Volume 645 Issue 8082, 25 September 2025

Attacks on US academic institutions miss the point that they generate wealth for society. Tapping even some of that could keep innovation going.

The high cost of running educational laboratories is hindering industrial progress. An innovative path forwards must be charted.

Device can place an emergency breathing tube in the trachea faster than medical personnel can, even those with extensive training.

The TESS exoplanet-hunting satellite accidentally captures images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

Regimens that sideline animal products are associated with both environmental and health benefits, according to study of nearly 24,000 people.

Remains buried in Asia in a crouching position are thought to be oldest known examples of intentionally mummified burials.

A decade after the pair of observatories first detected gravitational waves, researchers are drawing up ambitious plans for its successors.

Orbiters can pick up gravitational shifts thousands of kilometres below the surface.

Specialist machine-learning models are helping researchers to transcribe centuries-old handwritten records.

Time crystals, a state of matter once thought physically impossible, could soon be on a banknote.

A Spanish foundation using an artificial-intelligence tool to screen grant applications says it makes the peer-review process more efficient, but other researchers say it’s a breakdown in trust.

A report by the panel downplays the ills of global warming and was key to White House efforts to revoke federal authority to regulate climate policies.

Laser method could help to pinpoint the age of many fossils, but some palaeontologists say further research is needed to verify the technique.

More students than ever are studying across international borders, but where and what they learn is shifting.

Lab-made organoids that mimic reproductive tissues could point to treatments for common conditions such as pre-eclampsia and endometriosis.

An informative and highly accessible book discusses climate change, its impacts and challenges to mitigating global warming through a compelling personal account.

An ambitious analysis of a vast trove of data from 800 societies around the world concludes that there’s safety in numbers.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

What and who universities are for has changed considerably since the Second World War, leaving long-standing institutions ill-equipped to cope with current financial and political challenges.

Societies are evolving, and so must higher education. Researchers describe initiatives that can help to create stimulating and nurturing environments fit for today’s learning landscape.

Some innovative higher-education institutions are reimagining pedagogy by prioritizing local needs over research and international student recruitment. Anna McKie visits one of them.

Gene-editing tools transform cells into record-keepers, capturing hidden timelines of health and disease.

Johannes Huber builds an understanding of logs using medical-imaging technology, to improve future wood-harvesting methods.

A technique that spontaneously detaches a 2D material from the substrate on which it was grown creates high-quality nanoscale electronic devices.

Analyses of pelvis development in humans and other primates reveal how changes in bone-patterning processes helped humans to gain the ability to walk upright.

A genome sequence and single-cell atlas of a marine worm species point towards bursts of gene emergence, duplication and loss as the drivers of lineage-specific body traits.

Exploring multidimensional ‘landscapes’ of chemical reactions provides rich insights into how they work, and might even enable the discovery of new forms of reactivity.

Differences in protection against ferroptosis explain why men and postmenopausal women are more susceptible than premenopausal women to acute kidney injury.

How the five-fold symmetrical bodies of starfish and other echinoderms evolved is a mystery. New evidence fills in a key piece of the puzzle.

Most studies on how exercise affects the survival of people with cancer have been observational. A clinical trial provides compelling evidence of the benefits of physical activity.

The rise of green industrial policy is transforming decarbonization efforts; the implications for policymaking and global spillovers are discussed, as well as research needs.

The Biodiversity Cell Atlas aims to create comprehensive single-cell molecular atlases across the eukaryotic tree of life, which will be phylogenetically informed, rely on high-quality genomes and use shared standards to facilitate comparisons across species.

A temporal-signal processor based on two in-materia computing hardware platforms—reconfigurable nonlinear-processing units (RNPUs) and analogue in-memory computing (AIMC)—is used for both feature extraction and classification, advancing compactness, efficiency, and performance of heterogeneous smart edge devices.

A new form of momentum-selective electron energy-loss spectroscopy enables the element-resolved imaging of frequency- and symmetry-dependent vibrational anisotropies with atomic resolution.

