Volume 651 Issue 8107, 26 March 2026

As the country looks to commercial companies to drive innovation, it has a golden opportunity to support open science and increase its output in key areas.

With government funding in decline, researchers should prioritize data collation and training the next generation of scientists.

As prices surge and governments scramble to respond, the crisis underscores an urgent need to rethink energy security.

Microbial diversity loss seen after a course of some commonly prescribed antibiotics can persist for years.

A compact device can produce a magnetic field that is more than 800,000 times stronger than Earth’s.

Compounds that are used to make plastics and personal-care products were found in all types of marine environment, a meta-analysis shows.

Muscle mass increased or remained stable relative to body weight in middle-aged mice and humans on GLP-1 drugs.

The new five-year plan calls for more original scientific research to facilitate the country’s bid for self-reliance.

Gene-editing technique promises a potentially safer way to create CAR T cells with a simple injection.

The soaring cost and limited supply of computer memory is slowing some projects — and spurring creative approaches.

Survey examines how often academics attempt jokes during conference talks — and how these attempts at comedy land.

Damage to the blood–brain barrier is linked to immune changes and cognitive decline.

US biomedical funding behemoth says the approach will boost innovation, but some researchers worry that under-studied areas of science will suffer.

Chip allows people with paralysis to control a soft robotic hand.

The 1990s game has been run on bacteria and a satellite and played by neurons in a dish.

Researchers are pulling clues from genetic material in ice age soils and rewriting chapters of human history.

People are buying helmets, face masks, vests and beds that emit long-wavelength light. Beneath the hype, there is some interesting biology.

Scientific discoveries are increasingly eroding the human–animal divide and challenging long-standing assumptions about human exceptionalism.

Artificial-intelligence models will supposedly take over the world, but AI innovator Luc Julia tells Nature that they’re little more than glorified pocket calculators.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Current evidence points to modest effects of artificial-intelligence tools on jobs, highlighting how bad data, not sweeping automation, is driving much of today’s alarm.

Including human and environmental capital paints a different picture of national economies than does GDP alone.

In the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore, universities are operating as developers and landlords. Where does science fit in?

Indefinite data retention is neither financially nor practically possible, but there are ways to give your data maximal long-term value.

Close relatives of animals can become multicellular if distinct individuals join together or if dividing cells remain attached. A species has been found to use both mechanisms.

Moderate global warming creates a risk of climate impacts that are more severe than the most-likely impacts of high global warming.

Two studies report the oldest dog genomes ever to be sequenced, representing leaps in scientists’ understanding of the animal’s origins.

Carbon dioxide has been turned into minerals in Earth’s subsurface using recirculating water flow — a viable way to sequester this greenhouse gas in water-scarce areas.

In a dividing cell, chromosome pairs are pulled apart thanks to attachment sites called centromeres. Yeast genomes reveal key steps in how centromeres have evolved.

A 1981 publication showed how cooperators can prevail over defectors, laying the foundation for how the evolution of cooperation between unrelated individuals is studied.

Intelligent and miniaturized drug delivery devices leveraging advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, electronics and materials science enable treatments with increased precision and responsiveness, with applications in cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other diseases.

Starburst galaxies are seen to host galaxy-scale winds, which are super-fast and could be powered entirely by the thermal pressure of gas heated by supernovae.

An artificial intelligence system can produce research papers with minimal human involvement, even passing the first round of peer review for the workshop of a main machine learning conference.

Ultrafast electron imaging shows full phase-space dynamics of optical singularities, which can reach superluminal velocities before annihilation and break the particle-like analogy of topological defects.

An integrated photonic deep neural network was trained end-to-end with on-chip gradient-descent backpropagation, and all linear and nonlinear computations were performed on a single photonic chip, resulting in a reliable performance despite on-chip errors and variations.

A memristor integrated into perovskite photovoltaics aims to mitigate the issues seen with reverse-bias degradation under partial shading.

Magnetic resonance control of spin-correlated radical pairs alters red fluorescent protein emission in transgenic Caenorhabditis elegans, demonstrating in vivo magnetic field modulation of biomolecular processes.

Extreme global climate outcomes may occur even under moderate 2 °C warming and may turn out to be more extreme than model-averaged projections at 3 °C or 4 °C warming.

An industrial-scale pilot project using co-injection of recirculated water for subsurface CO₂ mineralization shows promise as a pathway for carbon sequestration in regions with limited access to water resources.

A new framework links specific emissions to monetized, location-specific climate damages, showing that future harms from past CO₂ emissions far exceed historical damages and that delayed carbon removal cannot fully offset these losses.

Using nitrogen isotopes from ancient and modern fish otoliths and corals, the study shows Caribbean reef food webs are now 60–70% shorter and functionally less diverse, indicating human-driven trophic simplification and increased risk of collapse.

The choanoflagellate Choanoeca flexa forms motile and contractile cell monolayers purely clonally, purely aggregatively or through a combination of both processes depending on environmental conditions.

Genome-wide analysis shows European dogs existed by 14,200 years ago, were already genetically distinct, received less Neolithic Southwest Asian admixture than humans did and contributed substantially to later European dogs.

Analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from archaeological canid remains found across Europe and Anatolia shows that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed across the region by 15,000 years ago.

Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with retrotransposon-rich centromeres and that long-terminal-repeat retrotransposons are the genetic substrate.

Thousands of centromeres were identified and tracked across two major fungal clades, showing that new centromeres spread progressively and that the kinetochore acts as a filter to determine which new centromere variants are tolerated.

In the nucleus accumbens, acetylcholine boosts dopamine release to promote effortful behaviour.

The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

Systemic flavivirus dissemination in mosquitoes following initial infection requires protein–protein interactions within extracellular vesicles, which enable infectious particles to be transported through haemolymph and confer species specificity.

An antiphage defence system has an activation mechanism that relies on the sensing of phage-encoded proteins that enforce geometry crucial to activation and are not typically present in non-infected cells.

Bacteria use diverse defence systems against phages, including a 164-residue prophage-encoded protein, Rip1, which senses conserved phage assembly rings to form membrane pores that block virion maturation and trigger premature host cell death.

A vagal reflex to blood volume changes in the heart involves PIEZO2 and helps to stabilize blood pressure in an upright posture and after blood loss.

A comprehensive atlas platform integrating transcriptional and epigenetic data enables more precise engineering of T cell states, accelerating the rational design of more effective cellular immunotherapies.

In a phase 1 trial, personalized mRNA vaccines tailored to individual tumour mutations in triple-negative breast cancer induced robust, long-lasting T cell responses and improved prognosis.

The distinct architecture of the Escherichia coli membrane transporter LetA mediates lipid trafficking across the bacterial envelope in partnership with the tunnel-like complex LetB.

PARM is a deep-learning model trained on data from massively parallel reporter assays to help predict promoter activity in different human cell types, design synthetic promoters and identify key features of regulatory promoter grammar.