Volume 641 Issue 8065, 29 May 2025

The global scientific community must do more to offer safety and support to displaced academics and others.

Countries must cooperate to seize a once-in-a-generation opportunity to become the top destination for scientists.

Neurons in a brain region linked with substance-use disorders can affect how much pain is felt when stopping chronic opioid use.

A pair of telescopes picking up reflected light achieve a performance 14 times better than a single telescope can manage alone.

Ash spread by violent eruptions in South American sequester carbon in the soil.

The humpback whale has the whale equivalent of nearsightedness, which puts it at risk of being snarled in fishing gear.

In response to US turmoil, premier establishments such as the European Research Council have sweetened incentives to attract talent.

A new crop of artificial-intelligence models allows users to create, manipulate and learn about biology using ordinary language.

Analysis flags hundreds of studies that seem to follow a template, reporting correlations between complex health conditions and single variables based on publicly available data sets.

A trapped ytterbium ion can be used to model complex changes in the energy levels of organic molecules interacting with light.

Survey respondents at all career stages report colleagues engaging in territorial and possessive behaviours — but early-career researchers are most often affected.

Immune-cell function improved in a teenager whose DNA was altered using prime editing.

As it awaits a court ruling, the US National Science Foundation has paused its attempt to cap indirect-cost payments on research grants.

New technologies to shuttle drugs into the brain are showing promise in Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and more.

Manufacturing CAR T cells in the laboratory is expensive and time-consuming. An in vivo approach could get the powerful therapy to more people.

A dissection of the field of ‘social priming’ asks what this controversy can teach us about how to study human behaviour.

The seas could save us from climate change, but only if we save them first, legendary naturalist and broadcaster argues in a vivid film.

The particle physicist and inventor advised 13 US presidents — whether they asked him to or not.

Indigenous people and others need a say in space-industry decisions. Here’s how that can happen.

Researchers with the neurodevelopmental condition discuss its peaks and valleys and how they structure their work lives to succeed.

Some researchers say that deep-learning ‘foundation’ models will revolutionize the field — but others are not so sure.

Amenipa Kyando supports coastal communities to enhance their livelihoods while protecting their environment.

Fossil evidence points to an earlier-than-expected timeline for when reptiles, members of the four-limbed group of animals called tetrapods, began to evolve.

Measurements of wind in a luminous galactic core reveal dense pockets of gas — a finding that calls for a rethink of how black holes interact with their host galaxies.

Immune cells boost stress-linked fear responses by communicating with brain cells. One way that psychedelics lessen such fear is by modulating this interaction.

An analysis of landscape features and of river deposits preserved in caves point to an event 2.1 million years ago that triggered the formation of Hells Canyon.

Some types of cell are more likely than others to give rise to tumours. A rapid cell cycle is a newly identified predictor of cancer susceptibility.

Differences in the role of late accretion in the long-term evolution of terrestrial planets are shown to possibly lead to distinct geophysical and chemical properties, as well as pathways conducive to prebiotic chemistry.

This Review provides an overview of the history of resting-state functional MRI research, which has helped to reveal the spatiotemporal organization of the brain, and discusses how it can contribute further to neuroscience research and precision psychiatry.

Observations of a luminous quasar from the high-resolution spectrometer Resolve aboard XRISM revealed highly inhomogeneous wind structure outflowing from a supermassive black hole, which probably consists of up to a million clumps.

We demonstrate that in a major merging system, radiation from the quasar in one galaxy directly alters the gas properties in the companion galaxy.

Realization of a gyromagnetic double-zero-index metamaterial results in unconventional optical and topological properties, suitable to be used for the generation of light pulses shaped as a vortex both in time and space.

Transient optical spectroscopy applied to studying twisted MoTe₂ for time-domain detection of fractional fillings of Chern bands reveals many hidden states that have not been previously observed and which could host exotic topological phases.

