Volume 655 Issue 8124, 23 July 2026

As automated tools accelerate both the discovery and the exploitation of software vulnerabilities, organizations must redesign their defences and workflows to keep pace.

The ‘24-hour rule’ and other tips from sport can improve lab life.

Electrodes that measure brain waves and more cannot be seen or felt.

Records from Denmark suggest that small family gatherings can be an important transmission point.

A celestial body thought to be an ordinary space rock turns out to have a comet-like tail.

Sci-fi procedure generates immature human sperm from stem cells, nurturing them on a mouse’s kidney.

Mathematical texts from a Maya site in Guatemala identify an astronomer called Sak Tahn Waax.

A connection with Epstein–Barr virus has long been suspected, but the underlying mechanism was unclear until now.

The scent of a single chemical, made only by the queen, alters hormone production in other females.

Erythrulose, which has four carbon atoms, is the most complex sugar spotted beyond our Solar System.

The idea of prosperity without growth is gaining traction among researchers. So why are many economists sceptical?

General-purpose AI tools for science, such as Claude Science, promise to accelerate research. But which is right for you?

Scientists are getting closer to understanding the wasting and fatigue that often accompanies cancer. Treatments could be on the horizon.

Amid funding cuts and political barriers, researchers are asking whether the campaign can ever succeed, and what to do next.

Nature talks to five artists about their approaches to communicating science visually.

Anticipating from the start the various ways a research programme can succeed or fail can avoid problems later. Here’s how to do it.

Technologies are taking the search for fossil fuels to the deepest parts of the ocean. Engineers must keep ecological risks manageable.

A postdoc researcher trying to move into an industry role wants help gaining traction and making it past the first interview stage.

Nature asked readers of the Nature Briefing what they like about their job and don’t want to hand over.

Artificial-intelligence tools can be useful for brainstorming and creating graphics, but they can introduce errors. If you’re going to use them, here’s how to avoid problems.

Transplantation experiments in evolutionarily distinct animal groups reveal conserved mechanisms underlying tissue organization during development.

A nanostructured gold surface can filter light depending on the tendency of its photons to arrive at a detector in pairs.

Satellite images have been analysed by a machine-learning algorithm to produce high-resolution maps of wetland environments — a boon for conservation efforts.

High temperatures make cell membranes weak and leaky. Rice plants rapidly counteract this effect by adjusting membrane lipid content, enabling them to resist heatwaves.

The response of the nucleus of a deuterium atom to electric fields shows no evidence of asymmetry, which is consistent with conventional theories of particle physics.

Different types of aggression in stickleback fish, and a pillar of light seen at sunset, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

The protein complex that helps messenger RNA to leave the nucleus is remarkably similar to the one that facilitates the destruction of short, unwanted transcripts.

Engagement-based feeds amplify intergroup, moralized, emotional (IME) and toxic content relative to reverse-chronological feeds, and a diversified extremity algorithm reduces exposure to IME and toxic content while maintaining comparable platform enjoyment.

Radial velocity measurements provide evidence for a Jupiter-mass exosatellite orbiting the brown dwarf companion CD-35 2722 B, a promising detection of an exomoon-like object.

Carbon isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS reveal that it may have formed as long ago as 12 billion years and thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

The low-energy enhancement in the γ-ray strength function of ⁷⁰Zn is due to magnetic dipole transitions between nuclear states.

By integrating reinforcement learning with quantum error correction, a quantum computer continuously self-calibrates during computation, achieving record logical error rates and enhanced resilience to drift.

A new class of materials, quantum statistical plasmonic metacrystals, is described, which can selectively transmit different types of light based only on their quantum coherence, showing bands of allowed and forbidden photon statistics.

A rich variety of both integer and fractional high-Chern insulators are observed in a moiré system composed of Bernal bilayer graphene and rhombohedral tetralayer graphene.

Radio-frequency switches made from two-dimensional layered hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) were co-integrated on gallium nitride (GaN) microchips to build programmable millimetre-wave (mmWave) monolithic microwave integrated circuits suitable for 6G hardware.

A solution-processed indium oxide nanocrystal interconnection layer enables a 65-cm² all-perovskite tandem solar module to achieve a certified 26.2% efficiency, advancing scalable commercial photovoltaics.

A catalyst-free upcycling strategy based on in situ generation of hydroxyl radicals at microdroplet interfaces is described for efficient and scalable processing of polymers with minimal infrastructure, using only water and oxygen under mild conditions.

Scalable quasi-pure metal–organic framework membranes achieve near-intrinsic separation performance, enabling energy-efficient industrial gas separations with major cost reductions compared with distillation.

Satellite imagery and machine learning used for the mapping of six seminatural open wetland types and land-use disturbance in European countries shows that wetlands are highly fragmented and have uneven restoration needs.

Trait-based ecosystem modelling shows that impact-driven darkness and body-size-dependent extinction thresholds, rather than carbon-dioxide increase or acidification, drove most of the observed end-Cretaceous marine extinction patterns.

Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transition to multicellularity in animals.

A genome-wide association study combining data from the Estonian Biobank and the UK Biobank identifies many common and low-frequency locus–metabolic trait associations, enabling the identification of putative causal links with disease outcomes.

Integration of data representing 35,120 brain scans from diverse global studies enables construction of reference charts that define normative microstructural and macrostructural properties across the human lifespan for research and clinical diagnosis.

Basic properties of symmetric random matrices can explain the emergence of macroscopic patterns in neural networks, suggesting that initialization conditions of connected neural populations may confer computational advantages across the mouse brain.

Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that drive the acquisition and expression of rapid vocal changes during juvenile song learning.

Teosinte alleles enhance nitrogen assimilation and seed protein without lowering crop yield when expressed in modern maize, providing a powerful strategy for crop improvement to meet future population demands.

An analysis of diet-induced obesity using MouseMapper—a suite of foundation-model-based deep-learning algorithms—identifies structural alterations of the infraorbital branch of the trigeminal ganglia.

A diet–microbiome–host axis strengthens mucosal immune defences and reinforces host–microbiota mutualism.

l-2-Hydroxyglutarate is identified as a legitimate physiological signalling metabolite, and control of its levels is essential for postnatal growth and survival and correct renal development and function.

Longitudinal transcriptomic, chromatin and genomic analyses of the two types of IDH-mutant glioma reveal in detail how disease progression is influenced by interdependent genetic, epigenetic and microenvironmental factors.

In rice, the P4-ATPase complex OsALA5–OsALIS2 rapidly stabilizes membrane fluidity in response to high temperature by flipping saturated phosphatidylcholines to the cytosolic leaflet of the plasma membrane.

Biochemical, structural and cell biological analyses reveal that UAP56 (DDX39B) assembles with a TREX-2–like module that redirects non-functional polyadenylated RNAs from export to degradation.

SIRT7 safeguards X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes.