Volume 654 Issue 8118, 11 June 2026

As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down.

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

Traces from some of the earliest animals reveal when they began to sense light.

Antineutrinos made alongside the production of weapons-grade plutonium could be spotted with existing technology.

Interventions that included home visits and cash transfers led to more strapping infants in an Indian state.

Large-scale measurements of atmospheric hydrofluoroolefins show that their levels are rising, but the implications are unclear.

Scientists have long worried about the reliability of commercial antibodies, and the latest findings have sparked fresh concerns.

A survey finds that academic supervisors can have a huge impact on their students’ mental health.

Treatments aim to bulk up failing hearts to restore their vigour — but can the field move on from past controversy?

Online prediction markets are taking bets on everything from climate change to quantum computing. But researchers question their accuracy.

The tech giant says it will make ‘topological’ quantum computers that can be scaled up faster than competing technologies.

An experiment with 2,520 participants backs Richard Feynman’s answer to every diner’s dilemma: do I want to try something new?

Detonation of newly discovered ‘ruptoblasts’, found in flatworms, releases compounds that kill nearby cells in minutes.

Peptide injections are the hottest trend in wellness. Researchers say enthusiasm for these unregulated drugs has got ahead of the science.

Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing.

A new book applies principles of environmental tipping points to past societal transformations — and attempts to draw lessons about what the future holds today.

A dazzling book explains our bodies’ dependence on sunlight for everything from sleep to skin and bone health.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

As a director of the Wellcome Trust and charity founder, the labs she built sequenced the human genome and more.

Artificial intelligence is not replacing human intuition in these fields, but reimagining how questions are asked, explored and understood.

From sky to sea, and then back to the lab, here are the top images from Nature’s 2026 photo competition.

A suite of artificial-intelligence tools is helping to speed up the process of discovering new antibiotics.

In mice, motherhood induces transcriptional changes in the brain that endure beyond short-term hormonal shifts. Postpartum stress disrupts these patterns.

One in six Internet-using adolescents in parts of Africa and Asia faced technology-facilitated sexual abuse in 2020–21. As digital access expands globally, better protection is crucial.

The first measurements from the JUNO experiment demonstrate unprecedented precision and promise exciting results.

A fertilized egg’s first few divisions rely on proteins stored in fibrous structures. The ordered nature of these structures and clues about their function are revealed.

Ionization experiment shows that quantum light can behave like a conventional laser that has a higher intensity.

Archaeological findings from Italy, and machines with a life of their own, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

A systematic review and analysis shows how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products.

The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

Experimental demonstration of quantum error-correcting codes combined with error detection and post-selection applied to a trapped-ion quantum processor shows improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines.

Bright squeezed vacuum light boosts nonlinear atomic tunnelling ionization more than 20-fold compared with coherent light, enabling quantum control of strong-field processes without increasing classical intensity.

 A broadband, sub-wavelength time-domain microscope is described, enabling the observation that terahertz light trapped within a cavity can mediate attractive interactions in a tunable van der Waals material.

Chiral perovskite superlattices exhibit room-temperature circularly polarized superfluorescence, with emission intensity and polarization controllable by weak magnetic fields.

Efficient blue perovskite light-emitting diodes with an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% are achieved through in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement.

An analysis of post-sorting plastic packaging shows that target polymer purity is similar across source-separation and post-sorting pathways, but post-sorted plastics contain more contaminants that need to be removed before recyclate production.

Temporary carbon dioxide removal can offset short-lived non-CO₂ climate forcers, providing a viable physical approach for crediting temporary carbon dioxide removal activities in industries in which non-CO₂ emissions dominate and direct emission reductions are difficult.

Decade-long warming increased soil antibiotic-resistance genes by about 24%, enriching resistant microbes and gene transfer, driven by selection for thermal tolerance and linked traits, with implications for public health.

Enabling parental mediation of online activities and children’s knowledge of where to seek help after sexual harassment or assault is associated with higher rates of disclosure of technology-facilitated CSEA.

Analysis of 15,836 ancient West Eurasian genomes reveals hundreds of instances of directional selection, showing that sustained changes in allele frequency were widespread, rather than being rare over this period as previously assumed.

Saturation genome editing of RNU4-2 identifies the functional and clinical impact of variants across the entire gene and delineates variants that cause a new recessive neurodevelopmental disorder distinct from ReNU syndrome.

Mapping DNA variants that modulate mortality using a starting population of 6,438 young mice defined 29 distinct loci that influence lifespan and mortality with divergent age- and sex-specific effects, as well as 30 loci that specifically couple body mass with longevity.

Mice with higher levels of parenting show more prosocial allogrooming towards stressed adults, and both behaviours share neural substrates in the medial preoptic area, suggesting that parenting circuitry may form an evolutionary foundation for adult-directed prosocial helping behaviour.

Brain-wide transcriptomic profiling in mice reveals that reproductive experience remodels the maternal brain by altering dopamine dynamics in the dorsal hippocampal formation, causing dopamine-dependent histone post-translational modifications, and thereby changes in gene expression and behaviour.

A study in Drosophilareveals a mechanism of non-homeostatic hunger and its critical relevance for memory consolidation.

mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle vaccines do not require type 1 conventional dendritic (cDC1) cells or the WDFY4-dependent cross-presentation pathway for CD8⁺ T cell priming but, instead, engage both cDC1 and cDC2 cells redundantly.

Macrophages can sample antigens from living cells through a trogocytosis-like mechanism that routes ingested material away from degradation, a finding that delineates a previously unknown pathway for antigen presentation to CD8 T cells.

CRISPR screening shows that claudin-4 is a receptor for the pro-carcinogenic B. fragilis toxin on colonic epithelial cells, and that this interaction promotes cleavage of E-cadherin, leading to epithelial barrier disruption and inflammation.

An analytical pipeline called Iteratively Defined Lengths of Inaccessibility (IDLI) maps the genome-wide occupancy of a range of nucleosome types and shows that most nucleosomes exhibit programmed ‘distortion’, in which the DNA exists mainly in a partially accessible state.

Using high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy of the mouse oocyte, the cytoplasmic lattice—which is required for oocyte maturation and where oocytes store proteins for early development—is resolved.

Structural studies using cryo-electron microscopy reveal the protein constituents and architecture of the mouse oocyte cytoplasmic lattice, and provide a molecular basis for understanding its functions in embryogenesis.

Structural studies of native mouse oocyte cytoplasmic lattices using cryo-electron microscopy reveal that they consist of PADI6 and subcortical maternal complex proteins plus cytoskeletal proteins, epigenetic regulators and ubiquitination factors.

Insights into the structural basis of fungal β-1,3-d-glucan synthase inhibition by caspofungin lay the groundwork for the development of next-generation echinocandins with increased potency, broader antifungal spectrum, and reduced propensity for resistance.