Volume 658 Issue 8136, 15 October 2026

International scientific organizations are ready to help the committees that award the prizes to invite a wider range of nominators.

In the Arab world, lack of training, research and discussion about menopause is hampering care. Three changes can help.

Speaking out against misconduct is challenging without external adjudicators.

The relatively short lifespans of non-human great apes might explain why their brain mass is maintained in later life

Results could help researchers to develop painkillers that are safer and more effective than existing treatments.

‘Rivers in the sky’ helped to keep an expanse of water roughly as big as Portugal ice-free.

Modelling suggests that the planets’ orbits will become destabilized inside one billion years once the Sun starts to shed mass.

Cases in the Northern Hemisphere are cropping up weeks early, and they are dominated by a virus with a concerning mutation.

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel win the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on optogenetics, which has revolutionized neuroscience.

Francis Halzen wins this year’s award for his work on a neutrino observatory at the South Pole that has helped to unlock mysteries of the Universe.

Prize goes to two chemists who probed why life favours one mirror-image molecule over another.

Intestinal bacterium secretes a molecule that reduces cholesterol production, according to a mouse study.

Outcomes have improved drastically in the United States for some forms of the disease, but those for others continue to lag.

The nation is on a trajectory to lead the world in science, a development that will reshape technological advancement, innovation and the balance of global power.

China trains more AI talent than any other country. Nature spoke to analysts and scientists about how AI research there compares to the United States.

Smartphones and artificial intelligence are undermining our ability to follow a complex argument, with grave consequences.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Better career support and more funding stability is needed to retain this invaluable group of scientists.

Existing legal frameworks have not halted planetary crises. Recognizing the rights of nature could offer a different path.

Meaningful work, flexibility and job security all matter more than salaries do, Nature’s job satisfaction survey shows.

Concerns about privacy, reproducibility and cost are prompting scientists to use models on their computers rather than in the cloud.

The fossil discovery of an early avian ancestor in China reveals that flightless birds lived alongside the known flying species.

A scientist puzzles over the origins of a curious gelatinous substance, and the complexities of measuring time, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

A material that was previously assumed to be an electrical insulator has been shown to be a semiconductor, with potential uses in electronics and optics.

People who underwent stem-cell transplantation and ate sugar-rich food had disrupted communities of gut microorganisms during antibiotic treatment.

A technique called time-resolved X-ray liquidography has been used to shed precision light on the steps involved in a classic chemical reaction.

Variants in genes involved in the production of extracellular matrix molecules could have enabled the skeletal adaptations that distinguish humans from other great apes.

Scanning tunnelling spectroscopy shows that the fractional spin-1/2 end states of molecular Haldane chains couple differently to a superconducting condensate depending on whether the chain contains an even or odd number of spin-1 triangulene units.

Suboxide molecular-beam epitaxy is used to grow silicon-doped α-(Al_xGa_1−x)₂O₃ films with bandgaps exceeding 7.0 eV, enabling the fabrication of a Schottky diode and a field-effect transistor with colossal-bandgap channels.

Resolution and control of the hidden solution-phase chemistry of 5-aminovaleric acid added to perovskite precursor solutions is described for producing films with a near-unity mean peak photoluminescence quantum yield and near-infrared perovskite LEDs with enhanced external quantum efficiencies.

Machine-learning-enabled atomistic simulations, spectroscopy, electrochemical data and quantum-chemical calculations reveal previously unstudied multi-lithium-ion complexes without bound anions, improving understanding of lithium-ion-battery functionality at the atomic level.

Two-dimensional graphene films with unusual folded surfaces are synthesized through a modular assembly strategy and show enhanced strength, toughness and elastic strain owing to stress distribution between interlayer folds.

Commodity microplastics exhibit intrinsic physicochemical activity at water interfaces, manifested by spontaneous generation of reactive oxygen species, challenging the prevailing paradigm of plastic inertness, with implications for human health and the environment.

Time-resolved X-ray liquidography films the structural changes of azobenzene during trans-to-cis isomerization in solution with atomic-level precision.

A Pd(II)/Pd(IV)-catalysed concerted semi-pinacol rearrangement preserves stereochemistry, improves migratory selectivity and avoids hazardous diazo reagents, enabling efficient carbon-skeleton editing in natural-product synthesis.

A year-long single-blind study shows that multiple satellites can accurately detect and quantify methane point-source emissions.

Efficient degradation of fucoidans depends on complementary bacterial guilds that cooperatively break backbone and side-chain sugars, revealing a conserved, globally relevant mechanism that shapes marine carbon cycling.

A fossil bird from the Upper Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna of southeastern China contemporary with Archaeopteryx and that clearly could not fly sheds new light on the ecological diversification of early-diverging avialans.

Massively parallel reporter assays and human–ape hybrid skeletal cells are used to study the evolution of human cis-regulatory elements (CREs), revealing how differences in CREs have shaped the composition of human skeletal tissue.

The Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study demonstrates how family-based genomic data can disentangle direct genetic effects from confounding, improving studies of health and human development.

RGP lineage tracing in stem-cell-derived organoids shows highly plastic proliferation and reduced clonal neuronal diversity, indicating that missing non-cell-autonomous niche cues are essential for faithful temporal control of cortical lineage progression.

Neuroinflammation alone may be dispensable for early synapse loss in Alzheimer’s disease.

Expression of Meis2 in hippocampal parvalbumin-expressing interneurons in an adult mouse model of neurodevelopmental disorders rescues experience-dependent plasticity, improves memory and network function and suppresses seizures.

Delphy makes near-real-time and scalable Bayesian phylogenetics possible for growing viral outbreaks, enabling public health bodies anywhere to analyse and react to their own data with state-of-the-art accuracy and minimal friction.

Avoiding a diet rich in simple sugars during treatment with antibiotics may mitigate microbiota disruption.

CFH is a key mediator of neuronal resilience across the central nervous system in mice and humans.

Potential predictive biomarkers of perioperative nivolumab therapy benefit in non-small cell lung cancer are identified from evaluable participants in the CheckMate 77T trial.

A binding-to-release drug conjugate strategy enables targeted payload release without cellular internalization, improving tumour specificity, efficacy and expanding therapeutic targets beyond conventional drug conjugates.

Integrative 3D epigenomic profiling of four glial cell types from the mid-gestation human cortex reveals cell-type-specific regulatory elements and chromatin interactions that illuminate the roles of non-coding variants in neuropsychiatric disease and human-specific cortical evolution.

Synthetic virus-like protein architectures designed by artificial intelligence show superior ability to deliver RNA into cells, compared with their naturally occurring counterparts, by overcoming the evolutionary constraints limiting viral evolution.

Bacterial ribosomes can synthesize proteins encoded within their own RNA.