Volume 651 Issue 8105, 12 March 2026

Researchers working on the most advanced AI models want rules to be drawn up to minimize the harm the technologies could cause. Their warnings need to be heard.

A systemic failure of oversight allowed the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to curry favour with academia. Stronger governance is urgently needed.

Long-lasting treatment suppresses HIV in people with mental illness and other conditions that make it challenging to adhere to standard treatments.

Rising temperatures shorten battery life, but devices are improving fast enough to resist the ravages of climate change.

Scientists identify bacteria that digest allergy-triggering compounds in peanuts, which can be life-threatening to those with allergies.

All four Sun-like stars would fit inside the area of Jupiter’s orbit.

The Japanese media sensation has inspired generations of researchers in fields as diverse as evolution, biodiversity and research integrity.

Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds.

In a French criminal trial, conventional DNA analysis couldn’t distinguish between twin brothers, but emerging scientific methods could help in such cases.

Study of 600,000 US military veterans shows that those who took anti-obesity medications were less likely to develop some complications of substance-use disorders.

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

After decades of debate, researchers say that they have found the clearest evidence yet for this rare form of carbon.

The planet’s crust could already have been churning 3.3 billion years ago.

The Evo2 genomic language model can generate short genome sequences, but scientists say further advances are needed to write genomes that will work inside living cells.

An eclectic book asks how humans have shaped these ‘queer’ landscapes and how they can be restored.

Including energy dynamics in research could improve our understanding of diseases and of the healing processes that sustain health.

Members must go beyond reinstating US government research spending and re-establish decentralized governance at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.

The US National Institutes of Health has troves of information on grant applications. Analysing it can assist with decision-making on issues such as equity.

A new principal investigator wants to help PhD students to develop resilience and creativity in the laboratory without hovering or doing the work for them.

A blend of chemistry and molecular-biology techniques are enabling archaeologists to mine ancient sediments for clues about the people who once lived there.

Climate change is expected to affect mosquito and parasite survival, reshaping malaria risk. But extreme weather could be a more immediate danger to disease control.

Oscillations in the brightness of a ‘superluminous’ supernova reveal it to be powered by a magnetized neutron star that distorts the orbit of surrounding gas.

Impaired lymphatic function causes cholesterol to accumulate in tissues, driving swelling known as lymphoedema. Lipid clearance could be an effective therapeutic strategy.

The spines of sea urchins can generate a voltage when water moves around them — a phenomenon that could be used to design underwater flow sensors.

The use of artificial intelligence in the clinic to image slides of cells enables the rapid assessment of cellular characteristics that might help with diagnostic decisions.

A suggestion that mutant insects could detect narcotics or explosive substances, and how ash seeds feature a screw propeller, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

Chip-based beam scanners use tiny electrically controlled cantilevers instead of moving mirrors to control the direction of light projected into free space.

Observations of a nearby type I superluminous supernova showing oscillating light-curve bumps provide evidence of a centrally located magnetar in the wake of the explosion, surrounded by an infalling accretion disk undergoing Lense–Thirring precession.

Entangled quantum memories are used in a quantum network of silicon–vacancy centres in diamond nanocavities to experimentally perform non-local phase measurements.

Aperiodic composite crystals were discovered that emulate 2D moiré materials, demonstrating a potentially scalable approach for producing moiré materials for next-generation electronics and a generalizable approach for realizing theoretical predictions of higher-dimensional quantum phenomena.

An Mn₃Sn homo-junction enables efficient field-free full switching of chiral antiferromagnets with greatly reduced power consumption, advancing their potential for energy-efficient magnetic memory devices with advantages of ultradense integration and ultrafast speed.

An integrated photonics scheme is presented for the manufacture of communication systems supporting the use of fibre and wireless infrastructures simultaneously, addressing the long-standing bandwidth mismatch between the two domains and demonstrating ultrahigh data rates.

A monolithically integrated photonic ski-jump enables scalable, diffraction-limited 2D beam scanning from photonic chips, achieving ultrahigh spot rates, compact footprints and applications spanning displays, sensing and quantum photonics.

A 4D imaging architecture using a large-scale, coherent LiDAR focal plane array comprising more than 0.6 million photonic components and associated electronics integrated on-chip can obtain coherent images at high frame rates over useful distances.

Sea urchin spines show exceptional mechanoelectrical sensing from gradient structures and can be replicated in 3D-printed mimics for underwater sensing.

A high-temperature immiscible blend of two dipolar polymers that self-assemble into three-dimensional all-polymer nanocomposites allows markedly enhanced dielectric and energy storage performances over a broad temperature range.

A method using hydrofluorocarbon electrolytes for synthesizing alkanes with monofluorinated structures is described, yielding a pathway for manufacturing lithium-metal batteries able to achieve high energy density as well as operate at low temperature.

Projected impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa by 2050 highlight the urgent need for climate-resilient malaria control strategies and robust emergency response systems to safeguard progress towards malaria eradication.

New results indicate that rhabdodontids and the previously described Ajkaceratops are actually distinctive European ceratopsians, a group better known from Asia and North America.

Genome-wide association studies incorporating data for populations of African ancestry provide an expanded view of the genetic basis of schizophrenia, which has previously been studied mainly in European and East Asian cohorts.

Calcium imaging of mouse hippocampal neurons while mice learn a reward-based task over several weeks provides insight into the evolution of the hippocampal reward representation during extended periods of experience.

Pyramidal neuron-driven mechanisms actively promote the survival and terminal differentiation of their associated interneuron subtypes.

Human genetic loci that associate with composition of the oral microbiome are identified using saliva-derived DNA, where the same host genetics also shapes oral health and genetic variation in oral bacteria.

Specific pain-sensing nociceptors and chemosensory tuft cells form a circuit to promote type 2 immune responses in the intestine.

Integrating computational analyses of T cell exhaustion and mitochondrial fitness atlases with in vivo CRISPR screens has identified KLHL6 as a dual-negative regulator of both exhaustion differentiation and mitochondrial dysfunction, highlighting its potential as a target to enhance anti-tumour immunity.

Mouse models show that lymphoedema caused by impaired lymphatic drainage is ameliorated by removal of cholesterol deposits, which promotes the regeneration of lymphatic vessels.

This study presents a clinical-grade autonomous pipeline combining high-resolution whole-slide tomography, edge computing and artificial intelligence, achieving high accuracy in cervical cytology and enabling scalable and objective diagnostics.

An allosteric site on the E3 ligase adapter cereblon can be targeted to modulate the efficacy of cereblon in targeted protein degradation applications.

Sidewinder enables high-fidelity DNA assembly by separating the information that guides assembly from the final assembled sequence.

The cytoplasm can be partitioned into distinct compartments by microtubule structures, which can be stabilized by distinct mechanisms in different species.

Systematic characterization of human lipid transfer proteins in complex with their lipid partners reveals the relevance of these interactions for lipid metabolism, identifies mechanisms that contribute to lipid binding selectivity and provides a rich resource for the study of these proteins.

PCNA–PAF15 has a key role in determining replisome dynamics during genome replication and protecting against genome instability.

N¹-Methylpseudouridine enhances the translation of synthetic mRNAs, independently of innate immunity.