Volume 653 Issue 8116, 28 May 2026

The production of the highest-quality literature reviews requires the judgement and expertise of people.

Global risks are too great for markets alone to curb. Political considerations must come before economic ones.

Genetic sleuthing uncovers a rare case of cancer caused by a virus administered as part of a child’s treatment for a genetic disorder.

The black hole at the Milky Way’s centre catapulted a Sun-like star to ‘hypervelocity’ speed.

A receptacle on the ‘Plain of Jars’ was used as a repository for human bones for generations.

Satellite data on more than 20,000 rivers reveals small but widespread decreases in dissolved oxygen.

Clinical trials for treatments against the Bundibugyo virus are ‘in a strong position’ to be launched quickly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.

The preprint server is the latest to impose stiff penalties on authors who contribute to AI ‘slop’ — but not everyone is convinced it’s the right approach.

A survey of more than 300 mouse strains has found widespread discrepancies between how mutant mice are reported and their actual genetic make-up.

Chinese start-up firms are supercharging their efforts to develop algorithms for brain–computer interfaces that help people to walk and talk.

Eight of the top ten officials at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have now been pushed out since President Donald Trump took office.

Colossal Biosciences says its artificial egg has de-extinction and conservation potential.

An El Niño is coming, models say, but Nature spoke to researchers about when and how we’ll know its intensity.

What happens when AI companies produce models that they say the public can’t have — and how should users and governments react?

Innocent people are frequently convicted of crimes on the basis of a witness’s false memories. Emerging science poses a surprising solution.

Neuroscience needs to stop treating the brain as if it is a computer.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Countries that want successful innovation systems must invest in science education and science teachers.

Billie Goolsby’s experience with hearing loss helped her to develop a robotic tadpole for deciphering the secret lives of amphibians.

The nascent field of wildlife endocrinology is upending scientists’ understanding of pregnancies and stress

A machine-learning tool that allocates scarce medicines to meet demand and reduce waste is providing millions with better health care as it rolls out nationwide.

Depletion of sex hormones that enable male development induces neuroinflammation that disrupts hormonal signalling and immune responses against brain tumours.

A simple machine-learning algorithm, inspired by honeybees’ visual memory and sense of direction, enables a flying robot to pinpoint its home location.

Real-world data reveal that cooperation continually falls and rebounds. Motivation to cooperate must therefore be actively renewed rather than assumed to sustain itself.

Analysis of a 23-year record of Texan storms reveals how urban landscapes affect storm rainfall — painting a more complex picture than had been realized.

A direct, dynamical black-hole mass measurement in a strongly lensed little red dot at high redshift indicates that it is a massive black-hole seed caught in its earliest accretion phase.

A measurement of the hyperfine splitting energy of the ground state of antihydrogen at 4 ppm precision reaches a point at which this result is sensitive to the internal structure of the antiproton.

Dynamical freezing, a mechanism by which a driven quantum system may not thermalize to a featureless ‘infinite-temperature’ state at long times, is experimentally observed in an ensemble of interacting nitrogen-vacancy spins in diamond.

An experimental realization of device-independent randomness amplification is demonstrated using superconducting qubits, in which a source of weak, correlated randomness is converted into virtually perfect random bits, certified by a Bell test.

A highly efficient navigation strategy taking inspiration from the visual learning flights of honeybees is described, which enables drones to quickly return from longer flights by means of path integration and uses a neural network as a view memory to reach the home location.

Metrics such as accuracy systematically reward guessing over admitting uncertainty in large language models; reframing hallucination as an incentive problem opens a practical path towards more reliable language models.

Eu-doped infinite-layer nickelate Sm_0.95−xCa_0.05EuNiO₂ exhibits a magnetic-field-induced re-entrant superconducting phase in the Eu-rich overdoped regime.

Using high-resolution satellite imagery combined with a deep-learning-based framework to build a national energy inventory enables a data-driven assessment of solar–wind complementarity strategies to reduce power variability and enhance renewable energy penetration across China.

Hailstone trajectory simulations conducted under historical and future scenarios show a shift towards larger hailstones, resulting in global hailstorm-induced damage potential increasing by around 40% by the late twenty-first century.

Analysis of five types of warm-season storms in Texas using three-dimensional radar reflectivity data shows that urbanization can influence storm frequency, intensity, or vertical distribution, depending on the storm type.

Across 17 forest plots (2.7 million trees, 5,400 species), competition dominated overall, but facilitation was relatively stronger near the equator and declined towards higher latitudes, partly linked to temperature, legumes, mycorrhizal associations and canopy nursing effect.

Wild meat is a fundamental component of the diets of rural Central African populations, accounting for 20% of the recommended daily protein intake, compared with 13% and 6% for those living in towns and cities.

Analyses of biobank data show that human variation such as age, sex and genetics, particularly at the major histocompatibility complex locus, is associated with viral abundance and supports a causal link between abundance of Epstein–Barr virus and Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Cooperation in group lending declines over time due to shifting behavioural motivations, briefly rebounds after loan restarts, then declines faster again, revealing systematic deviations from rational behaviour driving long-term cooperation loss.

AhR functions as a neuronal brake on axon regeneration, integrating environmental sensing, protein homeostasis and metabolic signalling to control the balance between stress adaptation and axonal repair.

Experiments in Arabidopsis demonstrate that group VII ethylene response factors show differential responses to different stimuli, enabling plants in flood-prone environments to adapt to both submergence-induced hypoxia and reoxygenation upon desubmergence.

Over three decades, rapid expansion of the transposable element ISL3 has reshaped Enterococcus faecium, which helps to explain this pathogen’s growing clinical threat.

A human spatial atlas of gene expression in liver based on live donors shows marked porto–central zonation of hepatocytes and non-parenchymal cells, and transcriptomic changes in early steatosis.

A single-cell spatial atlas identifies a B cell-predominant microenvironment within the profibrotic tubular niche that marks a subset of patients with diabetic kidney disease with rapid progression.

In a multicentre trial of AAV1-hOTOF gene therapy involving 42 participants aged 0.8–32.3 years with autosomal recessive deafness 9, treatment demonstrated safety, tolerability, and improved hearing and speech perception, with age and distortion product otoacoustic emissions associated with treatment outcomes.

Nationwide deployment of a novel decision-aware machine learning framework as a decision support tool for the allocation of essential medicines in Sierra Leone resulted in improved access to essential healthcare in this resource-constrained setting.

Androgens have distinct roles in the brain, acting as immune-based tumour suppressors through neuroinflammation and neuroendocrine mechanisms.

Long-range interactions mediated by protein electric dipole moments have a role in driving the assembly and disassembly of super-signalling complex I for promoting NF-κB signalling.

Lesion-targeted immune modulation is a feasible strategy to control cardiac fibrosis, and engineered dendritic cells are a promising therapeutic platform for treating cardiac remodelling and heart failure.

NMDAR expression is sufficient to induce B cell recruitment and affinity maturation, resulting in receptor-modulating antibodies that connect anti-cancer immunity and autoimmunity.

ThermoCas9, a genome-editing enzyme that is sensitive to the DNA methylation status of the target locus, is characterized and shows promise for targeting hypomethylated DNA regions in cancer cells.

The Human Development Multiomic Atlas catalogues single-cell accessibility and gene expression data from human fetal cells across 12 organs, enabling the inference of syntactic rules for motifs that govern cell-type-specific transcription factor binding and chromatin accessibility during human development.