperpolarized noble-gas spins of observations from distributed intercity quantum sensors monitoring for unexpected transient rotations of polarized spins set parameter range constraints in the search for axion dark matter.

A cavity-array microscope is realized using intra-cavity lenses to create a two-dimensional array of over 40 modes, each coupled to a single atom in free-space.

Emu3 enables large-scale text, image and video learning based solely on next-token prediction, matching the generation and perception performance of task-specific methods, with implications for the development of scalable and unified multimodal intelligence systems.

A measurement strategy is described that is able to read out the parity of minimal two-site Kitaev chains in real time, by coupling two Majoranas and resolving their quantum capacitance.

CrPS₄, a 2D van der Waals A-type antiferromagnet, is shown to exhibit ideal characteristics of Stoner–Wohlfarth antiferromagnets, such as ferromagnet-like binary switching rather than layer-by-layer flipping as in other 2D A-type antiferromagnets.

Using a wafer-scale monolayer 2D MoS₂ process instead of conventional silicon-based devices to manufacture components of spaceborne communication systems demonstrates radiation tolerance, low bit error rate and long-term stability, even under much harsher radiation environments.

Aluminium redox catalysis is achieved with a low-valent aluminium species, carbazolylaluminylene, enabling cyclotrimerization of alkynes and producing diverse benzene derivatives.

Large-scale molecular dynamics simulations show that the crystal–melt interfacial energies of MgSiO₃ bridgmanite increase substantially with pressure, potentially forming unusually large bridgmanite crystals and suggesting a new physical mechanism driving magma ocean segregation.

A wide survey of pesticide effects on soil biodiversity across 373 sites in Europe reveals that pesticide residues occur in 70% of sites and have major effects on soil biodiversity and functional ecology.

Hominin fossils from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area, Ethiopia, suggest that early Homo and Australopithecus species co-existed in the region more than 2.5 million years ago.

With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in eastern Africa.

Yakut communities, with Trans-Baikal admixture during the Mongol expansion, preserved genomic diversity and oral microbiomes despite the Russian conquest, which introduced cereals, pathogens and Christianity, whereas marital practices preserved low consanguinity except in one late case of traditional shamanism.

Approaches combining genetic association and Perturb-seq data that link genetic variants to functional programs to traits are described.

Glitches in video calls can have a negative effect on the judgement of the people involved and correspond to worse outcomes in major areas of life such as job interviews and parole hearings.

The balance between radial progenitors and intermediate precursors to generate upper-layer neurons during the development and evolution of the cerebral cortex is mediated by members of the tuberous sclerosis complex.

A detailed spatiotemporal roadmap of the human female and male reproductive tracts during key periods of sexual differentiation provides new cellular and molecular insights into how early axial gradients lead to specific cell lineages and tissue structures.

Hepatocyte organoids derived directly from human tissue enable long-term hepatocyte expansion and can be combined with portal mesenchyme and cholangiocyte organoids to form a donor-specific periportal liver assembloid system.

Comprehensive large-scale studies of multi-national populations identified microbiome species consistently associated with favourable and unfavourable health markers, informing future studies of the human gut microbiome and its association with diet and cardiometabolic conditions.

A newly developed monoclonal antibody, MARV16, broadly neutralizes all Marburg virus isolates and provides effective protection in guinea pigs with Marburg virus disease.

The tolerogenic activity of type 1 conventional dendritic cells (cDC1s) is determined by EPOR, which is preferentially expressed in cDC1s and induces antigen-specific FOXP3-expressing regulatory T cells.

Using lipid nanoparticle delivery of mRNAs to the liver in aged mice, T cell function and declining immune cues can be restored.

One-shot tissue dynamics reconstruction can infer changes in tissue composition over time, from single-time-point spatial proteomics of human cancers.

Mu opioid receptor agonists with a preference for the non-GTP-bound state of the G protein promote GTP release, thereby potentiating antinociceptive effects of drugs such as morphine and fentanyl without also increasing their respiratory or cardiac effects.