Volume 654 Issue 8117, 4 June 2026

Researchers and science publishers need to seize the opportunity offered by the drastic shifts in the way news is produced — one reason Nature has joined TikTok.

Quick identification of viruses holds the key to minimizing their spread.

A decade on from the launch of an ambitious project, it’s time to revisit the reasons for constructing a human genome from scratch.

Analysis reveals the enzyme that allows some microorganisms to anchor their outer membrane to their cell wall.

Hexagonal patterns on the surface of gold crystals are an unfavourable environment for reactions.

Death and the need for liver transplant were delayed in people with cirrhosis who received macrophage therapy.

Traces on tweezers and surgical scissors suggest liquid medication was applied to the skin of patients.

An open-source atlas generated by an AI tool called ESMFold2 vastly increases the known protein universe.

Researchers hope to build a facility with thousands of robots capable of performing experiments independently by 2040.

The late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős thought he had the last word on a geometry problem. Now an OpenAI chatbot has proved him wrong.

Public-health researcher James Baguma has studied the interactions between bats, which can carry the virus, and people in the region near the latest epidemic.

James Webb Space Telescope reveals weather patterns from how planet WASP-94 A b filters the light of its parent star.

Imaging suggests why the ability to make inferences declines after an episode of acute stress, such as a job interview.

Failure will probably delay US space agency’s efforts to beat China to the lunar surface.

An AI-led analysis of publicly available peer-review reports links requests for major revisions with papers that end up having high impact.

The technology can whip up spurious findings and pollute survey responses, but it could also make research more rigorous.

Labs are teaming up to run a host of huge projects that aim to bring rigour to cognitive science.

Claims about the upper limits to human lifespan are characterized by hype, deficient data and shoddy science, says longevity researcher Saul Newman.

As the leader of the Missouri Botanical Garden, he called global attention to the biodiversity crisis.

Excess body weight affects individuals’ health differently. Taking this variation into account is crucial for effective health care, policy and research.

With a summer break looming for many researchers, Nature’s careers team suggests science-themed page-turners.

Simulations of biological systems could transform biomedical research, but researchers are still learning how to reproduce life’s complexity without drowning in data.

Amazonian deforestation is altering atmospheric moisture transport; as a result, even low levels of global warming could trigger dieback of most of the remaining forest.

Supersonic shocks in the vicinity of Jupiter suggest that transient plasma structures could govern the acceleration of particles travelling through space.

Massive analyses of RNA transcripts from rodents, monkeys and humans reveal hallmarks of ageing that could expedite the development of anti-ageing interventions.

The arrangement of mineral nanocrystals in the tooth enamel of primates, hominins and modern humans altered as the diet of these species changed.

The biography of a pioneering scientist and suffragist, and a call for researchers to write about themselves, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Pregnancy poses many challenges, including protecting against infection and increased nutritional demands. Pregnancy-associated gut changes offer some help.

An old theory gains fresh support from advanced DNA sequencing, which can detect rare mutations in B cells from people with autoimmune thyroid conditions.

NASA’s Juno observations show relativistic electron acceleration at the bow shock of Jupiter and establish a universal scaling law linking shock size to maximum cosmic ray energy.

 Enhanced preformation of the α particle, a strongly bound system of two protons and two neutrons, in ¹⁰⁴Te causes it to be the fastest ground-state α-emitting nucleus known so far.

A Mamyshev oscillator mode-locked laser compactly integrated on a photonic-chip delivers nanojoule, femtosecond pulses.

Near-field radiative heat transfer between silicon nitride membranes is enhanced several-fold by using metamaterials, opening opportunities for thermal energy harvesting and infrared sensing applications.

A continuously graded-doped tin oxide electron transport layer improves the efficiency of n–i–p perovskite solar cells and mini-modules.

An analysis of enamel nanocrystal misorientation in primate and human teeth across three major dietary shifts in human evolution shows that misorientation increased with harder diets, suggesting that misorientation contributes to enamel’s resilience.

Embedding a small fraction of force-sensitive mechanophores as cross-links into common polymers enhances ballistic energy dissipation.

This study shows that aryl-bismuth complexes can act as either nucleophiles or electrophiles in palladium-catalysed cross-coupling reactions, enabling synthetic flexibility in biaryl formation.

A new metric shows that compound climate extremes rise faster with cumulative CO₂ emissions than models project, implying higher risks and smaller remaining carbon budgets for the 1.5 °C and 2 °C targets.

The buffer pool designed to compensate for unintended carbon losses from the largest forest climate mitigation programme in the United States is too small when considering the impact of future climate change scenarios.

The Amazon forest faces a near system-wide transition of 62−77% of the area under a combination of 1.5–1.9 °C global warming and 22−28% deforestation.

Development of the pangenome-informed genome assembly (PIGA) workflow enabled the generation of 1,116 diploid genome assemblies (55 de novo and 1,061 pangenome-informed), representing an extensive resource of medically relevant genic variations.

Single-molecule DNA sequencing identifies recurrent somatic mutations in autoimmune B cells that may allow them to escape peripheral tolerance and cause autoimmune disease.

In mice, a circuit between the spinal cord and various regions of the brain, centring on spinal-cord-projecting neurons in the rostral ventromedial medulla, has a key role in driving chronic pain.

A drawing-like task designed to study compositional generalization identifies a specific neural population in the ventral premotor cortex in primates that encodes action symbols.

Longitudinal tracking of mice reveals that stable, specialized social roles emerge spontaneously within groups during a foraging task, with dopaminergic activity in the ventral tegmental area driving sex-divergent patterns of specialization.

Integration of gene expression data from multiple tissues across four mammalian species reveals conserved transcriptomic signatures of mammalian ageing and mortality and uncovers the modular architecture of ageing and mortality hallmarks.

Drug-based and manipulation-based strategies provide evidence of pronuclear competition for finite cytoplasmic resources between separate parental pronuclei in zygotes, suggesting a cell biological mechanism for the cytoplasm-mediated remote parental interaction that regulates epigenetic marks.

Glycerol is an allosteric activator of tissue-nonspecific alkaline phosphatase (TNAP), activating the futile creatine cycle.

From pregnancy until lactation, eosinophils accumulate in the small intestine where they regulate goblet cell fate and enhance innate defences against enteric pathogens.

An in vitro toolkit for studying VSG diversification defines key molecular requirements underlying the formation of mosaic VSGs, providing an experimental framework for the exploration of antigen diversification in Trypanosoma brucei and in other pathogenic microorganisms.

Metastasis-associated oncofetal cell states emerge at the earliest stages of colorectal cancer and spatial profiling shows stereotypic patterning of fibroblast subtypes resembling normal tissue architecture, resulting in distinct regional microenvironments that dictate the timing and positioning of oncofetal plasticity.

Structural studies demonstrate that myosin generates forces that cause structural changes in actin, modulating cooperative binding by α-catenin and thus signal transduction and intercellular communication via adhesion complexes.

The E3 ligase SCF^FBXO42 degrades holoenzyme-free PP2Ac in complex with the coiled-coil protein CCDC6 to maintain cancer cell fitness

PerturbFate is a high-throughput, cost-effective, single-cell platform that systematically profiles CRISPR interference perturbations to reveal common regulatory nodes and convergent phenotypic states across diverse genetic alterations linked to vemurafenib resistance in melanoma cells.

QuadPE—a quadruple paired prime editing guide RNA strategy—enables efficient and programmable insertion of large DNA fragments.