Volume 647 Issue 8088, 6 November 2025

A high-quality image data set shows that tech companies can obtain informed consent and avoid data bias without breaking the bank.

Sanae Takaichi has pledged to make the country ‘strong and prosperous’ again; success hinges on breaking barriers for women in science.

Biologically inspired electronic neurons could boost the efficiency of artificial-intelligence systems.

People who rack up most of their daily steps in walks lasting less than five minutes have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease than do those who amass their steps in big blocks.

Modelling shows how the infant Universe might have stayed warm and dense during its primoridal expansion.

The moisture emitted by forests travels across national borders to provide precipitation to far-away fields.

Beijing wants to double down on advanced semiconductor technologies, artificial intelligence and basic research.

Female Aedes mosquitoes signal that copulation can proceed by subtly extending their genitalia.

Nature asked researchers who use artificial intelligence how its propensity for people-pleasing affects their work — and what they are doing to mitigate it.

Civets enrich coffee beans they eat and excrete with two fatty acids often used in dairy products, study finds.

Some doctoral programmes are admitting no students at all amid uncertainty about federal science funding.

Florida’s primary reef-building corals have been declared ‘functionally extinct’ — prompting a shift in conservation strategies.

Remains of some of the 300,000 soldiers who died on the retreat from Moscow reveal two bacterial diseases that probably added to the death count.

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

With the US government absent from the COP30 global climate summit, it will be up to others to avert catastrophe.

Chatbots and AI models are challenging ideas about who — or what — can create art, music and more.

A thoroughly researched account of the history and relationships that shaped the scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

As machines get better at data analysis and writing tasks, doctoral training must evolve to make the most of artificial-intelligence outputs.

Nobel prizewinner who helped to improve scientific relations between China and the United States.

A focus on national security alone is limiting people’s access to key materials.

Extreme weather threatens the extraction of critical minerals required to produce clean energy.

From NASA to the National Institutes of Health, federal agencies conduct research that universities cannot. Agency scientists speak out about the irreplaceable facilities, institutional knowledge and training opportunities that the country is losing.

Charlene Yeong works as a veterinarian with animals from zoos and those native to Singapore.

A large consortium of researchers has mapped how brain cells establish diverse identities throughout neurodevelopment and across species.

Cells change shape to move efficiently in a range of spatial environments. This response can be informed by the cell’s memory of past deformation.

An artificial-intelligence model trained on health-care records uses a person’s medical history to estimate whether and when any of more than 1,200 diseases might arise.

It is challenging to generate ultrashort laser pulses at high powers, but repeatedly overlapping light pulses in a crystal can efficiently amplify a weak signal.

Stem-cell models provide evidence that viral DNA sequences that entered the human genome in the past were repurposed to aid early stages of embryonic development.

Repetitive head impacts trigger neuronal loss and disrupt blood vessels and immune cells long before the accumulation of neurotoxic tau protein.

Recent studies integrating multi-omics data with cell atlases across development for brains of humans and model organisms are revealing conserved and divergent patterns of brain development at the molecular and cellular levels, and linking these to complex behavioural and neuropsychiatric phenotypes.

An array of optical tweezers trapping 6,100 neutral-atom qubits in 12,000 sites is experimentally realized, demonstrating performance exceeding present technologies and enabling the prospect of large-scale quantum computing and quantum error correction.

Experimental evidence of coherent charge transport in the normal state of the kagome metal CsV₃Sb₅ is presented, revealing the nature of correlated order in kagome metals and new directions for exploring quantum coherence in correlated electron systems.

A multipass optical parametric amplifier leverages dispersion-engineered dielectric mirrors to overcome the gain versus bandwidth trade-off and achieve broadband amplification with high gain within a compact device.

A method to make a big family of non-van der Waals superlattices of carbides and carbonitrides based on the delamination and rolling-up of multilayer MXenes is presented. 

A ductile inorganic-rich solid–electrolyte interphase that retains its structural integrity and allows easy ion diffusion enables a long cycle life under practical conditions for lithium metal batteries.

A model has been developed to identify the least-cost technology pathway for global individual iron and steel plants over 2020–2050 in alignment with national carbon-neutrality targets.

The viability of Antarctic ice shelves under low rates and high rates of global warming is modelled to estimate when it will become unfeasible for the ice shelves to maintain their present-day shape.

Extensive oxidative potential measurements from across Europe analysed with the two most common assays, dithiothreitol and ascorbic acid, using a standardized protocol show the strong influence of site type and suggest pathways for mitigation strategies.

Seismic data from the Turkana Depression in East Africa show that areas of thinned lithosphere are not necessarily persistent weak zones where extension and magmatic provinces will develop.

The ankylosaurian dinosaur Spicomellus afer possessed a tail weapon and uniquely elaborate dermal armour.

A high-resolution transcriptomic and epigenomic cell-type atlas of the developing mouse visual cortex from embryonic to postnatal development is presented, providing a real-time dynamic molecular map associated with individual cell types and specific developmental events.

Long-distance migration and dispersion is a common characteristic of nearly all classes of telencephalic GABAergic neurons, which diversify extensively after birth in the cortex and striatum, but show limited postnatal changes in the septum, preoptic area and pallidum.

Paired transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility profiling are used to examine the developmental trajectories of neuronal populations in the hypothalamic preoptic region, including cell types with key roles in physiological and social behaviour functions have been identified.

Tripotential intermediate progenitor cells are responsible for the local production of GABAergic neurons, oligodendrocyte precursor cells and astrocytes in the human neocortex.

A study describes chromatin accessibility and paired gene expression across the entire developing human brain during the first trimester in the context of gene regulation and neurodevelopmental disease.

An analysis of cell-type diversity in brain samples from a variety of mammalian species, both during development and in adult animals, reveals that the TAC3 initial class of striatal interneurons is conserved across placental mammals and is homologous to Th striatal interneurons in rodents.

Lineage tracing in human tissue samples from gestational weeks 16 to 24 provides insight into lineage relationships between cortical cell types and shows a switch in progenitor output from glutamatergic to GABAergic neurons.

BARseq interrogates the expression of 104 cell-type marker genes in 10.3 million cells over nine mouse forebrain hemispheres to reveal the role of peripheral inputs on cortical area development.

A tri-omic atlas of the mouse brain from postnatal day 0 to P21 reveals that layer-specific projection neurons have a role in coordinating axonogenesis and myelination.

Repetitive head impacts from contact sports are associated with brain inflammation, vascular damage and neuron loss that are independent of hyperphosphorylated tau pathology.

Genetic manipulation of blastoids reveals the role of recently emerged transposable elements and genes in human development.

Delphi-2M forecasts a person’s future health, covering more than 1,000 diseases, provides insights into co-morbidity dynamics and generates synthetic data for the training of AI models that have never seen actual data.

Basal cells, rather than neuroendocrine cells, have been identified as the probable origin of small cell lung cancer and other neuroendocrine–tuft cancers, explaining neuroendocrine–tuft heterogeneity and offering new perspectives for targeting lineage plasticity.

A mass spectrometry-based approach globally identifies protein regulators of metabolism and reveals the role of LRRC58 in controlling cysteine catabolism.