Volume 643 Issue 8071, 10 July 2025

Researchers studying research must avoid the temptation to get too stuck in the academic weeds.

Severe blows to the ‘deaf-scientist pipeline’ must not mean abandoning its best practices. Here is how to support current and future students.

Scientific research is at the heart of Israel’s success and has worldwide benefits. Our work will continue despite adversity.

Mangled bones found at a one-time manufacturing facility pinpoint species used to make a quintessential condiment.

Sound-wave created by eruption in Tonga caused the atmosphere to warm over Mexico and the Caribbean.

A global map reveals the prevalence of thousands of genes that arm pathogens against antibiotics.

A material that emits less energy than it absorbs has the potential to save some of the sunlight wasted by solar collectors.

Efforts by leaders of the US national academies to adjust to the new political reality have spurred member concerns about capitulation and censorship.

Results align with other efforts to count the number of people killed amid the ongoing conflict.

Nature talks to legal and other specialists about the cases and what to watch out for when transporting lab materials.

‘Distributed peer review’ of grants makes process more than twice as fast — and includes some cheat-prevention measures.

Images hold clues to risk of dementia and various age-related diseases.

Drugs currently being tested target complications associated with obesity such as heart disease, fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes.

The month’s sharpest science shots — selected by Nature’s photo team.

Better stress assessment and tailored interventions could give clinicians the tools they need to fend off lasting damage.

Metal-organic frameworks were the next big thing in chemistry when they were invented more than three decades ago. Now, these intriguing materials are becoming commercial tools for capturing carbon dioxide and harvesting water from the air.

Microorganisms, materials and movement inspire high-fashion dress designs.

The publication of ever-larger numbers of problematic papers, including fake ones generated by artificial intelligence, represents an existential crisis for the established way of doing evidence synthesis. But with a new approach, AI might also save the day.

Expanding human influence in outer space will require an ethical compass that is more expansive than the one conventionally used.

Award-winning mentors share best practice to keep your team going amid political upheavals, economic downturns and other events.

AI tools have been slow to enter academic recruitment — but recent developments could change that.

Risto Taipale works on the maintenance of a research station that provides publicly accessible data on climate change.

Soil samples from the far side of the Moon provide clues about the origin of lunar asymmetry and the effects of ‘mega-basin’ impacts on the evolution of rocky planets

‘Missing’ genes needed for the biosynthesis of a natural anticancer drug have been discovered by perturbing and analysing individual cells of yew trees.

An accessible and adaptable artificial-intelligence model trained on a diverse set of X-ray images is better than existing models at spotting rare chest diseases.

A landmark field study reveals widespread pollution of the Atlantic Ocean by nanoscale plastic debris — raising questions about the risk to marine ecosystems.

A key component of the TCA cycle, a series of reactions that occurs in energy-generating organelles called mitochondria, can dictate the fate of intestinal stem cells.

Gene expression reveals that different types of human cell can work as a unit. These cellular modules, found in several tissues, change during disease.

The diverse chemical and physical properties of plastics make it hard to recycle mixtures. An innovative recycling method now tackles this issue.

An inventory of 16,325 known plastic chemicals, including >4,200 hazardous compounds, supports the development of safer plastics.

Volcanism identified by Pb–Pb dating of basalt fragments returned by the Chang’e-6 mission from the farside of the Moon gives a young eruption age of 2,807 ± 3 Ma, consistent with the crater-counting age.

Samples from the Chang’e-6 mission show that the lunar magnetic field rebounded in field strength after its previous sharp decline of about 3.1 Ga.

An estimate of water abundance in the lunar mantle indicates that the farside mantle is potentially drier than its nearside counterpart.

Extreme Sr–Nd depletion in 2.8-billion-year-old basalt fragments from the lunar farside South Pole–Aitken basin suggests an ultra-depleted mantle source resulting from lunar magma ocean crystallization and/or later impact-related melt extraction.

