Volume 656 Issue 8126, 6 August 2026

Diseases don’t stop at borders. Pandemics, climate change and conflicts demand a collective approach.

Textile made from fungal filaments can repair itself and is biodegradable.

Infernos ravaged continental expanses of ferns during mass extinction of land and sea animals.

A high-speed camera and underwater microphones help scientists to investigate a puzzle about bubbles.

A combination of drugs restores stem-cell function in mouse models of the blood disorder.

Forecasters predict that the monster climate pattern will combine with global warming to push global temperatures in 2027 to new heights.

A shift from nomadic lifestyles could have triggered linguistic diversity before it then declined rapidly.

The University of Oxford has already vaccinated its first clinical-trial participant. The study’s lead scientist, Teresa Lambe, tells Nature how the team was able to move so fast.

The model can modify existing proteins using a probability approach.

Two of the four are the first Chinese-born winners of the prize since 1982.

Chief US science adviser calls for a shake-up in funding while handing out grants to accelerate research with AI.

Nature reveals the studies that are mentioned most often in patent filings — and why.

Inspired by long-lived animals — and human centenarians — researchers are hunting for ways to enhance DNA repair and extend healthspan.

Books on parasitism and symbiosis inspire wonder at the strange ways in which species’ lives intertwine.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Fearless molecular biologist who revealed the workings of antibodies and memories.

Vessels propelled by atomic reactors have low emissions but create other hazards that need clear regulations.

Sustaining the region’s strong position in the life-sciences sector will require investment and education in bioengineering.

Struggling to stay focused in the lab? Attention researchers offer some advice.

Adding iron to the ocean to stimulate carbon-absorbing phytoplankton could have ecological consequences that reach far beyond the intervention site.

Large language models could advance experiments in the social sciences, but fundamental questions remain about how they should be used to support research.

The nature of geological dynamics on Venus are fiercely debated — the planet’s steep rift valleys could be evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

Privacy attacks can reveal whether someone’s medical data was used to train an AI model. People who differ from the majority are the most vulnerable to such attacks.

Coupling between horizontal and vertical electric polarization enables an unconventional ferroelectric material to be controlled using standard device geometry.

A bacterial self-destruct mechanism has been repurposed as a potential therapy, selectively eliminating diseased cells — including tumour cells in mouse models of cancer.

A fast, low-error entangling gate for dual-rail cavity erasure qubits preserves a strong error hierarchy, advancing scalable quantum error correction with substantially improved fault-tolerant performance.

Cryo-STEM reveals that SrTiO₃ forms periodic polar nanodomains below 105 K, but these fragment below 40 K, linking quantum paraelectricity to nanoscale polar ordering and disordering.

Transport measurements show multiple magnetic-field-enhanced and field-induced superconducting states in rhombohedral graphene, providing a clean, tunable platform for studying unconventional superconductivity and topological quantum states.

Perpendicular switching of the polarization state in the layered ferroelectric Bi₄Ti₃O₁₂ is demonstrated by means of trilinear coupling, allowing manipulation of the in-plane polarization component with an out-of-plane electric field.

An insulator-free topological waveguide architecture comprising four inequivalent photonic valley half-semimetals arranged in a parallel, cyclic configuration and stacked very close to one another demonstrates robust, multi-lane, unidirectional light transport with 100% spatial efficiency.

By integrating a solution-grown perovskite microplate with chemically inert single-walled carbon nanotube electrodes and embedding them into an optical microcavity, the new microdevices can achieve polariton lasing under a constant direct current at 8 K.

A bottom-up synthesis strategy creates lanthanide MXenes (Ln₂CT₂) that combine semiconducting behaviour with ferromagnetism, offering a promising new class of two-dimensional materials for spintronic applications.

A simple organic catalyst enables direct alternating copolymerization of CO₂ with bicycloalkanes to produce high-performance polyesters that can be selectively depolymerized and recycled in a closed-loop lifecycle.

A designed ligand enables palladium-catalysed remote γ-C(sp³)–H activation in aliphatic carboxylic acids, providing efficient access to valuable γ-lactones and bioactive molecules from simple feedstock chemicals.

A process-rich global biogeochemical model is used to determine the trade-offs between carbon dioxide removal efficiency and ecosystem impacts in ten ocean ocean biomes following ocean iron fertilization.

Large language models can be used to estimate the results of social science experiments about as accurately as a group of human forecasters—even for experiments published after the models were trained—although they tended to overestimate effect sizes.

Exquisite early Cambrian fossils of Protomelission gatehousei and Dayingomelission hexaclitia preserve soft-tissue anatomy and skeletal microstructure, confirming that these taxa are definitively bryozoans and indicating a deeper origin for the Bryozoa than was first apparent.

Single-cell mapping of cis-expression quantitative trait loci in inflammatory bowel disease revealed distal, enhancer-enriched variants detected at the cell-type level more frequently co-localize with genome-wide association study loci than those identified at the tissue level.

Genome-wide analyses indicate that accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations, a hallmark of ageing, may be caused by cryptic replication errors, which act as passenger mutations that eventually become detectable with age owing to age-related somatic mosaicism, rather than oxidative damage.

Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.

Using single-nucleus multi-omic sequencing, diverse autism spectrum disorder-linked gene mutations converge on transient, stage-specific disruptions in early brain development, and highlight sex-specific gene expression alterations.

A small-peptide signalling axis involving RGF family members controls resilience to cold stress in tomatoes and rice; modulating this pathway prevents cold-induced yield losses.

The universal cell embedding foundation model learns to capture the organization and variation of cells by training on 36 million cells from hundreds of experiments, dozens of tissues and eight species.

AI models for medical diagnostics are vulnerable to membership inference attacks.

Mammalian cancer cells carrying mutations in several genes, including those encoding currently undruggable proteins, such as TP53, can be targeted selectively for cellular destruction using CRISPR–Cas12a2-mediated chromatin shredding.

Liver steatosis increases formation of replacement liver metastases by increasing MYC stability through acetylation, which increases proline synthesis and collagen production.

ATG8 conjugation on damaged lysosomes triggers rapid assembly of a protein complex containing TFG, which directs lysosomal membrane repair by recruiting ESCRT proteins to sites of damage.

A spatially resolved map of the human proteome across a variety of healthy tissues and cancers provides wide-ranging insights in developmental biology and oncology, and could aid the identification of therapeutic targets and development of treatments for cancer.

 By pairing two neural networks in an iterative optimization algorithm, small-molecule binding proteins can be designed from scratch with high accuracy, affinity and success rates, showing promise for applications in drug delivery and sequestration.

Structures of the distinct binding poses of three agonistic peptide toxins—bullet-ant-derived toxin δ-paraponeritoxin-Pc1a, cone snail ι-conotoxin RXIA and the globular β-scorpion toxin Cn2—on the human Na_v1.6–β1 channel complex illustrate a diversity in binding poses and mechanisms of action.