Volume 656 Issue 8127, 13 August 2026

Questions of public trust can be addressed only through better communication and research that meets society’s interests.

Without strong standards and smart oversight, artificial intelligence risks eroding the foundations of higher education.

Specialized immune cells found in the brain, known as microglia, reach out to neurons in female mice that were given a dose of ketamine anaesthetic.

Measuring the deformation of a surface hit by a falling droplet offers insights into water’s erosive power.

Modified baker’s yeast can produce a precursor for a drug that is usually derived from an endangered plant and its relatives.

Vehicles are less likely to smash into deer on the road where the big cats are on patrol.

Countries such as Spain and France can expect fire regimes more like those of California as climate change favours hot, dry conditions, scientists suggest.

The technology is proving adept at finding faults in decades-old papers and reference databases.

Researchers are looking for ways to extract the metal from underground reservoirs that use less water in the process.

Four independent research teams report big advances in devices built with the underestimated quantum-bit technology, including lower error rates.

Reactivation of typically harmless anelloviruses, in particular, seems to be linked with developing long COVID, study finds.

Megaproject involving hundreds of sites is cataloguing rainforest insects from the ground to the canopy.

The US pilot programme will provide financial support for four years to more than 250 students, who will gain industry experience.

Jaw-dropping patient videos and miraculous testimonials ignited a frenzy in China over a technique that aims to improve drainage from the brain. Now it is entering trials worldwide.

The Amazon rainforest might be closer to a tipping point than scientists thought. Some fear that droughts and fire could nudge it into irreversible decline.

Global conventions have mainly overlooked the psychological and social impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Here’s how to change that.

Publicly available AI models and local infrastructure can reduce AI’s environmental footprint while giving researchers greater control over the tools they use.

Four researchers born after 1997 describe how they stay motivated and cultivate resilience during difficult times.

Job transitions are challenging, but good communication and planning will help.

Naked mole rats live in colonies characterized by having a single breeding queen. It emerges that a queen-associated chemical helps to maintain this reproductive hierarchy.

Dust can tint the cosmos red, but a compact astronomical object is coloured by turbulent gas around a black hole.

Where to spot a basking shark and a gloomy tale about an abandoned telescope, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

A ketogenic diet promotes tumour growth in the small intestine in susceptible mice. In people, diet advice might need to be tailored to individual cancer risks.

AlphaFold3 predictions of the molecular contacts made by a genome-editing enzyme have been used to improve the enzyme’s selectivity for target DNA sequences.

The Review describes shared ancient, conserved mechanisms between human antiviral immunity and bacterial anti-phage systems, outlining universal principles of pathogen sensing, signalling and effector function that reveal common rules governing host–virus interactions across life.

A framework comprising four dimensions—autonomy, efficacy, goal complexity and generality—is proposed for characterizing AI agents, supporting the construction of agentic profiles for the effective governance of different AI agents.

Observations of an unusual cosmic-dawn source illuminate how early supermassive black holes may have grown rapidly in a gas-enshrouded state; such enshrouded black holes may lie at the heart of the 'little red dots'.

Shocks in the eastern outskirts of the Helix Nebula, detected in Hα emission with the MOTHRA telescope, provide evidence for the recycling of fragmented stellar ejecta into the surrounding gas.

The piezochiral effect, a new member of the family of strain-responsive functionalities alongside piezoelectricity and piezomagnetism, is introduced, enabling control of chirality through mechanical strain, with future applications in photonics, spintronics, biosensing and quantum information.

A plasmonic metamaterial driven at terahertz frequencies achieves strong, ultrafast temporal modulation and shows a transition to the photonic time crystal regime with reduced plasmonic losses.

An ‘encapsulation epitaxy’ mechanism is used to grow air-stable, two-dimensional superconducting films at the interface of a 2D–3D hybrid substrate, holding promise for use in fabrication of superconducting quantum circuitry.

Electrodeposited self-assembled molecules improve perovskite solar cell stability and efficiency by forming dense, strongly anchored layers on indium tin oxide, enabling 26.8% laboratory-cell and 21.3% module efficiencies.

Operando optical microscopy shows avalanche-like lithium deintercalation (intercalation) processes as the dilute stages of graphite are emptied (filled), showing how local disorder governs phase-transition dynamics and ion transport in lithium-ion battery electrodes.

A new trigonal-phase Co₃O₄ manufactured using a vacuum-mediated molten-alkali mechanochemical method is described, demonstrating edge-shared octahedral coordination and achieving lower overpotential than spinel-type Co₃O₄ in the acidic oxygen evolution reaction, with reduced dissolution of cobalt.

A mild chemical process upcycles polyvinyl chloride waste into polyalphaolefin lubricants with tunable properties, offering an economical route to plastic recycling and improved carbon circularity.

Analyses of the relationship between taxon richness and multi-trophic ecosystem functioning across marine, lake, stream and soil ecosystems show that food web complexity underlies biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning.

Naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) queens produce isopropyl myristate, a low-volatility ester that high-ranking animals detect and avoid, which alters prolactin and progesterone in other females to suppress reproduction and preserve eusocial hierarchy.

Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.

Centromeric DNA repeat insertions and CENP-A chromatin assembly are identified as genomic signatures that preserve telomere integrity in ALT cancer cells.

The populations of CRHR2-expressing neurons in the lateral septum of mice involved in threat-related behaviour in response to environmental challenges are defined.

Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the higher-order syntactic structure of phrases and sentences.

High-resolution spatial transcriptome analysis of a human embryo at Carnegie stage 6 reveals three distinct developmental trajectories from the epiblast towards amnion, primitive streak and axial mesoderm, and detects the initiation of haematopoiesis before gastrulation, originating from hypoblast rather than epiblast.

SyeA was present in the Buchnera ancestor, is secreted into the host cytoplasm, is homologous to secreted effectors of bacterial pathogens and is essential for Buchnera transmission.

Chronic dietary cholesterol activates Ral GTPases, which promote LDLR internalization and lysosomal degradation through RalBP1–REPS1 and CTSA, thereby reducing cholesterol clearance, whereas CTSA inhibition restores LDLR function and may offer a therapeutic strategy for cardiovascular disease.

ContactSeek is an AlphaFold3-driven model that can improve the precision of genome-editing tools.

A combination of different manipulations in mouse models of spontaneous intestinal adenoma formation dissects the roles of systemic and epithelial ketogenesis versus dietary lipids in ketogenic diet-mediated intestinal tumorigenesis, highlighting the need for nuanced consideration of dietary strategies for cancer prevention.

A rice gene, CHPO, links chilling resilience with nitrogen-use efficiency, revealing a domestication-shaped regulatory mechanism that could guide breeding of climate-resilient, sustainable rice varieties.

Replication stress induces the formation of transient chromatin loops that enclose de novo heterochromatin-enriched stalled replication forks.

Alternate RNA decoding, an understudied process, leads to peptide sequence modifications that can have substantial functional effects on protein stability, tissue-specific proteomes and disease.

Cryogenic electron microscopy, chemical biology and electrophysiology are used to determine the structures and functional consequences of representative congenital myasthenic syndrome-associated mutant receptors with and without drugs, uncovering principles of pathogenesis and providing a framework for precision therapies.