Featured
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News |
Will your study change the world? This AI tool predicts the impact of your research
A tool called Funding the Frontier visualizes all the downstream impacts of funding — and predicts which studies will have the biggest societal impact.
- Brian Owens
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Correspondence |
Make cities more walkable, in the real world and in virtual reality
- Mohammad Javad Koohsari
- & Andrew T. Kaczynski
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Comment |
Technology leaders should ‘pay back’ society to support the common good
Media technologies shape individuals’ sensitivity to the world around them. But are algorithms promoting what’s best for people?
- Abilio Almeida
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News & Views |
AI uses medical records to accurately predict onset of disease 20 years into the future
An artificial-intelligence model trained on health-care records uses a person’s medical history to estimate whether and when any of more than 1,200 diseases might arise.
- Yonghui Wu
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Career Q&A |
Python, the movie! The programming language’s origin story comes to the silver screen
The creator of the NumPy and SciPy libraries reflects on their supporting role in the story of Python, now the subject of a documentary.
- Jeffrey M. Perkel
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News & Views |
Robotic system takes chemistry into hyperspace
Exploring multidimensional ‘landscapes’ of chemical reactions provides rich insights into how they work, and might even enable the discovery of new forms of reactivity.
- William E. Robinson
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Perspective |
The Biodiversity Cell Atlas: mapping the tree of life at cellular resolution
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.
- Arnau Sebé-Pedrós
- , Amos Tanay
- & Bo Wang
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Article
| Open Access
The formation and propagation of human Robertsonian chromosomes
Analysis of human Robertsonian chromosomes originating from 13, 14 and 21 reveal that they result from breaks at the SST1 macrosatellite DNA array and recombination between homologous sequences surrounding SST1.
- Leonardo Gomes de Lima
- , Andrea Guarracino
- & Jennifer L. Gerton
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News |
Journals infiltrated with ‘copycat’ papers that can be written by AI
Tools such as ChatGPT can be used to generate almost-identical research papers that pass standard plagiarism checks. Hundreds are thought to have been published.
- Miryam Naddaf
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News |
Can AI chatbots trigger psychosis? What the science says
Chatbots can reinforce delusional beliefs, and, in rare cases, users have experienced psychotic episodes.
- Rachel Fieldhouse
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Editorial |
Bring us your LLMs: why peer review is good for AI models
Deepseek’s R1 model has been peer reviewed. Others should follow the firm’s example.
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News & Views |
People are more likely to cheat when they delegate tasks to AI
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?
- Shoko Suzuki
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News & Views |
AI can learn to show its workings through trial and error
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.
- Daphne Ippolito
- & Yiming Zhang
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News |
Which diseases will you have in 20 years? This AI accurately predicts your risks
A modified large language model called Delphi-2M analyses a person’s medical records and lifestyle to provide risk estimates for more than 1,000 diseases.
- Gemma Conroy
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News |
Secrets of DeepSeek AI model revealed in landmark paper
First peer-reviewed study shows how a Chinese start-up firm made the market-shaking LLM for US$300,000.
- Elizabeth Gibney
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News Feature |
AI is helping to decode animals’ speech. Will it also let us talk with them?
The complexity of vocal communication in some primates, whales and birds might approach that of human language.
- Rachel Fieldhouse
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News |
‘Revolutionary’ AI tools rescue old weather data to improve climate models
Specialist machine-learning models are helping researchers to transcribe centuries-old handwritten records.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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Outlook |
Ready or not, the digital afterlife is here
Developers of griefbots say that they help people by allowing them to commune with recreations of the dead, but others say that the technology is fraught with danger.
- Tammy Worth
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News Explainer |
World's most energy-efficient AI supercomputer comes online
JUPITER, the European Union’s new exascale supercomputer, is 100% powered by renewable energy. Can it compete in the global AI race?
- Jonathan O’Callaghan
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Editorial |
Synthetic data can benefit medical research — but risks must be recognized
Artificially generated data can help to train AI models when real data are scant, but more focus is needed on validating the results.
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Correspondence |
Use computing royalties to kick-start biodiversity fund
- Ralf C. Buckley
- , Charles Lawson
- & Linsheng Zhong
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World View |
AI chatbots are already biasing research — we must establish guidelines for their use now
The academic community has looked at how artificial-intelligence tools help researchers to write papers, but not how they distort the literature scientists choose to cite.
- Zhicheng Lin
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Correspondence |
AI-agent ethics should consider sentient non-human animals
- Borbala Foris
- & Jean-Loup Rault
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News |
AI-powered brain device allows paralysed man to control robotic arm
The human user and AI have shared autonomy and constantly interact to complete tasks.
