Volume 647 Issue 8091, 27 November 2025

The nation’s next generation of scientists and technologists will shape the coming decades.

The world needs a more agile framework for climate action, but that shouldn’t mean abandoning a system that has worked for 30 years.

Subtle genomic variations between humans and Neanderthals provide clues to how DNA shapes our facial features.

Using hydrogen to power road transportation and heat homes doesn’t save more carbon emissions than direct electrification.

Similarities to the womb and placenta of female mammals indicate a response to common evolutionary challenges in pregnancy.

Several microbial strains working together in a ‘one pot’ production process could provide an environmentally friendly route to clothing.

The Make America Healthy Again summit, attended by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and vice-president JD Vance, gave a sense of what’s driving US health policy.

Researchers have identified a neural biomarker of compulsive food cravings, and showed that it is suppressed by the weight-loss drug Mounjaro.

Analyses of fossils and ancient genomics reveal how early human populations bred less wolf-like companions, and how they might have traded them around the world.

If approved, GanLum could be available within a year and a half, according to maker.

Scientists say emissions could begin to decline in the next several years. What happens in China could determine when.

Promising results from a small clinical trial highlight a growing interest in designing gene-editing treatments for common illnesses.

In an analysis of nearly 900 retracted medical-research studies, the number of female authors is disproportionately low.

Technique could be used as a cheap way to boost ability of other AI models.

More children and adults are being diagnosed with ADHD in some countries. Science is helping to understand why — and how best to provide support.

Blending ‘old-fashioned’ logic systems with the neural networks that power large language models is one of the hottest trends in artificial intelligence.

The advent of artificial intelligence might be just the latest stage in a guiding biological process that has produced ever more complex, mutually dependent organisms over the history of life.

Economists should consider forests and wetlands as well as factories and farms.

Tim Berners-Lee is calling for a return to a decentralized Internet and stronger data privacy, but his arguments could be more inspiring.

Nobel laureate who mapped temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background.

A young academic in China worries that the grant-application lottery is wasted effort.

Sociologist Patricia Kingori is helping to expose contract cheating by scholars in high-income countries.

Maria Shrestha works to understand the evolutionary history of crayfish symbionts — and how they might be indicators of trouble.

The Perseverance rover on Mars has serendipitously recorded sounds and electromagnetic signals that are characteristic of lightning in dust storms.

Hand bones from a human relative, found in Kenya, reveal features similar to those of living gorillas, complicating the evolutionary history of hand and tool manipulation.

In 1995, two papers reported long-sought proof of an exotic state of matter — with applications in fields as diverse as quantum computing and cosmology.

A search for the genes responsible for the high incidence of heart defects in children with Down’s syndrome casts a light on potentially affected developmental processes.

Some bacterial-infecting viruses use ‘sponges’ to mop up defence molecules, but bacteria can fight back by responding when a sponge captures decoy molecules.

The SuperCam microphone aboard the Perseverance rover captured 55 triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars over two Martian years, providing implications for examining the planet’s surface chemistry, habitability and human exploration.

Parallel operation of two exchange-only qubits consisting of six quantum dots arranged linearly is shown to be achievable and maintains qubit control quality compared with sequential operation, with potential for use in scaled quantum computing.

Controlling pairs of nitrogen vacancy centres enables the measurement of magnetic correlations below the optical diffraction limit, and the use of entangled pairs shows a linear scaling of the measurement sensitivity with readout noise, as opposed to the quadratic scaling that would be obtained with unentangled spins.

An entanglement-enhanced sensing strategy making use of entangled nitrogen–vacancy pairs is described, demonstrating a 3.4-fold improvement in sensitivity and a 1.6-fold improvement in spatial resolution relative to single nitrogen–vacancy centres under ambient conditions.

A mechano-intelligent transmission mechanism based on the slipknot delivers precise force signals for clinical practice and robotic operations such as minimally invasive surgery and tendon-driven robotics.

An asymmetric organocatalysis strategy is used to control pyramidal nitrogen chirality and to synthesize the enantioselective N-chloroaziridines with a configurationally stable nitrogen stereogenic centre.

A general photocatalytic strategy is described to convert oxetanes into other useful molecules by selectively substituting the oxygen atom with a nitrogen-, sulfur- or carbon-based moiety, simplifying the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and complex drug analogues.

A strategy is described making use of in situ activation of radical boron chemistry to convert amines to handles for cross-coupling, enabling a range of useful chemistries to make and modify drug-like molecules.

Findings from a tectonically active mountain range show that soil production is driven by bottom-up rock weakening rather than by soil thickness, challenging long-held top-down models.

Global warming will intensify wildfires, boosting emissions and increasing the number of premature deaths by about sixfold globally by 2100—shifting the health burden more evenly across regions, demanding stronger international policy responses..

Smoke PM_2.5 could result in 71,420 excess deaths per year in the USA by 2050 under the SSP3-7.0 high-warming scenario.

Analyses of newly discovered hand and foot bones of a Paranthropus boisei specimen provide insight into possible tool use and other palaeobiology characteristics among Plio-Pleistocene hominin species.

Analysis of human Robertsonian chromosomes originating from 13, 14 and 21 reveal that they result from breaks at the SST1 macrosatellite DNA array and recombination between homologous sequences surrounding SST1.

Using a new analytical method for tracking gamma band events in mouse visual cortex, flexible encoding of visual information according to behavioural context is shown.

An analysis of T cell responses in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis shows that the C9orf72 antigen is a key target of autoimmune responses in the disease, and identifies C9orf72 epitopes that are recognized.

Studies using human pluripotent stem cells and a mouse model of Down syndrome identify HMGN1 as a key contributor to congenital heart defects in individuals with Down syndrome.

The Panoptes antiphage system defends bacteria by detecting phage-encoded counter-defences that sequester cyclic nucleotide signals, triggering membrane disruption and highlighting a broader strategy of sensing immune evasion through second-messenger surveillance.

Panoptes, an anti-phage defence system against virus-mediated immune suppression, is revealed.

A high-resolution antigenic map of influenza A(H5) haemagglutinin (HA) enables the design of immunogenic and antigenically central vaccine HA antigens that elicit antibody responses broadly covering the A(H5) antigenic space.

Enrichment for efferocytic macrophages in the islets of Langerhans promotes the accumulation of anergic-like CD4⁺ T cells and dampens autoimmune diabetes.

A proteotoxic stress response specific to exhausted T cells, governed by AKT signaling and accompanied by increased protein translation, represents a mechanistic vulnerability and a new therapeutic target to improve cancer immunotherapies.

MetaGraph enables scalable indexing of large sets of DNA, RNA or protein sequences using annotated de Bruijn graphs.

Bacterial ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters can be utilized and engineered to transport non-canonical amino acids into Escherichia coli for highly efficient synthesis of proteins with novel functions.

Cas9 in type II-C CRISPR–Cas systems functions independently of its RNA partners to regulate spacer acquisition, dynamically adjusting the process on the basis of crRNA abundance to maintain a sufficient CRISPR array size and immune memory.

Structural and in vitro functional studies of the human delta-type ionotropic glutamate receptor GluD2 reveal that it contains an ion channel that is activated by d-serine and GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid).