Volume 658 Issue 8138, 29 October 2026

The UN organization faces perhaps the most serious crisis in its nearly 40-year history — but it is too precious to lose.

As machines race ahead in solving problems, mathematicians must establish a new era that prizes human understanding over simply publishing more solutions.

Large language models suggest more tests, referrals and medications than human physicians do, driving up the cost of care.

Analysis of some nearby stars shows that, despite their name, these bodies can be pink, yellow and more.

Scientists tracked the changing sleep patterns of Indigenous people in Argentina who gained access to mains electricity — and smart phones.

Chemical fingerprinting charts the rises and declines of specific adulterants in illicit supplies of the drug.

A Nature investigation identified more than 30 requests since 2024 to US universities in a campaign questioning climate attribution science.

Cryptographers’ inboxes are being flooded with requests to validate cipher solutions.

Physicists trap and cool down positron for months to measure its ‘magnetic moment’ with extraordinary precision.

An artificial-intelligence model trained on nearly four million fossils suggests that three of the extinction events might have happened more gradually than previously thought.

Analysis of nearly 30,000 brain scans yields detailed timeline of how the brain matures — and hints at the consequences of disrupting it.

Archaeologists identified skull fragments from China as belonging to this group of ancient human relatives.

Scientists start with a five-year grant that could be extended for another ten years.

Regulatory pushback stalled the field. But researchers are optimistic about mind-altering drugs as potential treatments for depression and mood disorders.

Could a blood sample, a brain scan and a look at your phone data transform how your psychiatrist treats you?

An eloquent analysis of the origins of human speech suggests that social cohesion, not conflict, drove our use of words.

Computer scientist Tuhin Chakrabarty talks about detecting AI-generated prose — and why it matters.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

A focus on the gene alone has become outdated. Books that capture the complexity of life deserve centre stage.

Researcher and policy adviser who championed tests and treatments for genetic diseases.

Finding practical ways to analyse the state of a person’s immune system could guide treatment decisions and create opportunities for disease prevention.

Nature’s survey of almost 4,000 researchers shows that you’re not alone if you struggle to make ends meet or your last pay rise is a distant memory.

Understanding the triggers of autoimmunity might lead to better therapies, with hair loss among the conditions for which underpinning factors have come to light.

How and when did cells gain the ability to crawl? Live imaging of cells from close relatives of early eukaryotes fills in a major gap in the understanding of cellular evolution.

A conserved property of protons and neutrons is carried not by their constituent particles but by structures that mediate the force between them.

A genome-rewriting approach known as adenine base editing offers a precise way to investigate gene function in early human embryos.

Salt-marsh plants can protect inland areas against huge waves — but seemingly only up to a point, and big storms cause progressive damage.

Touch-sensitive, light-emitting yarn can turn everyday clothing into washable, bendable user interfaces with dynamic graphics and versatile computing functions.

Improved molecular insights into inflammatory rheumatic diseases are enabling better disease control and advancing the field towards achieving durable remission and eventual cure.

A triplet carbene molecule in a tailored crystal provides a stable single-molecule spin–photon interface with millisecond coherence, advancing chemically engineered molecular qubits for quantum networking.

All-antiferromagnetic tunnel junctions can display both a large TMR and a reciprocal switching effect, octupole-driven spin-transfer torque, enabling nanoscale magnetic memory and potentially room-temperature terahertz spintronic devices.

Multifunctional digital fibres integrate display, touch sensing, computation and multimodal input–output, enabling flexible, washable garments with interactive graphical interfaces and wireless multimedia capabilities.

Planar carbon pentaheptite nanoribbons are synthesized by laterally fusing polypentalene chains transformed from pre-synthesized polycyclooctadiene chains, suggesting a possible route towards carbon quantum wires.

The use of zeolites with an appropriate pore structure combined with a high CO/olefin ratio is shown to catalyse olefin carbonylation and produce primary and secondary carboxylic acids as the main products.

Fifteen years of atmospheric CO₂ measurements show that the Amazon carbon sink is weakening, with fires, deforestation and climate stress driving increasingly high carbon emissions.

Salt marsh platforms resist erosion under extreme waves, but vegetation damage reduces wave attenuation; substantial wave attenuation by vegetation is mainly limited to low-energy marsh coasts with waves below 1 m.

An analysis of UK banking data reveals that people who reported being victim-survivors of financial abuse experience worse financial outcomes compared with a control group.

A swimming and water-foraging mammaliaform, Megacauda sungei gen. et sp. nov., had a lifestyle analogous to the extant platypus, and was capable of mammal-like swallowing and suckling.

Anoxic live-cell imaging shows actin-dependent crawling motility and dynamic protrusions in Asgard archaea, providing insights into cellular innovations that may have contributed to eukaryotic evolution.

The genetic architecture of personality is robustly generalizable, minimally confounded and widely relevant to human experience.

An imaging system developed to record cellular activity throughout the whole body of zebrafish captures cellular organ dynamics and identifies multiple distributed circuits.

A key role for retrograde neuromodulatory signalling in motivated behaviour is shown through dynamic endocannabinoid release within a thalamostriatal circuit that regulates behavioural engagement during reward seeking.

Single-cell and spatial multiomics are combined to define niches in the developing human heart, revealing pacemaker-cell organization, cardiomyocyte maturation and compaction, and developmental perturbations associated with trisomy 21.

Paper2Agent converts research papers into interactive artificial intelligence agents by turning manuscripts, code and data into model context protocol-based tool-invoking systems that reproduce original results, answer new scientific queries and collaborate to generate novel insights.

Base editing of NANOG in human embryos reveals its essential role in epiblast pluripotency, showing that loss of NANOG disrupts pluripotent epiblast specification and instead cells differentiate towards primitive endoderm and trophectoderm, which highlights base editing as a precise, non-genotoxic tool for studying human development.

In contrast to Cas9-induced DNA double-stranded breaks, base-editor-induced lesions are efficiently repaired in early human embryos.

Emerging infectious disease outbreak risks are ubiquitous worldwide, and highest in landscapes where people, livestock and fragmented natural ecosystems coexist, but detection and data on outbreaks are currently limited by inequalities in healthcare access.

Immune dysregulation and physiological neural activation converge to trigger autoimmune alopecia.

A proximity-mapping atlas defines tumour-associated proximity antigens, revealing disease-associated membrane spatial communities, and identifies EGFR–CDCP1 as a co-target pair that enhances tumour killing by multispecific therapeutics.

SERPINE1 and SERPINB2-driven fibrin-rich niches locally programme immunosuppressive macrophages and exclude T cells, enabling spatially organized immune evasion in pancreatic ductal carcinoma.

An approach to improve efficiency and establish a background expectation for ligand potency optimization is described.