- Rachel Fieldhouse
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News |
Hundreds of suspicious journals flagged by AI screening tool
System that searches for signs of bad practice could help to weed out questionable titles.
- Miryam Naddaf
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Outlook |
AI versus skin cancer: the future of dermatology diagnosis
England’s health service is trialling an artificial-intelligence tool that can identify skin cancer as accurately as a physician.
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Article
| Open Access
Neural networks of the mouse visceromotor cortex
The dorsal peduncular area of the mouse brain functions as a network hub that integrates diverse cortical and thalamic inputs to regulate neuroendocrine and autonomic responses.
- Houri Hintiryan
- , Muye Zhu
- & Hong-Wei Dong
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Article
| Open Access
One-shot design of functional protein binders with BindCraft
BindCraft, an open-source, automated pipeline for de novo protein binder design with experimental success rates of 10–100%, leverages AlphaFold2 weights to generate binders with nanomolar affinity without the need for high-throughput screening.
- Martin Pacesa
- , Lennart Nickel
- & Bruno E. Correia
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Comment |
Net zero needs AI — five actions to realize its promise
Without artificial-intelligence technologies, balancing human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions with carbon removals by 2050 is out of reach. Action in five areas is needed to keep this goal alive.
- Amy Luers
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News Feature |
What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks
Researchers argue over whether ‘novel’ AI-generated works use others’ ideas without credit.
- Ananya
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Career Column |
Finding your academic voice: faster, healthier writing with AI speech recognition
Voice-to-text tools powered by artificial intelligence can make life easier for academics by replacing the keyboard with dictation and transcription.
- Zhicheng Lin
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Technology Feature |
Beyond AlphaFold: how AI is decoding the grammar of the genome
Scientists are seeking to decipher the role of non-coding DNA in the human genome, helped by a suite of artificial-intelligence tools.
- Jeffrey M. Perkel
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News |
AI helps assemble ‘brain’ of future quantum computer
As a demonstration, artificial-intelligence system helps to make a miniature, high-speed animation of physicists’ favourite feline.
- Jenna Ahart
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News |
A mind-reading brain implant that comes with password protection
A brain–computer interface decodes in near-real time the imagined speech of people who have difficulty enunciating words.
- Gemma Conroy
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Article
| Open Access
Clone copy number diversity is linked to survival in lung cancer
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.
- Piotr Pawlik
- , Kristiana Grigoriadis
- & Nicholas McGranahan
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Obituary |
Margaret Boden obituary: cognitive scientist who explored how machines might emulate human imagination
Pioneering artificial-intelligence scholar, whose influential work bridged cognitive science, philosophy and computer science.
- Joanna Bryson
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News |
AI content is tainting preprints: how moderators are fighting back
Preprint servers are seeing a rise in submissions seemingly produced by paper mills or with help from AI tools.
- Traci Watson
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Nature Video |
Why did researchers stick a duck to a rock? To show off their super glue
Researchers have developed an AI-enhanced hydrogel capable of sticking even in wet, salty conditions.
- Nick Petri�� Howe
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Nature Podcast |
Underwater glue shows its sticking power in rubber duck test
Adhesive shows promise in tricky salt-water conditions — plus, a hidden microbial ecosystem living within trees.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Technology Feature |
Is your AI benchmark lying to you?
Artificial intelligence models are too often assessed against flawed goals — a stumbling block for progress.
- Michael Brooks
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News & Views |
AI learns from nature to design super-adhesive gels that work underwater
The protein glues used by organisms to cling to wet surfaces have informed an AI-supported strategy to discover highly adhesive hydrogels.
- Laura Russo
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News |
OpenAI launches reasoning LLM that you can download and tweak
One version of the gpt-oss large language model can run on a laptop, and performs nearly as well as the company’s most powerful models.
- Elizabeth Gibney
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Article
| Open Access
Parent-of-origin effects on complex traits in up to 236,781 individuals
A novel multistep strategy reveals how parent-of-origin effects shape complex traits in large-scale biobanks.
- Robin J. Hofmeister
- , Théo Cavinato
- & Zoltán Kutalik
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Correspondence |
Don’t train medical AI on patients’ data without their knowledge
- Toral Banerjee
- , Rongyu Lin
- & Mengyuan Shi
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Career Column |
Version control: how I combat the rise of generative AI in the classroom
I was worried that ChatGPT was composing my students’ essays. Looking at the writing process step by step can combat this and has other benefits, too.
- Nikita Bezrukov
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