Volume 643 Issue 8070, 3 July 2025

Virtual chatbots that simulate conversations with famous actors or sci-fi characters can have real-world consequences.

International students enrich university communities and strengthen civic life. We must defend their place in global education.

Male mice that make high levels of fibroblast growth factor 21 stay lean as they age — a finding that could translate to humans.

Kelp ‘loofahs’ might be first example of toolmaking by marine mammals.

Ritual ‘retirement’ rather than family feud might explain why so many figures of the female pharaoh are broken and cracked.

Modern re-run shows that Arthur Ruhlig’s conclusions, which probably influenced early thinking about fusion energy, were correct, but his numbers were off.

Several groups hope to develop artificial-intelligence models that can predict how cells behave.

Experiment shows how people in dugout canoes could have crossed the treacherous straits between Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands.

Scientists warn against reading too much into a small experiment generating a lot of buzz.

PhD programmes need to better prepare students for careers outside universities, researchers warn.

Tool aims to solve the mystery of non-coding sequences — but is still in its infancy.

The Rubin Observatory in Chile will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights.

Study highlights potential for sustainable synthesis of paracetamol.

Half a century after its cinematic release, Jaws is still shaping how we view — and protect — the ocean’s top predators.

Emerging ‘co-scientist’ systems use teams of chatbots to mimic the deliberations of a research group. Do they really help?

Research across science and medicine will probably shrink at one of the world’s most elite universities amid a new political reality.

A marine ecologist’s 40-year struggle to understand how animals signal to one another.

Researcher used carbon dating to provide evidence that humans had arrived in Brazil much earlier than previously thought.

The decades-old limit on how long human embryos can be grown in culture is under debate. A new road map outlines how to extend the length of culture responsibly.

As the Trump administration steps up attacks on US universities and scientific institutions, the European Union is campaigning hard to attract scientists from the United States. But how many can the bloc take?

After a quarter of a century, the website remains an essential tool for navigating the genome and understanding its structure, function and clinical impact.

Clinical geneticist Carmencita Padilla advocates for expanded access to neonatal screening in the Philippines and around the world.

Measurements with confined photons challenge a prediction that particles that ‘quantum tunnel’ into infinitely long barriers will get stuck.

Could lithocholic acid, a compound produced when gut bacteria process bile, be the missing link between a low-calorie diet and its age-defying effects? Experiments in mice, flies and nematode worms provide clues.

How being near to other orangutans affects the duration of sleep.

Technologies that can interpret imagery have many potential applications. An innovative study of papers and patents in the field suggests one use case that overrides the others: human surveillance.

Most sexually reproducing species have an even chromosome copy number, but the dog rose does not. What explains its unusual pattern of chromosome inheritance?

Damage to the vascular lining leads to interactions with red blood cells that hint at how to treat dangerous complications of heart attack, stroke and COVID-19.

In mice, a lack of maternal iron impairs an iron-dependent enzyme that activates the male sex-determining gene, causing some XY embryos to develop ovaries.

The Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues Network aims to create a reference catalogue of somatic mosaicism across different tissues and cells within individuals.

A modelling study suggests that Mars had a desert-like climate with intermittent liquid-water oases regulated by a negative feedback among solar luminosity, liquid water and carbonate formation.

The study of the relationship between particle speed and negative kinetic energy, arising in regions in which, according to classical mechanics, particles are not allowed to enter, reveals behaviour that appears to contradict the predictions of Bohmian mechanics.

An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

An unconventional machine learning-based inverse design framework enables the generation of ultrabroadband and band-selective thermal meta-emitters with complex 3D architectures and diverse material compositions.

An approach that learns models of robots from video capture can predict the 3D motion outcomes of motor commands, enabling accurate control of a range of soft, biologically inspired robots from a single video camera.

Weakly space-confined, large-grained crystals of all-inorganic perovskite were used to fabricate light-emitting diodes with a high external quantum efficiency and operational stability.

A new asymmetric non-fullerene acceptor, P2EH-1V, is designed and synthesized for constructing devices demonstrating record-high efficiencies of 26.7% (certified at 26.4%) over an aperture area greater than 1 cm² in perovskite–organic tandem solar cells.

A cost-effective all-in-one halide cathode material with high energy density and exceptional cycling stability can be used to achieve energy-dense, durable cathodes for the next generation of all-solid-state batteries.

A new group of multi-principal-element alloys, designed through machine learning and extreme microstructural heterogeneities, achieve high strength (1.8-GPa yield strength) and ductility (25% uniform elongation) at room temperature.

A dysprosium amide–alkene complex shows soft magnetic hysteresis loops up to 100 kelvin, arising from the high charge density of the amide ligands and the structural role of the pendant alkene.

A new method for extending alkenes by one or two carbons is shown to be useful in attenuating the immunosuppressive properties of a medicine, making it potentially applicable for targeting disease areas where immunosuppresion is unwanted.

Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries bce; instead, the Punic people derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean, with notable contributions from North Africa as well.

Insights into the dogrose genome and centromeres explain their ability to achieve stable sexual reproduction.

Three electron microscopy datasets are combined to provide a complete connectomic description of the neural circuitry that makes up the neck connective in Drosophila, including the descending neurons, ascending neurons and sensory ascending neurons.

Increasing the activity of individual parvalbumin-expressing interneurons in the mouse brain modulates the number and strength of inhibitory parvalbumin synapses received by these cells through changes in the expression of the neuropeptide-encoding genes Vgf and Scg2.

A red blood cell haemostatic mechanism induced by dying ECs functions independently of platelets and fibrin.

Lithocholic acid is one of the metabolites upregulated during calorie restriction, and treatment of mice, worms and flies with this bile acid alone can reproduce the health benefits of calorie restriction.

The molecular mechanism underlying how lithocholic acid recapitulates the lifespan and healthspan benefits of calorie restriction is revealed to involve TULP3, sirtuins, v-ATPase and AMPK.

APOL9a/b proteins coat mouse intestinal bacteria with high specificity, and genetic abolition of ceramide-1-phosphate synthesis pathways in the symbiote Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron significantly decreases this binding of APOL9a/b to the bacterium.

A population of TRAIL-positive astrocytes in glioblastoma contributes to an immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment and this mechanism can be targeted with an engineered oncolytic virus to improve outcomes.

Analysis of genomic data from 981 colorectal cancers from participants in 11 countries reveals variations in mutational signatures of microsatellite-stable cancers that are dependent on geographical origin and age at which the cancer was diagnosed.

CRISPR-TO, a system for programmable control of spatial localization of cellular RNAs, is presented and enables functional investigation of endogenous RNA localization in diverse living cells.

A study presents EndoMAP.v1, a resource that combines information on protein interactions and crosslink-supported structural predictions to map the interaction landscape of early endosomes.

Iron-deficient conditions in pregnant mice can cause XY mouse embryos to develop female rather than male genitalia, revealing that iron metabolism has a role in determining male sex in mice.

Structural and biochemical studies of the monkeypox virus core protease show that it exists as an active homodimer and indicate that the substrate-binding sites of core proteases are a promising target for antiviral drugs.

Different phosphorylation patterns created by GRK2 and GRK5 on the C-terminal tail of ACKR3 lead to distinct structural arrangements and dynamics of G-protein-coupled receptor–arrestin complexes, potentially explaining diverse cellular outcomes.