Volume 655 Issue 8125, 30 July 2026

Mathematicians must urgently recognize AI’s impacts on their field — and act swiftly to mitigate threats.

Quantum computing exists because governments funded risky bets. Capitalism can carry it the rest of the way — if quantum scientists are supported.

Method used to discover an exoplanet called β Pictoris d might reveal other very dim exoplanets.

A construction design inspired by traditional Japanese pagodas could help to keep modern towers safe.

Switching off one copy of a gene also enabled one of the children to walk independently for the first time.

Tree diversity is lower in regenerated forests than in old forests — even after 120 years of regrowth.

The United Kingdom is gaining influence through its growing AI-safety ecosystem.

A subset of cardiac neurons keep the heart from malfunctioning in stressed mice.

Advances in materials allow buildings to be cooled as temperatures rise.

Republicans and Democrats worry about research theft and exploitation — but don’t agree on how to solve the problem.

Transmissible tumours have been found in only a few types of animal, but there might be many more out there.

Astronomers are deeply worried that a planned array of 50,000 mirror-bearing satellites in orbit will severely compromise telescopes.

Ultra-weak ‘biophotons’ might be used to diagnose disease, or could even represent a new signalling mechanism in cells.

Newly discovered figurines point to skills that might have helped shape early humans’ expansion across Europe.

A celebration of Ernst Haeckel’s sketches of life forms, from microscopic to majestic.

Understanding natural selection can improve medical treatments, social policies and crop yields.

A staging system based on how big a role AI has in patient care can help to identify who is responsible in cases in which care fails.

People who give tissue samples for biomedical research might have no idea that their cells are being used for biocomputers.

Nature spoke to three students from China’s first cohort of PhD candidates who are allowed to graduate with products instead of papers.

Rebuilding the reciprocal care-oriented relationships between Amazonian Indigenous peoples and nature could address the predicted effects of climate change on biodiversity.

Some nucleotides have been shown to control metabolism by ‘gluing’ proteins together. Could other small molecules made naturally by cells have similar capabilities?

The development of two medical AI assistants highlights an unnerving challenge: as the technology races ahead, what is the best way to evaluate what works?

Spatially resolved transcriptomic technologies continue to enhance understanding of development and disease through a feedback loop involving academia and industry.

Two demonstrations of silicon-based quantum processors tackle the engineering challenges of building scalable quantum computers.

The saturation of geomagnetic activity with solar wind strength can be explained by a regression to the mean effect, suggesting that the impact of extreme geomagnetic storms can be twice as large as previously thought

Single-atom measurements show non-Gaussian order-parameter fluctuations and critical scaling across a continuous phase transition, highlighting the importance of full statistical distributions in understanding universality.

A silicon quantum processing unit executes high-fidelity multiqubit circuits, with all time-varying control signals generated by a digitally programmed cryogenic complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor controller and delivered to the low-noise, exchange-only qubit device through a high-density superconducting ribbon cable.

A silicon spin-qubit device comprising a shuttling bus for transporting qubits is used to achieve parity checks up to weight four, highlighting the feasibility and benefits of incorporating shuttling into semiconductor quantum processors.

Elastic instabilities in mechanical metamaterials can be harnessed to programme fracture behaviour, transforming instability from a failure mechanism into a design principle that increases fracture energy by up to tenfold.

A molten salt, high-pressure synthesis method enables solution-based production of diverse refractory metal nitride nanocrystals, expanding access to technologically important nitride materials for advanced applications.

Polydopamine-pillared composite graphene oxide membranes with tunable and stable interlayer spacing, featuring controllable interlayer spacing, are capable of sieving hydrated rubidium and potassium ions and delivering continuous freshwater production at high levels.

A catalytic stereoretentive decarbonylation step is used to form a chiral alkylnickel intermediate from easily available chiral amino acid and α-hydroxy-acid derivatives, providing a straightforward approach to stereocontrolled C(sp³)–C(sp³) bond formation.

A platform for synthesis of C-aryl glycosides using glycosyl sulfonyl hydrazides as redox-neutral radical precursors for cross-coupling produces versatile and readily diversifiable building blocks, expanding practical access to carbohydrate-derived therapeutics and chemical tools.

Experiments carried out at atmospheric conditions show that methanesulfonic acid is an important driver of particle formation and growth in cold marine environments, with simulations indicating enhanced cloud condensation nuclei concentrations, especially in polar regions.

The biocultural heritage of the Amazon, its plant species, plant services and cultures are at risk from climate change.

Uniform sharing of public goods can boost cooperation in social networks, but often concentrates benefits among well-connected individuals, creating inequality despite greater collective success.

The Small Auxin Up RNA (SAUR) protein ZmSAUR72 in maize (Zea mays) promotes silk growth via regulation of H⁺-ATPase activity, and is a key determinant of the anthesis-silking interval and thus resilience to drought.

Combined single-cell transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility sequencing analysis of mouse primary visual cortex across postnatal development reveals that the glucocorticoid receptor drives astrocyte maturation to limit neuronal plasticity.

The hippocampus exhibits a CA3-to-CA1 coding transformation that combines fast learning with an efficient, compressed neural code.

Researchers mapped how transcription factors define neuron lineages in fruit fly brains, revealing hierarchical genetic programs that shape and specialize circuits controlling motivated behaviours such as mating.

In a mouse model of Huntington’s disease, targeted modulation of neuronal activity restores network function and improves motor deficits.

A massively parallel assay systematically charts the sequence-function landscape of the STING signalling protein, and the findings define molecular principles that tune STING activity and show its functional potential across immune contexts.

A large language model artificial intelligence agent operating in a sandboxed electronic health record system can autonomously take patient histories, order tests, interpret findings, diagnose conditions and propose treatments, outperforming experienced clinicians while adhering to safety standards and clinical guidelines.

Advances to the artificial intelligence system AMIE enable it to manage disease across multiple visits while reasoning over a corpus of clinical guidelines and patient history, outperforming primary care physicians on management reasoning tasks.

Purines can act as endogenous molecular glues in human cells by anchoring a rate-limiting enzyme in purine biosynthesis to its inhibitor, and modifying this mechanism could provide a way to improve the properties of thiopurine chemotherapeutic drugs.

Sleep and exercise can slow clonal haematopoiesis and limit mutant cell-driven atherosclerosis.

Plants sense water deficiency through SAM8 protein condensation, which responds to reduced hydration and triggers stress adaptation by altering RNA export and gene translation.

Cryo-electron microscopy and biochemical reconstitution experiments in yeast provide insight into the assembly of the CMGE complex, a helicase that establishes bidirectional DNA replication in eukaryotic cells, and elucidate the role of the firing factor Sld2.

Structures of the AGO maturation complex reveal how chaperones and an RNA duplex drive assembly of the RNA-induced silencing complex.