Volume 646 Issue 8083, 2 October 2025

Governments have the right to decide how to spend money on science. Modelling shows that making instant cuts to grants without a plan or consultation is misconceived.

The authority created to safeguard the ocean floor now leans towards licensing its exploitation. Here’s how to reset the balance.

Outlining the trial-and-error processes that are involved in every research project could help others to become more efficient and paint a more honest picture of life as a researcher.

Experiments show that the bacterial component of fine particulate matter has a highly potent inflammatory effect.

The chemical make-up of crystals that formed from magma hint at an increase in the number of meteorites battering Earth’s surface.

Archival whaling data reveal a sex bias in the offspring of long female whales.

Gigantic plant’s stench is most powerful on the first night it blooms, all the better to draw carrion-loving pollinators.

During an announcement on Monday, the US president repeatedly advised people, ‘Don’t take Tylenol’, but scientists say that strong evidence between the medication and autism is lacking.

Preliminary results from a small trial offer the clearest evidence yet that the brain disease’s progression can be slowed.

Scientists used artificial intelligence to write coherent viral genomes, using them to synthesize bacteriophages capable of killing resistant strains of bacteria.

The annual awards are a celebration of weird but thought-provoking science.

Chatbots can reinforce delusional beliefs, and, in rare cases, users have experienced psychotic episodes.

Lunar minerals generate the rust mineral haematite when bombarded with high-energy oxygen particles, experiments show.

Maria Branyas Morera was the oldest person in the world when she died. Scientists analysed her genes, metabolism and more.

Critics slammed attempts by Google, Microsoft and Meta to speed up materials discovery. But behind the hype, there is progress.

Chuck the gadgets, the fads and the alarm. Circadian research reveals how important your body’s internal clock is to blissful slumber.

Decades of corporate control have shaped diets, harmed farmers and strained the planet — transforming the system will take collective action.

Creating international viral biosafety guidelines are key to clearing up confusion, regaining trust and ensuring that essential research continues.

Media technologies shape individuals’ sensitivity to the world around them. But are algorithms promoting what’s best for people?

Nature’s global survey of 3,785 doctoral students shows satisfaction has recovered from pandemic lows, but harassment and inadequate supervision remain widespread.

Despite being jetted by giant clams, Mei Lin Neo remains steadfast in her defence of marine species.

The causes of early-life eczema have been unclear, but evidence indicates that changes to fetal immune cells and sensory neurons during pregnancy play a key part.

Quantum sensors based on diamond promise robustness but have limited sensitivity. Generating quantum correlations in the material might be a solution.

Artificial intelligence is moving from being a mere tool to an active partner in decision-making, but when we offload misconduct to machines, who bears the blame?

Scientists try to explain bird behaviour, and a book delves into scientific paradoxes.

Cutting a pattern into a flat disc can transform it into a parachute capable of carrying small payloads, which might be used to deliver humanitarian aid

When enzymes require rescue strategies to complete progression through their reaction, but natural safety nets fail, disease states can ensue.

A revised ‘Doughnut’ providing a visual assessment of trends in social deprivation and planetary degradation over the past two decades shows more than doubling of global GDP accompanied by accelerating ecological overshoot but only a modest reduction in human deprivation.

The XRISM Resolve spectrum of the galactic neutron star X-ray binary, GX 13+1, reveals one of the densest winds ever seen in absorption lines.

Analysis of samples from the asteroid Ryugu provide evidence of late fluid flow in a carbonaceous asteroid, indicating that such bodies may have retained two to three times more water than previously thought.

The experimental demonstration of many-body signal amplification in a solid-state, room-temperature quantum sensor is reported.

An ensemble of spins from nitrogen–vacancy centres in diamonds is prepared in a spin-squeezed state.

Two-qubit operations exceeding 99% fidelity have been demonstrated by silicon devices made with standard semiconductor tooling in a 300-mm foundry environment.

A thin planar disc designed with appropriately patterned cuts transforms itself, due to air flow effects, into an effective parachute exhibiting good positional stability, regardless of its initial orientation.

Cross-linkable co-SAMs improve hole-selective SAM stability, preventing defects and thermal degredation in perovskite solar cells, enabling 26.92% efficiency with high heat durability, and guiding the design of more efficient and durable solar cells.

Using ¹⁹F nuclear magnetic resonance to study LiF–LiH solid solutions revealed that it is present in the solid–electrolyte interphase of lithium metal batteries and confirms the heterogeneous nature of LiF in such interphases.

A two-phase machine-learning-based tool making use of high-throughput experimentation is introduced to examine the connections between chemical and protein sequence space and predict productive biocatalytic reactions among substrate and enzyme pairs.

A plate-based assay called CRAFTseq has been developed that uses ‘multi-omic’ single-cell RNA sequencing and direct genotyping of CRISPR edits to test the functional effects of genetic variants on cell state and function.

People cheat more when they delegate tasks to artificial intelligence, and large language models are more likely than humans to comply with unethical instructions—a risk that can be minimized by introducing prohibitive, task-specific guardrails.

In Drosophila, the physical structure of the eye has a key role in the directional tuning of motion-sensitive neurons, showing how navigational behaviour is tightly associated with anatomy.

Individual boutons on mouse corticostriatal axons exhibit differential selectivity for rewarded and unrewarded movements during motor learning, and the proportion of reward-responsive boutons increases.

Cultivation of tropical soil microorganisms combined with physiological experiments and bioinformatics analyses identify a family of clade III lactonase-type nitrous oxide reductases with low sequence identity but high 3D structural similarity to known nitrous oxide reductases.

Prenatal stress triggers molecular dysregulations in fetal neuroimmune circuits, leading to altered mast cell and sensory neuron function, which predisposes offspring to develop eczema in response to otherwise harmless mechanical friction after birth.

Epstein–Barr virus infection generates a neuroinvasive B cell subset, which recruits activated T cells to the central nervous system, promoting multiple sclerosis.

Chronic alcohol use in humans and mice downregulates small intestinal mAChR4 and reduces goblet-cell-associated antigen passage formation, disrupting antimicrobial immunity.

A study presents ALPACA, a computational method for inferring clone- and allele-specific copy numbers of individual clones from multi-sample bulk DNA-sequencing data, and demonstrates its use to study metastasis trajectories.

APC/C activity is transiently inhibited to generate a pulse of glycolysis that is required for mammalian cell cycle entry.

A study reveals progressive cohesin loading and a hypertranscription state responsible for the formation of genic cohesin islands at active regulatory genes in mouse embryos, highlighting an interplay between chromatin architecture and transcription as they are established for the first time.

In mammals, the enzyme TGDS produces UDP-4-keto-6-deoxyglucose, which binds to the catalytic pocket of UDP-xylose synthase, thereby regenerating the essential NAD⁺ cofactor of UDP-xylose synthase in conditions of low NAD⁺.

The evolutionary emergence of a nested fibrillar centre–dense fibrillar component may have optimized pre-rRNA processing.

Structural insights into ultrafast Ca²⁺ transport by plasma membrane Ca²⁺-ATPases are provided, highlighting an essential role for PtdIns(4,5)P₂ dynamics.