Volume 657 Issue 8133, 24 September 2026

An AI revolution is sweeping through education. But teachers who can convey the excitement of thinking and learning are irreplaceable.

Climate losses extend beyond property and income. Policymakers need ways to assess what people value, experience and ultimately stand to lose.

From southern Africa to the Amazon, the risks are mounting and the window for action is rapidly closing.

Impacts by space objects have obscured some of the evidence of the planet’s contraction over the past 4.5 billion years.

Modelling shows a link between feeding programmes and higher potential earning in five African nations.

A strong magnetic field can disrupt a star’s ability to produce the fountains of matter called coronal mass ejections.

The trait could explain why symptoms vary in severity between people with similar brain pathology.

Geophysical survey yields ‘tantalizing’ data that could point to Nefertiti’s burial place — but it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions.

Large networks are particularly beneficial to researchers in under-represented groups.

The extreme weather of this year’s mega El Niño could look different from past events.

Lab-grown organoids wire into mice missing a key part of their brain, offering a new way to test drugs for developmental conditions.

Philanthropists are stepping up support for research in a country where scientists have relied on the government alone for funding.

Politics and personal values influence people’s confidence in scientists, according to a report.

Scientists are poking holes in established ideas about how cells live and die, and are harnessing these discoveries to fight diseases from cancer to autoimmune conditions.

There is growing concern that AI can blunt memory and reasoning. But science shows ways to keep the brain sharp.

Many academics are concerned about threats to independent enquiry in higher education. Here’s how it can be protected while taking legitimate concerns into account.

Learning how to manage your feelings can help you to tackle some tricky situations at work, say organizational psychologists.

Artificial-intelligence systems can generate hypotheses, design experiments and analyse data — but humans still need to decide what makes sense.

Records of war extracted from news reports have shaped what researchers know about violence. Satellite images could transform that understanding — if access stays open.

Just 116 images exist of the active galaxy 3C 345 — but an AI-driven algorithm has created a highly detailed video of the plasma jets blasted from its centre.

Northern Hemisphere trees planted in the Southern Hemisphere can thrive, displaying increased stem growth and physiological signals linked to reduced stress.

Single-nucleus RNA sequencing captures molecular changes in the prefrontal cortex across the lifespan and in health and disease.

Three national surveys reveal how factors such as gender, age, political alignment and income are correlated with support for white nationalism in the United States.

Antiprotons have been transported by road at CERN. This advance might one day enable laboratories outside the site to use antimatter in their experiments.

Integrating satellite-derived war-damage data with text-based fatality records through improvement, enrichment and fusion mitigates limitations inherent in each source, revealing complex violence dynamics beyond fatality-centric paradigms, as case studies from Ukraine and Myanmar illustrate.

The kine neural reconstruction algorithm produces high-resolution, time-continuous very long baseline interferometry videos, enabling direct measurement of instantaneous plasma velocities and detailed kinematic analysis of relativistic astrophysical jets.

Researchers demonstrate successful road transport of trapped antiprotons, establishing a practical method for moving antimatter to quieter laboratories and substantially improving future tests of matter–antimatter symmetry.

Vacuum fluctuations provide an important new way to control material properties non-invasively and can enhance superconductivity, which is shown by an increase in the critical temperature of superconducting NbSe₂, a layered transition-metal dichalcogenide.

Chemically stable lead carboxylates are used as surface passivators for engineered perovskite films to manufacture metre-scale solar modules that can achieve record-high certified efficiencies, as well as passing all IEC 61215 reliability tests.

Deep-foam photolithography uses light-controlled polymer foaming to create high-resolution, multifunctional microstructures with tunable optical, wetting and fluid-handling properties for advanced manufacturing applications.

Nine-residue peptides can encode discrete interaction motifs that direct the formation of hexagonal pores, which hierarchically tile into laterally expandable multichannel nanofibrils with defined topology.

A generative committor-guided path-sampling framework reconstructs rare biomolecular transition pathways and reveals the underlying thermodynamics and kinetics without using predefined collective variables or brute-force sampling, at an acceptable computational cost.

Pyridine positional isomerization can be enabled by controlled reorganization of the heteroaromatic core through sequential nitrogen insertion and deletion.

Simple triarylphosphines enable selective azine C–H coupling with water and ammonia, offering a versatile late-stage functionalization strategy for complex molecules.

Explicit support for white nationalism is uncommon overall, but higher among young white men, disadvantaged and politically disaffected white people, conservatives, Republicans, and those with primarily online friendships.

New Mongolian fossil evidence shows zhelestids were not placental-like herbivore relatives, but a dental variant within Zalambdalestoidea, with distinctive molars alongside zalambdalestid skull and limb traits.

Single-molecule long-read sequencing of human sperm reveals variation in recombination across donors and that a substantial fraction of non-crossover gene conversions arises before meiosis, distinct from PRDM9-driven recombination and associated with fragile sites.

A population-scale single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex provides a perspective of the transcriptomic landscape in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, and offers potential targets for therapeutic intervention.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex exhibits non-linear, cell-type-specific transcriptional trajectories characterized by dynamic remodelling during development, relative stability in midlife and selective molecular reactivation in late adulthood.

Single-nucleus transcriptomics across diverse populations is used to explore how genetic risk for brain disorders affects specific cell types, revealing previously hidden gene–trait associations and conserved, cell-type-specific mechanisms.

An evolutionarily conserved mitochondrial haem-sensing mechanism that predates the emergence of haemoglobin-based oxygen transport could have therapeutic value in iron deficiency disorders.

Experimentally replaying tumour evolution in divergent mouse strains reveals the importance of interactions between genetic ancestry and acquired cancer-driving mutations in shaping the earliest stages of cancer development.

M12 is a metabolically activated molecular glue that recruits diverse proteins to DCAF11 for ubiquitin-mediated degradation, revealing a glutathione-dependent mechanism that broadens targeted protein degradation across multiple substrates.

The RNA-binding protein ZFP36L2 mediates stress-adaptive plasticity in intestinal regeneration and colorectal cancer metastasis.

Probabilistic sequence encoding from language model embeddings within a generative AI framework enables protein miniaturization, modification and augmentation while maintaining native architecture and functional integrity.

Structural studies of Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) polymerase reveal the structural basis of CCHFV RNA synthesis and highlight druggable sites for designing both nucleoside antivirals and non-nucleoside antivirals.

Structural insights into the Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever virus polymerase reveal how the virus replicates.

The cryo‑EM structure of the Oryza sativa photosystem II–light harvesting complex II supercomplex in its native membrane reveals the intact plant photosystem architecture, retaining physiologically relevant proteins and lipids that are otherwise lost during purification.