Volume 645 Issue 8081, 18 September 2025

As railways enter their third century of service, research must support their renaissance for more-sustainable travel that supports human development.

Science isn’t really moving towards equity; institutions are just perfecting the appearance of equity. We need to build an alternative system.

Rubidium atoms that are chilled to extremely low temperatures could emit bursts of particles called neutrinos.

Ukrainian refugees who moved into German households report greater social integration than those who lived in other settings.

Lightweight, battery-powered shirt could maintain skin at a comfortable temperature for hours.

Ultrasonic calls, too high for the human ear to detect, convey a wealth of information across the rodent’s territory.

Horses with genomic edits to make them run faster have been banned from polo, but a zoo of CRISPR-edited animals is gaining acceptance in agriculture.

Long-term exposure accelerates the development of Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease with dementia in people who are predisposed to the conditions.

Pauses to some US graduate programmes have led universities in several countries to launch initiatives to entice would-be PhD students.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 hallucinates less than previous models do, but cutting hallucination completely might prove impossible.

MXenes, distant cousins of graphene, reach new heights of complexity — opening the way for use in advanced batteries and more.

The first six months after an organ transplant are the riskiest for recipients.

Pathogen-consuming cells found in fat tissue also play a part in lipid balance.

Master-control area integrates information about hunger, a food’s tastiness and more — and can even drive intake of plastic pellets.

The complexity of vocal communication in some primates, whales and birds might approach that of human language.

Outbreaks of dengue are killing thousands of people in South America each year and getting worse. Brazil hopes to turn the tide with a home-grown vaccine and an army of mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria.

Public museums and private collections are stuffed with scientific artefacts gathered by individuals — often with highly questionable obsessions and motivations.

An insightful book explores attacks on science from a historical and a personal perspective.

With crucial infrastructure increasingly dependent on accurate, resilient clocks, outages in the dominant system for global positioning highlight the need for other ways of distributing time information.

Amid growing debates about the benefits and risks of studying looking-glass versions of life’s building blocks, there is an urgent need to bridge divergent views.

Scientific societies, journals, editors and researchers are pushing back against mean-spirited peer reviews.

Naailah Ali aims to support cacao farmers in the West Indies by improving the bean-fermentation process.

Lithium in the brain has been found to protect against cognitive decline. Restoring lost lithium could be a new angle from which to tackle Alzheimer’s disease.

Large language models (LLMs) are more accurate when they output intermediate steps. A strategy called reinforcement can teach them to do this without being told.

DNA segments that are naturally excised during immune-cell development can replicate, drive damage at various genomic sites and lead to cancer recurrence.

Analysis of seed attachment and the forces needed for detachment reveal how dandelion plants have evolved to spread in the same direction that the wind blows.

Soft devices made by rolling up rubber-like sheets patterned with 2D electronics can monitor, stimulate and navigate deep tissue in animal models.

An innovative method to trace tumour evolution using patterns of fluctuating DNA modifications could be implemented in the clinic to predict cancer progression.

Next-generation batteries will present different risks to conventional lithium-ion cells, emphasizing the need for efforts towards characterizing the abuse tolerance and hazards associated with next-generation battery materials over their life cycle and providing the data in the context of supporting affected professionals.

Colour code on a superconducting qubit quantum processor is demonstrated, reporting above-breakeven performance and logical error scaling with increased code size by a factor of 1.56 moving from distance-3 to distance-5 code.

Magic state distillation is achieved with logical qubits on a neutral-atom quantum computer using a dynamically reconfigurable architecture for parallel quantum operations.

Stable and robust topological edge modes are observed at finite temperatures in an array of 100 programmable superconducting qubits because of emergent symmetries present in the prethermal regime of this system.

A new artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek-R1, is introduced, demonstrating that the reasoning abilities of large language models can be incentivized through pure reinforcement learning, removing the need for human-annotated demonstrations.

DNA molecules can be programmed to autonomously carry out supervised learning in vitro, with the system learning to perform pattern classification from molecular examples of inputs and desired responses.

A soft, stretchable and freely movable fibre sensor called NeuroWorm, inspired by earthworms and that can be magnetically steered through soft tissue, is described as a new platform for dynamic bioelectrical and biomechanical monitoring.

High-density multimodal soft bioelectronic fibres provide a platform for minimally invasive implantable electronics, where diverse sensing and stimulation functionalities can be effectively integrated.

A 2.5-billion-year record of oxygen isotopes in sedimentary sulfate reveals the transitional oxygenation of the Earth’s surface and provides constraints on the dynamic, lengthy co-oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.

A modelling study based on satellite observations, machine learning and a chemical transport model quantifies the global and regional exposure to particulate-matter pollution and the human health impacts related to the 2023 Canadian wildfires.

The discovery of chemosynthesis-based benthic communities at depths of 5,800 m to 9,533 m in the Kuril–Kamchatka and western Aleutian trenches challenges traditional perspectives on the energy sources sustaining hadal fauna.

Imaging of a Devonian jawless fish reveals advanced features previously thought to be exclusive to jawed vertebrates, challenging the idea that jaws were the primary driver for the evolution of derived traits in the vertebrate body plan.

A study reports whole-genome sequences for 490,640 participants from the UK Biobank and combines these data with phenotypic data to provide new insights into the relationship between human variation and sequence variation.

A high-bandwidth neuromotor interface offers performant out-of-the-box generalization across people.

Lithium has an essential role in the brain and is deficient early in Alzheimer’s disease, which can be recapitulated in mice and treated with a novel lithium salt that restores the physiological level.

Research on Drosophila neurons shows links between the need to sleep and aerobic metabolism, indicating that the pressure to sleep may have a mitochondrial origin.

A study reveals a gut–brain sensory pathway through which the microbial component flagellin activates neuropod cells in the colon to signal the brain and reduce feeding in mice.

Cleavage by pathogen-derived proteases of an engineered chimeric protein activates its plant immune receptor component, enabling broad-spectrum resistance to pathogens in plants.

Coupling of a FREP1 variant to a gene-drive system allows the spread of a host malaria resistance allele through the mosquito population.

A preclinical covalent compound, CMX410, contains a aryl fluorosulfate warhead that targets the acyltransferase domain of Mtb Pks13, an essential enzyme in cell-wall biosynthesis, making it a promising candidate for tuberculosis treatment regimens.

Cancer evolutionary dynamics are quantitatively inferred using a method, EVOFLUx, applied to fluctuating DNA methylation.

Excised signal circles are circular DNA by-products of V(D)J recombination that form a complex with the V(D)J recombinase, and when increased in abundance, result in increased mutagenesis, causing adverse outcomes in cancer.

N-glycans on glycoRNAs prevent innate immune sensing of endogenous small RNAs, and the natural mechanism they use demonstrates how glycoRNAs exist on the cell surface and in the endosomal network without inducing autoinflammatory responses.

A synthetic biology system called SMART has been developed that uses conditional protein splicing for the programmable ligation of functional proteins from previously defined molecular combinations on cell surfaces.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the human sweet taste receptor in the apo and sucralose-bound states reveal its heterodimeric architecture and mechanisms of ligand binding and signal activation.