Resonant inelastic X-ray scattering can be used to measure the spin current carried by magnons in the presence of temperature gradients across a magnetic insulator.

An electrostatic-repulsion-enabled advanced transfer technique based on ammonia solution is introduced for separating van der Waals thin-film materials from their substrates, demonstrating suitability for its use in the complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) industry.

Amino acids possess a new and broad colloidal property: they stabilize patchy nanoscale colloids, such as proteins, by adsorbing onto their surfaces through weak interactions.

A low-cost robotic platform using mainly optical detection to quantify yields of products and by-products allows the analysis of multidimensional chemical reaction hyperspaces and networks much faster than is possible by human chemists.

 A bifunctional iminophosphorane-catalysed, stereo-controlled deconjugation for the synthesis of highly enantioenriched alkylidenecyclopropanes is described, alongside computational studies elucidating the mechanistic pathway and origins of diastereoselectivity and enantioselectivity.

Seismological and geodetic data are used together with a machine learning earthquake catalogue to reconstruct magma migration before and during the 2025 volcano–tectonic crisis at Santorini volcano, indicating a coupling between Santorini and Kolumbo.

Time-series data from tropical forests tracking weather and declines in arthropod diversity and function show that fluctuations in species were largely dependent on their El Niño sensitivity and ecological specialization.

The human pelvis exhibits distinct spatiotemporal ossification patterns and an ilium cartilage growth plate that is shifted perpendicularly compared with those of other mammals and non-human primates—two key adaptations that underlie bipedalism.

Genomic, single-cell transcriptomic and epigenetic analyses show that chaetognaths, following extensive gene loss in the gnathiferan lineage, relied on newly evolved genes and lineage-specific tandem duplications, not caused by a whole-genome duplication event, to shape their distinctive body plan.

Wireless large-scale recordings of neural activity in freely flying fruit bats reveal that hippocampal ensemble properties are associated with sensorimotor rhythms, and that previous models of replay and sequential dynamics, based on experiments in rodents, might not be applicable to other species.

Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of mouse hypothalamus and behavioural experiments show that specific hypothalamic networks regulate conflicting feeding versus parenting behaviours of female mice.

Shared inter-brain neural dynamics, reflecting aspects of social interaction including self and other’s behaviours, arise in GABAergic neurons of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex of socially interacting mice, as well as in the neurons of socially interacting artificial intelligence agents.

Commensal Candida albicans enhances the virulence and dissemination of Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium.

17β-oestradiol establishes an anti-ferroptotic state in female kidney tubules.

A single dose of an adeno-associated virus vector encoding an HIV-1 broadly neutralizing antibody given shortly after birth results in persistent antibody expression and protection from infection in rhesus macaque models of human HIV-1 transmission through breastfeeding and sexual intercourse.

The enzyme ABHD18 is shown to have a key role in cardiolipin metabolism in mitochondria, offering a potential route for a small-molecule treatment of the rare genetic disease Barth syndrome.

Orthogonal chimeric receptors containing intracellular domains for IL-4R, IL-20R, IL-22R and GCSFR reprogram T cells to promote distinct natural and synthetic cell states with functional and therapeutic implications.

An NNMT inhibitor reduces tumour burden and metastasis in multiple mouse cancer models and restores immune checkpoint blockade efficacy by decreasing cancer-associated-fibroblast-mediated recruitment of myeloid-derived suppressor cells and reinvigorating CD8⁺ T cell activation.

An ultra-high-resolution chromatin organization map of E. coli, using Micro-C, reveals intricate chromatin structures involved in the silencing of horizontally transferred genes and those associated with active operons.

PARP inhibitor treatment triggers histone release from the chromatin in cancer cells; consequently, targeting the histone chaperone NASP renders cells vulnerable to PARP inhibition.

This paper explores how voltage-gated potassium channels can plug the pore to prevent the conductance of ions during inactivation.