Volume 645 Issue 8079, 4 September 2025

Foreseeing clashes of cultures is the key to making industry-academic collaborations mutually beneficial.

A July ruling from the International Court of Justice is clear: nations can face consequences if they don’t act on the climate crisis.

Big-eyed species are especially vulnerable to the effects of light pollution, a citizen-science effort shows.

The creature might have been more than 3.5 metres long, with powerful jaws and serrated, flesh-cutting teeth.

Average expected lifespan is still increasing in high-income countries, but the rate of increase is slowing.

Cosmic maps appear consistent with the proposal that black holes could cause the Universe's accelerating expansion.

In a rare move for a US public official, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr called for a Danish paper finding no link between aluminium in vaccines and disease to be retracted.

Preprint examines how citations can influence the review process.

Research shows that beer drinkers are split depending on which types of flavour chemicals they prefer.

Study challenges the textbook idea that the brain region that processes body sensations reorganizes itself after limb amputation.

Succulents become rechargeable night lights after injection with tiny phosphor particles.

The decision will hinder lawsuits against grant terminations, legal specialists say.

Long-term study suggests that the more heatwaves people are exposed to, the more it accelerates body ageing.

Lungs are complex organs to transplant, but the surgery is a step towards clinical trials.

These foods have been linked to obesity and other health troubles, but some scientists argue the grouping is too broad to guide dietary choices.

Scientists are tinkering with plant genes to create crops that seed their own clones, with a host of benefits for farmers.

Photography is not just illustrative, it is investigative. A revealing book cautions us to look closely at what pictures are really telling us.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Textbooks give strange, imprecise explanations of where things happen in quantum mechanics. Consistency with gravity needs a fresh approach.

Small electric aeroplanes flying at low altitude will need energy sources that can withstand crashes and deliver power reliably. Standards need to be decided now.

Australia’s Online Safety Amendment Act provides the chance for researchers to analyse the complex relationship between social-media use and mental health in adolescents, but results should be interpreted with caution.

Anti-immigration sentiment is fuelling a drive to slash international student and worker numbers, but at what cost to researchers and countries leading the charge?

Carmen García-Chávez monitors the activities of wolves after their reintroduction to Chihuahua, northern Mexico.

An artificial-intelligence tool helps historians to interpret Latin inscriptions by assigning a date and location and suggesting text for missing parts.

A clinical trial reports data from one of the first groups of people with the blood cancer myeloma to receive a type of immunotherapy called CAR T cells.

A bacterially produced molecule circulates in the bloodstream and increases the risk of cardiovascular disease by hijacking immune-cell signalling.

Bridges made from connected steel frameworks can sometimes survive unexpected damage by activating hidden structural responses.

A long-standing mystery about a pathway that makes a key defence molecule in various valuable crop plants is finally solved.

An analysis of seismic waves propagating through Mars finds evidence that the planet has a small, solid inner core, which challenges existing planetary models.

People who claim they can bend spoons by stroking them fail to convince researchers, and a pioneer of industrial research gets the recognition she deserves in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Methods to train physical neural networks, such as backpropagation-based and backpropagation-free approaches, are explored to allow scaling up of artificial intelligence models far beyond present small-scale laboratory demonstrations, potentially enhancing computational efficiency.

Silane, which is a precursor to the sandy surfaces of rocky planets and dusty clouds on gas giants, is seen directly in another world—a low-metallicity brown dwarf in which oxidation is slow and gas mixing is fast.

An analysis of seismic data acquired by the InSight mission demonstrates that Mars has a 600-km solid inner core.

An optically addressable fluorescent-protein spin qubit is realized using enhanced yellow fluorescent protein; the qubit can be coherently controlled at liquid-nitrogen temperatures and the spin detected at room temperature in cells.

Adaptive wireless communication over an unprecedented frequency range spanning over 100 GHz can be achieved by a thin-film lithium niobate photonic wireless system, which can process a large flux of information at high speed.

An experimental method is used to assign partial charges based on crystal structure determination through electron diffraction, applicable to any crystalline compound.

By introducing chiroptical spectroscopy with attosecond pulses, attosecond coherent control over photoelectron circular dichroism is demonstrated and measurements of chiral asymmetries in the forward–backward and angle-resolved photoionization delays of chiral molecules are reported.

Experimental tests and computational simulations of a scaled-down specimen of a real steel truss bridge identify and characterize the latent resistance mechanisms following critical failures, demonstrating how loads supported by failed components can be redistributed and enable structure resilience.

A new approach combining 3D imaging, computer vision and parametric modelling, named GRACE, is introduced, enabling adaptive and context-aware 3D printing of structures around features ranging from cellular to macroscopic scales with minimal user intervention.

A new tool based on generative machine learning called FlowER uses flow matching to model reactions as the redistribution of electrons between reactants and products, enabling the enforcement of mass conservation in reaction prediction.

A risk-based, spatially explicit analysis of carbon storage in sedimentary basins establishes a prudent planetary limit of around 1,460 Gt of geological carbon storage, which requires making explicit decisions on priorities for storage use.

A global land surface phenology map predicts complex geographical discontinuities in flowering phenology, genetic divergence and harvest seasonality across a range of taxa.

Aeneas, a generative neural network trained on ancient texts, helps historians contextualize inscriptions and perform epigraphic tasks, offering an improved starting point for historical research.

Birds have evolved a unique sex chromosome dosage compensation mechanism involving the male-biased microRNA (miR-2954), which is essential for male survival by regulating the expression of dosage-sensitive Z-linked genes.

A study presents a strategy based on human pluripotent stem cells for treating neurodegenerative disorders of the gastrointestinal tract.

A population code for the dynamics of choice formation in the primate premotor cortex is revealed, with diverse single-neuron tuning to a shared decision variable.

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task in mice.

Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

The salicylic acid (SA) biosynthesis pathway—involving ligation of benzoyl coenzyme A and benzyl alcohol to give benzyl benzoate; hydroxylation of benzyl benzoate to give benzyl salicylate; and cleavage of benzyl salicylate to give SA—is highly conserved in plants.

Diverse plant species synthesize salicylic acid from phenylalanine through a pathway that includes a conserved triple-enzyme module that converts benzoyl-CoA to salicylic acid.

Characterization of four SALICYLIC ACID-DEFICIENT GENEs in rice identifies an ancestral pathway for biosynthesis of salicylic acid from phenylalanine and provides genetic targets for engineering disease resistance in crop plants.

The emergence of a highly pathogenic FCoV–CCoV recombinant is responsible for a rapidly spreading outbreak of feline infectious peritonitis originating in Cyprus.

The molecular mechanisms of cell entry for the recently identified highly pathogenic feline coronavirus FCoV-23 are characterized in detail.

Disruption of dendritic cell (DC) interstitial motility in the tumour microenvironment promotes immune evasion, and enhancement of DC interstitial motility offers a route for DC-centric immunotherapy.

Imidazole propionate produced by gut microbiota is associated with atherosclerosis in mouse models and in humans, and causes the development of atherosclerosis through activation of the imidazoline-1 receptor in myeloid cells.

A bivalent biparatopic nanobody penetrates the brain, binds to and potentiates the activity of homodimeric metabotropic glutamate receptor 2, correcting cognitive deficits in two preclinical mouse models with endophenotypes resulting from NMDA receptor hypofunction.