A new class of moiré materials based on monolayers with triangular lattices and low-energy states at the M points of the Brillouin zone is introduced, demonstrating emergent momentum-space non-symmorphic symmetries, a kagome plane-wave lattice structure, and potential quasi-one-dimensionality.

CMOS-based circuits can be integrated with silicon-based spin qubits and can be controlled at milli-kelvin temperatures, which can potentially help scale up these systems.

Stable coating of filters with a thin liquid layer enhances adhesion of airborne particulates while maintaining high air permeability, resulting in longer lifetimes and higher efficiency of these filters.

A product-oriented strategy that leverages the reactivities of different functional groups in real-life plastic mixtures can be used to obtain valuable products, opening a path for managing end-of-life plastic mixtures.

A relative potency-adjusted inventory of fine-particulate matter (PM_2.5) established in China reveals sectoral and regional disparities in PM_2.5 emissions, exposures and associated toxic potencies.

Observations from 12 hydrocast stations along a transect crossing the North Atlantic from the subtropical gyre to the northern European shelf provide evidence of large amounts of nanoplastics throughout the entire water column.

Analysis of whole-genome sequencing data from 3,023 human genomes from mainland Southeast Asia identifies high genetic heterogeneity among populations in the region and many unique small and structural variants.

Analysis of more than 95% of each diploid human genome of a four-generation, twenty-eight-member family using five complementary short-read and long-read sequencing technologies provides a truth set to understand the most fundamental processes underlying human genetic variation.

A set of neurons in the peri-locus coeruleus region controls arousal and avoidance states, providing an understanding of the neurobiological basis of arousal and exploratory behaviours.

Approach versus avoidance responses are driven by D1 and D2 neurons in the ventral hippocampus.

Activity in the striatum is necessary for trial-to-trial improvements in learning sensory–motor tasks but not memory recall.

Metabolic enzymes of the tricarboxylic acid cycle, such as 2-oxoglutarate dehydrogenase, are differentially expressed in absorptive and secretory lineages, guiding cell fate establishment and offering insights for targeted regenerative therapies.

The discovery that DNA methylation of different CpG sites can serve as digital barcodes of clonal identity led to the development of EPI-Clone, an algorithm that enables single-cell lineage tracing through cellular differentiation at scale.

Ark⁺, a fully open artificial intelligence foundation model, demonstrates exceptional capabilities in diagnosing common, rare and novel thoracic diseases.

A distinct population of CD4 T cells resides in specific regions of the steady-state brain, and these T cells are programmed in the periphery by the microbiome to coordinate adaptive behaviour.

Dysregulated CD4 T cells that recognize gut commensal antigens are able to infiltrate the central nervous systems and are re-stimulated by host proteins, resulting in neuroinflammation.

Immune checkpoint blockade activates T cell immunity by reprogramming the STAT3 and STAT5 transcriptional pathways in dendritic cells, and STAT3 degradation is effective for treating tumours of multiple cancer types in mouse models.

Comprehensive single-cell transcriptomic analysis of 35 human tissues reveals 12 cross-tissue coordinated cellular modules that exhibit intramodule communication and dynamic changes with ageing, and whose organization is perturbed during cancer progression.

Combined high-throughput protein engineering with machine learning to curate libraries of CRISPR genome-editing enzymes with distinct genome targeting properties is described.

The molecular mechanisms of astroblastoma development are identified, whereby distinct gene fusions upregulate shared transcriptional networks to disrupt the normal development of ventral telencephalon neural progenitors, which leads to oncogenesis.

Studies on the essentiality of Ku in human cells reveal that Ku interacts with diverse double-stranded RNA molecules, including antisense Alu, and enables tolerance of Alu sequence expansion in primates.

A technique called condense-seq has been developed to measure nucleosome condensability and used to show that mononucleosomes contain sufficient information to condense into large-scale compartments without requiring any external factors.

An approach that combines single-nucleus RNA sequencing and multiplexed perturbation identifies genes that enable the biosynthesis of direct precursors of the anti-cancer drug Taxol, whose current production involves a laborious extraction process from yew trees.