Volume 657 Issue 8131, 10 September 2026

The development bank and others are starting to publish and verify the raw data and code accompanying their research-based reports and papers. Other agencies should do the same.

Discovery flourishes when instruments, ideas and people come together in unpredictable ways.

The scientist honoured by the newest telescope in space spearheaded a pioneering programme as NASA’s first chief astronomer.

Emissions linked to global warming are higher at sites where feral pigs disturb the soil.

Coffin decorations and wall paintings were made with tissue from a broad range of organisms.

Comparison using signals sent over fibre-optic cable tests agreement between seven devices spread across Europe.

Small trial targeted liver proteins that play a part in the regulation of lipid levels.

The space observatory will have an expansive view of the Universe as well as sharp resolution.

Humanoid robots broke records at sporting events such as sprints, but struggled at practical tasks such as hammering nails.

Images revealed the accelerated movement of a glacier–rock mass just days before it collapsed and triggered a deadly flash flood.

Results bolster hopes that the drug daraxonrasib could prove effective against a variety of tumours.

An experiment spots an energy flash similar to that of the long-sought weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP.

Top artificial-intelligence models failed to predict the biological consequences of rewriting a virus's entire DNA code.

The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

The UK Biobank is imposing new safety measures after a security incident, but safeguarding biomedical data while enabling researcher access remains a challenge.

Scientists are probing whether language models trained on historical data can reproduce creative breakthroughs.

A deep dive into Newton’s major work, Principia Mathematica, reveals his hate of hypotheses and a habit of courting controversy.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

His awe-inspiring proof for the resolution of singularities — such as peaks, edges and self-crossings — revolutionized algebraic geometry.

Disparities in income and wealth are growing. A scientific assessment process can give governments the information they need to tackle them.

Governments should invest to develop all types of capital, and not just income, to improve the lives of future citizens and to protect the planet.

Sexist assumptions and a male-dominated culture can make it harder for women to attract investment for the companies they set up.

Rapid technological advances are allowing researchers to identify thousands of proteins in individual cells, revealing the hidden mechanisms underlying development and disease.

Structures of a protein used to make crucial sugar-carrying lipids uncover a surprising reaction mechanism and a built-in brake that emerged during primate evolution.

A clever approach for evaporating a compound used to make perovskite semiconductors tackles a vexing challenge in scaling up next-generation solar cells.

In one inbred strain of laboratory mice, late-life treatment with a GLP-1 drug extends lifespan. This effect might be more than just a consequence of calorie restriction.

The HydroGym computational environment teaches agents strategies for fluid-flow control that can be applied to scenarios they have not encountered before.

A physics pioneer who provided a new way to describe temperature, and the value of studying fossilized tracks in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

A newly discovered function for the protein Rb explains why inhibiting cell division can enhance the signalling mediated by the oestrogen receptor that drives breast cancer.

The discovery of the fast-orbiting star S301 near Sagittarius A* offers a promising new probe of the central black hole spin of the Milky Way through relativistic orbit measurements.

Non-destructive single-molecule absorption spectroscopy is achieved by detecting photon recoil from a trapped molecular ion, enabling single-photon-sensitive measurements of molecular vibrational transitions.

HydroGym offers over 60 standardized reinforcement-learning flow-control environments and demonstrates zero-shot transfer to a 3D wing, cutting local skin friction by 38% and exploration costs by four orders of magnitude.

By engineering the statistics of light at the micrometre scale using phase-only spatial light modulators, both the state and degree of polarization become spatially programmable, enabling direct encoding of information in a high-dimensional space.

A formamidinium-based eutectic enables low-temperature perovskite evaporation, producing efficient, scalable and durable perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells with minimal efficiency loss over large areas.

 Experiments have shown that spontaneously charged water drops can damage coatings on metal surfaces, leading to corrosion of the metal.

Entangled dual-site migration is enabled by a process termed the borinane rearrangement—a lead-and-follow movement of a borinane ring along the carbon backbone.

A 2,000-year Peruvian ice core record of atmospheric CH₄ concentrations contains the first historical global CH₄ record from the low latitudes, and implementation of a four-box model indicates higher equatorial CH₄ strength than previous estimates from polar-only records.

New data on homebuying loan records around the Second World War in the USA, linked to race and immigration status, show that Black borrowers were disproportionally excluded from mortgage programmes.

Using canopy-penetrating LiDAR data, the northern part of southwestern Amazonia appears to contain as many earthworks as previously estimated for the whole of Amazonia.

The Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database compiles prokaryotic, viral and eukaryotic genomes from seawater collected from the Great Barrier Reef, providing a rich resource for the study of marine microbial communities and ecosystem research and management.

Female restitution in interspecific sugarcane hybrids between Saccharum officinarum and Saccharum spontaneum arises from second division restitution, as haplotype-resolved F₁ genomes reveal duplicated, partially recombined maternal chromatids and distinctive recombination signatures, resolving its meiotic mechanism and enabling breeding strategies to accelerate crop improvement.

Using a virtual reality system, experiments in Drosophila show that flies use memory mechanisms to navigate along the boundary of an odour plume and track the source of a smell.

Amygdala astrocyte primary cilia are disrupted during stress, and their restoration leads to improvements in stress-related behaviour in mice.

Semaglutide treatment for 3 months in female mice improved physiological function, attenuated hallmarks of ageing and modulated nutrient sensors and conserved genetic regulators of ageing.

Engineered probiotics equipped with a synthetic glucose-responsive circuit transiently colonize the gut and secrete therapeutic factors when glucose levels increase, enabling safe, oral, sense-and-respond control of diabetes in mouse and primate models.

Climate and econometric modelling reveal that human-induced climate change is shifting the burden of childhood malaria in Africa.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells for antitumour therapy ‘armoured’ with a dominant-negative TGFβ receptor II show enhanced efficacy and tolerable safety in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma who have developed resistance or not responded to previous treatment.

Diet shapes obesity-associated therapeutic responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors through gut microbial metabolism and host anti-tumour immunity, demonstrated in mouse custom-diet models and human-to-mouse fecal microbiota transplantation experiments.

CDK4/6 inhibition redirects Rb chromatin occupancy to activate oestrogen-responsive genes, counteracting its own ability to maintain therapeutic cell-cycle arrest.

A workflow using artificial intelligence-redesigned starting points to evolve enzymes with improved properties compared with those evolved from natural proteins is established.

Knowledge of the spatial location of a gene is necessary to understand its epigenomic regulation.

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of full-length human UGCG, the gatekeeper that dictates the scale and composition of glycosphingolipid diversity, are reported, showing that it uses a metal-independent catalytic mechanism driven by an arginine network.