Volume 658 Issue 8135, 8 October 2026

Two reports highlight the changes needed in academia to facilitate the fast, collaborative, responsive and inclusive research that aids global decision makers.

The next major advancement in TB might not be a new drug, but a better understanding of how and why resistance to medicines emerges.

As AI wearables become discreet, cheap and mainstream, they risk normalizing non-consensual recording in everyday spaces.

Gene-editing CRISPR enzymes controlled by light and sound target tissues of interest.

Observations confirm jets’ expected effect on the gas cloud that surrounds a galaxy.

The bellbird’s extra-large gape helps it to achieve pneumatic-drill-level volume.

A heatwave in 2025 would have been one-third of a degree cooler without the greenhouse gases released since 2015.

Laboratories are still using dangerous and carbon-intensive liquids much more often than environmentally friendly ones, according to a 40-year survey of patents.

Many scientists use artificial intelligence in their work, but agents are increasingly soliciting researchers for collaborations.

Tracking the biological age of grafted organs suggests that donor pools could be expanded to boost organ availability.

AI predictions could help with pandemic preparedness, but they will need experimental confirmation.

Newly launched Vita is part of a broader government plan to give China a bigger say in what counts as high-quality science.

Jacob Trefethen, who leads life sciences at the OpenAI Foundation, speaks to Nature about the organization’s ambition to cure disease.

Modified medication targets the cells implicated in the condition’s tell-tale lesions.

Freelance peer-review jobs through third-party companies raise practical and ethical questions.

Scientists have debated for decades whether the human brain sprouts new neurons throughout life. What would it mean if it could — and how much evidence is enough?

Two books explore how warfare is being reshaped, with influence shifting from states to tech giants.

Twenty-five years after the US anthrax attacks, fears around AI are distracting people from seeing what’s needed to stay safe: a strong, regulated life-sciences sector.

When supply chains fail, it’s often because of energy, computer or data-network failures. Addressing these requires a way to make interdependencies visible.

Ten researchers and faculty members share what surprised them when they began teaching — and what they wish they had known before walking into the room.

Scientists are using cell-free transcription and translation systems to synthesize proteins, design biology-based sensors and develop synthetic cells.

Cell-based models of the human cortex transplanted into mice produce neurons that are inaccessible in vitro, and could enable scientists to link brain injury to behaviour.

An ultrathin semiconductor that conducts electricity using positively charged ‘holes’ might clear the way for next-generation electronic devices.

A fruit-fly protein thought only to store amino acids in fact responds to nutritional deficiency in both development and adulthood, resulting in lifespan extension.

Repetitive sequences make extrachromosomal DNA vulnerable to breaks, which could be exploited for therapy — but might also promote tumour evolution.

This Review synthesizes an evolutionary framework for understanding the key stages, challenges and microevolutionary processes through which single cells evolve into functionally integrated multicellular organisms.

Gas chromatography analysis of compounds formed by the superheavy element seaborgium shows that the hexacarbonyl complex Sg(CO)₆ exhibits lower first bond dissociation energy than the lighter chemical homologue W(CO)₆, owing to relativistic bond weakening effects.

A chiral superlattice in collinear antiferromagnetic UOTe generates large Berry curvature and spin-polarized currents, enabling anomalous Hall effects and advancing chiral quantum materials for spintronics.

An architectural inversion shifts integrated optical frequency comb generation from outward broadening around a central pump to filling the spectrum between two octave-separated pumps through a self-aligned parametrically driven cavity soliton, enabling robust self-referencing for future deployable on-chip frequency and time metrology.

Using an acoustic metamaterial platform, a critical topological phase transition is experimentally demonstrated establishing a hierarchical phase transition organization, in which topology shapes criticality beyond the conventional Landau–Ginzburg paradigm and standard topological phase transitions.

Experimental evidence indicating that critical gapless topological states can be characterized by the entanglement spectrum and wavefunctions is presented, demonstrating persistence of topology at phase boundaries and extension to higher-dimensional systems.

