Volume 649 Issue 8098, 22 January 2026

Nature Health, the newest journal in the Nature Portfolio, aims to bridge the ‘implementation gap’ from research to policy and practice.

Symmetrical arrangements of botanical motifs indicate a grasp of spatial division long before the advent of formal written numbers.

A drop in precancerous growths in women who hadn’t received the jab suggests the existence of a ‘herd effect’ against the virus.

Better understanding of multi-year global weather cycles could help airlines to reduce fuel consumption and cost.

Particularly talented canines have sociolinguistic skills akin to those of young toddlers.

The outlook has brightened for federal science budgets, but political appointees are likely to have a big say in how that funding is spent.

An analysis of more than one million people in the UK found that two-thirds of people who were vaccine-hesitant during the COVID-19 pandemic went on to get vaccinated.

A ferocious surge in influenza cases is linked in part to a variant that has not been dominant in the past few years — resulting in a waning of natural immunity.

Scientists have uncovered a way to manipulate the brain pathway in monkeys that puts the brakes on motivation.

Benchmarks reveal how artificial-intelligence systems reinforce discriminatory social hierarchies.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the signals that determine the length of dogs’ ears.

A rare sample from a woolly rhinoceros reveals how the population changed in the lead-up to the species’ extinction.

A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce.

More girls are hitting puberty at eight or earlier. Researchers are exploring the causes, the consequences and what should be done.

A fast-paced book captures how theory and formal proof intertwined with the personal lives of prominent mathematicians.

A generation that missed out on economic growth is driving the trends overtaking politics today.

From education to pandemic preparedness and public health, the past year has seen huge stress put on US science.

Researchers lay bare the human toll of lay-offs, funding cuts and attacks on science one year after the president’s return to the White House.

Nature’s round-up of innovations that are poised to make a splash in the year ahead.

Physical oceanographer Melina M. Martinez finds ways to gather ocean data off the coast of Argentina.

Surprising fossil finds in a Moroccan quarry reveal 773,000-year-old hominin specimens that are close to the ancestor of modern humans.

A study in Australia supports genetic screening in young adults before symptoms show, but the generalizability and cost–benefit ratios need to be examined in other settings.

Researchers identify the neurons involved in the emotional distress associated with pain, and design a genetic approach that could soothe suffering without opioid drugs.

A discovery in mice reveals why fasting enhances a type of breast cancer treatment — a hormone-signalling pathway and gene-expression changes have key roles.

The accuracy of eyewitness evidence is questioned, and a fossil collection examined when a geological society moves its London home in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

An experiment has broken the size record for an object exhibiting matter-wave interference — fuelling the debate about possible size constraints.

The symmetry, microscopy and spectroscopy signatures of altermagnetism are reviewed, and compared with traditional ferromagnetism and Néel antiferromagnetism, and magnetic phases with symmetry-protected compensated non-collinear spin orders.

Aadvanced computer simulations of three-dimensional turbulence reveal that the ab initio generation of large-scale magnetic fields is driven by shear-flow-induced jets; an analytical model is derived which reproduces the essential features of the flow- and field-generation mechanisms.

The detection of forsterite and enstatite emissions in EC 53 during accretion bursts marks one of the first pieces of direct evidence of in situ silicate crystallization in young stars.

Single strontium atoms are trapped in optical tweezer arrays generated via holographic metasurfaces, overcoming a critical barrier to realizing scalable neutral-atom quantum technologies.

Quantum interference of sodium nanoparticles, which can each contain more than 7,000 atoms at masses greater than 170,000 Da, is demonstrated.

Bulk superconductivity has been observed up to 96 K in pressurized bilayer nickelate single crystals which were synthesized under ambient pressure.

A compression-based, regenerative elastocaloric cooling device using low-transition-temperature tubular NiTi units in a cascaded configuration, which show superelasticity and substantial entropy changes, allows the construction of a sub-zero Celsius refrigeration system without refrigerant gases.

3D-printed gel microcilia arrays printed by two-photon polymerization and composed of a soft acrylic acid-co-acrylamide hydrogel with a nanometre-scale network structure are shown to respond to low-voltage electrical stimuli within milliseconds, enabling dynamic individual control and non-reciprocal 3D motion.

Spatially variable surface-elevation changes across 40 global deltas using interferometric synthetic aperture radar are reported.

New hominin fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés at Thomas Quarry I (ThI-GH) in Casablanca, Morocco, dated to around 773 thousand years ago are similar in age to Homo antecessor, yet are morphologically distinct.

An analysis of rare genetic variants identifies three genes—MAP1A, ANO8 and ANK2—that have a role in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and investigates the potential underlying biological mechanisms.

Genetic association tests prioritize candidate genes based on different criteria.

A meta-analysis of 168 studies reveals that economic inequality is not significantly associated with subjective well-being or mental health.

The anterior cingulate cortex encodes affective pain behaviours modulated by opioids; targeting opioid-sensitive neurons through a new chemogenetic gene therapy replicates the analgesic effects of morphine, providing precise chronic pain relief without affecting sensory detection.

Neural circuits in adult mouse visual cortex are stabilized by astrocytes, which secrete CCN1, resulting in reduced plasticity and increased maturation of multiple cell types.

After spinal cord injury, lesion-remote astrocytes acquire heterogeneous, spatially restricted reactivity states that shape neuroinflammation, neural repair and neurological recovery.

Microflora Danica—an atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes—reveals that although human-disturbed habitats have high alpha diversity, species reoccur, revealing hidden homogeneity.

Complex prophage integration dynamics, including low-level induction, cross-family host range and transposase-mediated mobilization, challenge existing paradigms and deepen our understanding of phage–bacterial interactions in the human gut microbiome.

Liver-restricted viral infection in mice results in secondary lymphoid organ dormancy and the compensatory induction of specialized lymphoid tissue in the liver, the structural features and functional outputs of which are closely mirrored in humans.

Mapping of the neutrophil compartment using single-cell transcriptional data from multiple physiological and patological states reveals its organizational architecture and how cell state dynamics and trajectories vary during health, inflammation and cancer.

Beneficial effects of fasting combined with endocrine therapy for oestrogen receptor-α-expressing breast cancers can be recapitulated using exogenous glucocorticoid receptor ligands instead of fasting to reduce harmful effects.

Acetyl-coenzyme A functions as a non-canonical signal to trigger mitophagy, and the acetyl-coenzyme A–NLRX1 axis underlies the KRAS-inhibitor-induced mitophagy response and promotes drug resistance, providing a metabolic mechanism of KRAS inhibitor resistance.

Inhibitor-induced kinase degradation is a common event that positions supercharging of endogenous degradation circuits as an alternative to classical proximity-inducing degraders.

The ATPase UAP56 acts as an ATP-gated molecular switch that directs mRNA ribonucleoprotein complexes from TREX to nuclear-pore-complex-anchored TREX-2 complexes for mRNA export from the nucleus.

The kinase ZAK is activated at collided ribosomes to mediate the ribotoxic stress response.