Volume 641 Issue 8063, 15 May 2025

Science stands to benefit from a project in which experienced academics and early-career researchers co-review studies.

Students and institutions should treat PhD degrees as they would a job.

Public-health measures to curb high blood-sugar levels, smoking and obesity could help to rein in the trend.

The Haenyeo divers of the Korean island of Jeju have a genetic variant linked to pain tolerance, as do other people living on Jeju.

Just five nations account for more than three-quarters of the emissions of this potent greenhouse gas that stem from rice cultivation.

At sufficiently high concentrations, some of the compounds called per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances self-organize into two-layered membranes.

Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline, critics say.

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency is investing £57 million to study climate-manipulating technologies, but says it is taking a cautious approach.

The collaborative system generated more than 100 hypotheses relating to the origins of life in the Universe.

Treatment combines existing drug with antibodies from hyper-immune reptile collector, raising both hopes and ethical concerns.

Petals’ pointy edges rely on a type of geometric feedback never before seen in nature.

Young people will be exposed to a number of heatwaves that no one would have experienced in pre-industrial times.

Former Harvard scientist convicted of making false statements says he wants to do research that benefits humanity — and cannot do that in the United States.

Poll of 5,000 researchers finds contrasting views on when it’s acceptable to involve AI and what needs to be disclosed.

Drug makers are scrambling to navigate an ‘existential threat’ to a once-celebrated technology.

An adventurous survey of inhospitable habitats unearths extraordinary organisms that pose challenging research questions.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Theoretical physicists are in thrall to a misguided mindset that allows viable ideas to be advanced only by overturning what already exists.

Researchers looking to study the social ramifications of mass traumas must not overlook the histories of affected communities in the search for healing.

Curtailment of freedoms and disregard for the rule of law in the United States is destroying the ability of science to serve the nation’s, and the world’s, interests. Researchers can take action.

The winners of Nature’s 2025 photo competition braved crashing waves and misty mountains to capture their science.

With organoids, assembloids and a growing toolkit of bioengineering tricks, scientists are stitching together models of the developing human brain — and pushing the limits of realism and control.

Cesária Huó is collecting bat vocalizations to understand how the sounds they make evolve.

An analysis of warm periods in Earth’s history helps to clarify an apparent anomaly in projections of the future behaviour of the South Asian summer monsoon.

The discovery that sunflower seeds can develop without fertilization reveals a pathway to accelerate improvement of this crop — and potentially others.

A prediction of the gravitational waves produced by interacting black holes achieves high precision and demonstrates the link between general relativity and geometry.

A method for examining RNAs in blood samples offers a clinical tool to detect and monitor cancer and to assess immune responses to vaccination.

Evidence for a previously overlooked route for microplastics to enter crops and reach plant tissues has implications for ecology and human health.

The steepest drops in number are seen in areas that host the largest populations — a trend observed for more than 80% of bird species across the continent.

A new, highest-precision analytical result for solving the gravitational two-body problem of black hole or neutron star scattering reveals the emergence of Calabi–Yau manifolds in the solution to the radiated energy in these encounters.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected water ice in the cold debris disk (analogous to the Kuiper belt) around the star HD 181327.

Quantum error correction of a logical qutrit and ququart were experimentally realized beyond the break-even point with the Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill bosonic code.

Characterizing the superconducting gap structure in the high-temperature superconductor H₃S by means of tunnelling spectroscopy reveals that it, as well as D₃S, has a fully gapped structure, confirming the phonon-mediated mechanism of superconducting pairing.

The superconductivity in Bernal bilayer graphene that emerges from the spin–orbit coupling induced by proximal tungsten diselenide can be tuned by modulating the twist angle between the two materials.

Introducing spin–orbit coupling by substrate proximity effect leads to an enhancement of superconducting phases in rhombohedral trilayer graphene.

A miniaturized and low-power-consumption system is designed to allow the accurate sensing and wireless transmission of internal temperature and strain signals inside lithium-ion batteries with negligible influence on their performance, improving their safety.

A prototypical example of a ‘strategic atom replacement’ approach enables synthesis of N-alkyl pyrazoles from isothiazoles by swapping the sulfur atom with a nitrogen atom and its associated alkyl fragment to deliver the alkylated pyrazole.

Proxy records and climate simulations show that in past warm intervals, the South Asian summer monsoon was characterized by an increase in monsoon rainfall, and weakening and strengthening of different parts of the monsoon circulation, consistent with future projections.

Model simulations show that the observed trends in the seasonal amplitude of methane can be attributed to changes in emissions and the atmospheric sink from reaction with the hydroxyl radical.

Absorption and accumulation of atmospheric microplastics by plant leaves occurs widely in the environment.

An acanthocephalan body fossil, Juracanthocephalus daohugouensis, is described from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou biota of China, showing previously unrecognized diversity in ancient Acanthocephala and the origins of this group of living organisms.

Isolating and studying haematopoietic stem cells in young and aged mice demonstrates evolutionary processes related to blood production and provides a framework for interpreting future work using laboratory mice to study stem cell ageing.

Dopamine release in the basal ganglia of the zebra finch is driven by neurons associated with reinforcement learning and by cholinergic signalling, and tracks performance quality during long-term learning of its song.

Studies in zebra finches show that dopamine has a key role as a reinforcement signal in the trial-and-error process of learning that underlies complex natural behaviours.

A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to represent patterns of social interaction.

The immune-checkpoint molecule TIM-3 regulates microglial homeostasis, and its microglial-specific deletion reduced cognitive impairment in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.

Spontaneous parthenogenesis in sunflower has been used to develop a scalable doubled haploid breeding system.

A population of neutrophils in the skin produces extracellular matrix, providing a defence strategy by reinforcing the barrier properties of the skin and helping to block the entry of pathogens.

The ability to physically partition the human brain at a spatial resolution comparable to neuroimaging methods enabled the development of a brain-wide atlas of mitochondrial content, specialization and enzymatic oxidation and phosphorylation activities.

A method, RARE-seq, for sensitive detection of cell-free RNAs in blood is demonstrated to have diverse clinical applications including diagnosing and characterizing human cancers, and tracking response to RNA therapeutics.

EGF-induced recruitment of UPF1 adjacent to HNRNPC induces splicing surveillance of cell proliferation mRNAs.

Insights into how the linker histone H1 promotes chromatin alterations and allows repair of DNA damage are described.

Physiological temperatures augment activation of glutamate receptors, which enables the structural basis of neuronal excitation to be elucidated.

ATP/ADP translocators in obligate intracellular parasites and plastids facilitate energy parasitism and endosymbiosis by mediating ATP import and ADP export, with their cryo-EM structures and mechanisms revealed, providing insights for drug development against intracellular pathogens.