RAIBO2, an energy-efficient quadruped robot, completed a full marathon in 4 hours, 19 minutes and 52 seconds on a single battery charge, achieving a total cost of transport of 0.25 that surpasses the human benchmark of 0.37.

A dual-precursor chemical system is used to achieve wafer-scale epitaxy growth of boron carbon nitride, a high-performance p-type semiconductor, for potential integration in efficient 2D materials for electronics.

Sequential on-water-surface assembly enables layer-by-layer stacking of two-dimensional polymers to create both lattice-matched and controlled lattice-mismatched van der Waals heterostructures with defined lattice registry, stacking sequence and thickness.

Etching-flux-mediated single-centred nucleation of two-dimensional semiconductors is used to deterministically localize a single nucleation event, expanding semiconductor deposition from controlling where materials grow to controlling where and how crystals can begin to form.

Thianthrenium ylides can be used as a general platform for metal–carbene generation and transfer, including cyclopropanation, σ-bond insertion and sigmatropic rearrangements.

By combining a meta-analysis of CO₂ enrichment experiments with three decades of southern African savanna observations, an increase in biomass production by C₄ grasses under rising CO₂ levels in water-limited environments is revealed.

Newly developed methods enable construction of Icelandic haplotypes and mapping of population-scale short reads to a pangenome by reducing reference bias and improving discovery in low-mappability regions, revealing many novel variants, including pathogenic alleles.

Xenocortication with human neurons enables circuit- and behaviour-level analysis of neurodevelopment in mice.

In mice, a sparse population of sleep-active long-range inhibitory neurons in the neocortex promote widespread cortical synchronization and sleep, revealing a cortical mechanism that contributes to the regulation of sleep.

The T7 bacteriophage deactivates bacterial defence systems through T7K phosphorylation of nearly all host and phage proteins during infection.

In Drosophila, the protein Lsp2, which is induced by dietary essential amino acids, is a key physiological effector of mTORC1, and mutant flies that lack the Lsp2 gene exhibit reduced translation of TOP mRNAs and improved longevity.

Isotope tracing is used to determine the fate of larval dietary amino acids in adult flies, and identifies Lsp2 as a key regulator of translation and lifespan that forms the molecular basis of the effects of early-life protein restriction.

A specific population of macrophages that express high levels of the enzyme PLA2G2D in tumour-draining lymph nodes is associated with poor prognosis in patients, and inhibiting PLA2G2D improves anti-tumour immunity in mouse models.

An in vivo model that is able to recover human T cells from solid tumours can identify targets to help improve CAR T cell antitumour activity.

Covalent, membrane-impermeable caspase inhibitors exploit transient GSDMD pore formation to enter pyroptotic cells, selectively blocking caspase-1 and caspase-11-driven pyroptosis and IL-1β and IL-18 release, enabling targeted suppression of inflammatory pathology in vivo.

Malva enables ultrafast, reference-free searching of raw single-cell sequences across millions of cells, transforming static transcriptomic atlases into dynamic resources for understanding the functions of sequences.

Stability of extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) relies on microhomology-mediated end joining at fragile TA-rich sites, with FANCM suppressing break formation, suggesting that Polθ disruption may destabilize ecDNA and sensitize ecDNA-driven tumours to therapeutic intervention.

A robotic, cell–free platform rapidly prototypes redesigned genetic codes, enabling the translation of proteins with reassigned codons and non-standard amino acids without altering living genomes.

During replisome assembly of monkeypox virus, the hexameric helicase–primase E5 undergoes large-scale conformational changes that allow two of its primase domains to interact with the polymerase F8 thumb domain and A22 subunit, activating the helicase–primase.

AP-7-168, an optimized derivative of a β-arrestin-biased negative allosteric modulator of the β₂-adrenergic receptor (β₂AR), functions as a molecular glue to stabilize β₂AR homodimerization.