An optimized Co–Ni alloy catalyst encapsulated with Sm₂O₃-doped CeO₂ shows both high activity and stability for high-temperature CO₂-to-CO conversion, overcoming the limitations of such catalysts typically used in industrial applications.

Effects of snow cover dynamics, land use or land cover conversions and non-conversion regions on albedo variations during 2001–2020 are quantified and their induced radiative forcing estimated, highlighting the role of land surface dynamics in modulating global warming.

Aardvark Weather, an end-to-end machine learning model, replaces the entire numerical weather prediction pipeline with a machine learning model, by producing accurate global and local forecasts without relying on numerical solvers, revolutionizing weather prediction with improved speed, accuracy and customization capabilities.

Aurora, a new large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data, outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean wave dynamics, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather.

Data from the NASA GRAIL spacecraft recover the lunar gravity field suggesting preservation of a predominantly thermal anomaly in the nearside mantle, which could influence the spatial distribution of deep moonquakes.

Analysis of a fossil trackway from the earliest Carboniferous of Australia shows prints of toes with claws, suggesting that the origin of amniotes was at least 35–40 million years earlier than previously thought.

Analysis of the 'Chicago' Archaeopteryx, a nearly complete and uncrushed specimen, reveals details of the skeleton, soft tissues and plumage of this taxon, providing information on the evolution to avian dinosaur.

Genomic evolutionary rates are decomposed to identify the dominant lineages and genes driving rate variation across the phylogeny of birds.

A genome-wide association study meta-analysis combined with multiomics data of osteoarthritis identifies 700 effector genes as well as biological processes with a convergent involvement of multiple effector genes; 10% of these genes express the target of approved drugs.

A connectome of the right optic lobe from a male fruitfly is presented together with an extensive collection of genetic drivers matched to a comprehensive neuron-type catalogue.

In mice, prolonged consumption of a high-fat diet decreases interest in calorie-rich foods as a result of reduced neurotensin expression and signalling, which uncouples hedonic feeding behaviour linked to neurons projecting from lateral nucleus accumbens to ventral tegmental area.

The combined activation of Wnt and STAT3 signalling enables long-term self-renewal of human hepatocyte organoids, maintaining hepatic identity, supporting gene editing and offering therapeutic potential for liver disease through enhanced functionality, structure and metabolic competency.

Liver organoids derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells populations grown with ascorbate and bilirubin can be used to recapitulate differential zonal functions of human hepatocytes and for transplantation in animal models of liver dysfunction.

The multipass membrane transporter MFSD6 localizes to the plasma membrane and acts as a host entry factor for enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) by binding directly to EV-D68 particles through its extracellular, third loop, offering a potential target to combat infections by this emerging pathogen.

Inflammatory monocytes in the brain meninges promote stress-induced fear behaviour, and the pathways involved can be modulated using psychedelic compounds.

Hepatic expression of constitutively active glucagon receptor may have contributed to the glucose and lipid metabolism and the high metabolic rates that enabled the evolution of flight in birds.

In thromboinflammation, early tissue plasminogen activator administration directly improves endothelial barrier function, prophylactic defibrotide and enoxaparin suppress microvascular thromboinflammation through endothelium-mediated mechanisms and combining enoxaparin with crizanlizumab reduces microvascular occlusion and protects endothelial function in sickle cell disease.

Total cell cycle duration is a key hallmark of cancer initiation, and determines whether defects in apoptosis, senescence, immune surveillance, angiogenesis, DNA repair, polarity and proliferation lead to cancer development.

A study describes the split integrated stress response, a cellular stress response mechanism characterized by reduced eIF2B activity without eIF2α phosphorylation, which activates the eIF4E–ATF4–PCK2 axis, enabling metabolic reprogramming.

A large-scale analysis of DNA-bound transcription factors (TFs) shows how the presence of DNA markedly affects the landscape of TF interactions, and identifies composite motifs that are recognized by complexes of TFs rather than by individual ones.