Volume 658 Issue 8134, 1 October 2026

As AI content makes bad actors harder to spot, scrutiny of organizations must increase without reducing trust.

The UN’s climate loss and damage fund needs to consider how to make decisions about finance fairly and quickly, without disadvantaging low-resource nations.

From aviation to banking, high-risk industries are subject to independent oversight and meaningful penalties. AI companies should be no exception.

One-tonne cache of iron is the largest ever found — and enough to make roughly 500 swords.

University students who are highly motivated to watch sports online do not report higher participation in exercise.

The global decrease in atmospheric dust might be affecting Earth’s temperature.

Insects show off their adaptability by incorporating unfamiliar construction materials to build honey-storage vessels.

Nature examines whether the technology might spell the end for humans, and why AI companies are calling for a slowdown.

Affected Chinese companies adjusted their sources of knowledge to stay competitive.

A new system will help scientists to refine large language models for longevity research and clarify ‘biological’ age.

The European Union is easing its reliance on US space infrastructure — and seeking to grow its satellite and launch operations.

A battle of forces, driven by the motion of Earth’s core, can explain small variations in the planet’s rotation, study finds.

Gene-targeting treatments could be used to treat other people with rare forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

A boron phase prepared under pressure is a million times more conductive than chemists expected, and can be stretched.

Researchers are trying everything they can to help coral reefs to survive severe heat stress from climate change, including playing sounds underwater.

An elegant account of the physicist’s unusual life story highlights the relationships that inspired him.

Digital technologies increasingly shape everyday life. Computer scientist Francine Berman tells Nature that stronger safeguards are required to protect the public interest.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Funders, journals and universities must reward the creation of new scientific terrain, not just the efficient mining of old ground.

Use of e-cigarettes makes it more likely that young people will experience mental-health disorders and take up smoking. Governments must act.

Academics worldwide are rethinking their assessment approaches — from developing exams that artificial-intelligence tools can’t pass to sneaking hidden AI prompts into tasks to catch cheating students.

Gene-editing techniques could soon allow researchers to replace entire genes and engineer complex cellular circuits — if the systems can be delivered safely into cells.

Variations in day length that occur on multidecadal timescales are caused by gravitational coupling between Earth’s inner core and its solid mantle.

A landmark collection of bat genomes reveals fresh clues about the evolution of one of the world’s most unusual groups of mammals.

‘Liming’ to reduce soil acidity has long been considered a carbon dioxide source, but in North America’s largest river basin, it has resulted in net capture of atmospheric carbon.

Inhibitors of tyrosine kinase enzymes have been a cornerstone in precision cancer treatments. Now, targeted protein degraders could reshape therapeutic options.

Researchers quantify the economic damage caused by climate-change-related heat stress on the global workforce.

A map of fats across the whole mouse brain reveals a spatial architecture that differs from that seen in gene-expression and protein atlases.

Ageing reflects progressive decanalization of mammalian cell identity, driven by erosion of a regulatory grammar written during development.

Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desideratum of the field of strategic decision-making.

Two independent ¹⁷⁶Lu⁺ single-ion optical clocks achieve fractional frequency uncertainties near 10⁻¹⁹ and agree at 5.7 × 10⁻¹⁹, advancing precision timekeeping.

Observations of rhombohedral graphene on a WSe₂ substrate at varying temperature, magnetic field and current indicate the presence of regions of gate space with zero-resistance superconductivity alongside others with finite saturation resistance.

Atomically aligned 1H bilayer MoS₂ exhibits a direct band gap, enhanced excitonic emission and stronger valley polarization, establishing its potential for advanced optoelectronic and valleytronic applications.

Electroluminescent photoresists synthesized via atom transfer radical polymerization can be directly patterned by ultraviolet and electron-beam lithography, and used to fabricate monolithic, multicolour organic-light-emitting-diode micro-pixel arrays.

A passivating molecule and optimized light management enable perovskite/perovskite/silicon triple-junction solar cells to achieve certified efficiencies up to 32.22%, advancing scalable high-performance photovoltaics.

Tertiary benzylamines can be transformed from static scaffolds into programmable platforms for molecular diversification through catalytic remodelling of their C–N bonds.

A titanium-based platform for dialkyl ether synthesis inspired by natural cytochrome P450 enzyme catalysis overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches, potentially paving the way for construction of other inaccessible heteroatom bonds with pharmaceutical applications.

Century-scale records of agricultural liming and anthropogenic acidity inputs for the Mississippi River Basin show that agricultural liming has acted as a net carbon sink over the past century.

Multidecadal fluctuations in Earth’s length of day are shown to be driven by gravitational torque and resisted by electromagnetic and topographic forces, improving our understanding of the material properties and dynamics of Earth’s deep interior.

Aquatic invertebrates are exceptionally nutrient dense, supplying the equivalent annual vitamin B₁₂ and selenium requirements for over 5 billion people.

Early Cambrian Eoceras shaanxiense gen. et sp. nov. preserves septa and a segmented tube resembling a primordial siphuncle, extending cephalopod origins and revealing early assembly of chambered shells used for buoyancy regulation.

An updated phylogeny of bats is presented, based on new genome assemblies and many ancient fossils and including all known bat families.

Comparative and functional analyses of Myotis bats uncover unique patterns of adaptation in virus-interacting proteins and longevity-associated pathways, linking two hallmarks of bat biology.

Behaviour of human participants in a prey-pursuit task reflects dynamic blending of goal-specific control policies, with hippocampus estimating latent states, anterior cingulate cortex orchestrating policy switches and orbitofrontal cortex supplying value-based contextualization rather than driving continuous policy updating.

Mice spontaneously form leader and follower roles during cooperation, and the medial prefrontal cortex encodes these role dynamics and an egocentric social value map of the partner’s position.

Cell-type-specific opioid blockade in accumbal cholinergic interneurons abolishes morphine-reward learning without impairing analgesia and decouples morphine-evoked dopamine elevations from acetylcholine dips, suggesting pro-cholinergic strategies to limit early opioid reward acquisition.

Functional lymphoid structures within the skull bone marrow enable central nervous system immunosurveillance and shape immune responses to brain disease.

A spatial lipidomic atlas of the mouse brain reveals more than 500 biochemical territories that mirror cell types and connectivity, capture oligodendrocyte heterogeneity and ventricular zonation, and are remodelled during pregnancy.

The maternal gut microbiome is a predictor of infant eczema.

The synthetic-acid-responsive membranolytic peptide aMP_C16-CA₅₀ induces immunogenic membranolytic cell death in tumour cells, robustly potentiating immune checkpoint blockade therapy.

TRI-611 induces the degradation of ALK fusion proteins via a previously undescribed CRBN recruitment motif, and its preclinical anti-tumour activity highlights TRI-611 as a potential new way of treating ALK-positive non-small-cell lung cancer.

GOOSE enables the design and testing of thousands of disordered protein region sequences to reveal distinct sequence-to-function relationships.

A nanopore-based ‘chop and measure’ method sequences peptides at single-amino-acid resolution by using enzymatic digestion to progressively shorten the N terminus one residue at a time, together with repetitive N-terminus re-reading.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures show how IS621 bridge recombinase mediates DNA excision, explaining its natural preference for insertion and informing the design of programmable bridge-editing technologies.