Volume 652 Issue 8108, 2 April 2026

Even when artificial-intelligence tools aid individuals’ decision-making, they can quietly de-skill whole professions by narrowing how uncertainties and values are debated.

As humans, we must be intentional about whether, and how, we explore space.

A programme that offers scans to smokers between the ages of 55 and 74 detects a large number of early-stage lung tumours.

Low levels of radioactive strontium and caesium are emanating from a pipe on the wreck of the Komsomolets.

Data from almost 700 people show that biomarkers that change at a slower pace are markers of longevity.

Data gathered during a 1,200-kilometre polar trek show where PFAS levels are the highest.

Measurements of Earth’s energy input and output reveals that the planet is more out of balance than ever before.

Repeated cloning from a single mouse failed after 58 generations. Researchers say harmful DNA changes are to blame.

Physicists have succeeded for the first time in transporting the most expensive and most volatile substance on Earth: antimatter.

Technique that inserts the genome of one bacterial species into the ‘dead’ cells of another could open doors for synthetic biologists.

Engineered tissue could eventually be used for children born with gaps in their alimentary canal, or for adults whose muscles have been damaged by cancer.

Study of one US university shows grades rising for master’s and PhD students over the past two decades.

UK government announces multibillion-pound science investments — but what impact will this have on the global race in these fields?

Radiologists and large language models alike have a hard time picking out real medical images from fake ones.

Some data suggest that boys and young men are struggling with school, health and masculinity. But does talk of a male crisis further sideline women and girls?

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

An essay series by specialists in evolutionary biology, philosophy and more examines the ‘paradox of the organism’.

The environmentalist founded the field of co-evolution, and warned that rapid human expansion would cause biodiversity collapse and famine.

Following nature’s patterns, not fighting them, is the way forward for the built environment.

Psychologist Brian Nosek’s latest work indicates that many results in the social sciences don’t stand up to immediate scrutiny. But that’s the beginning of a conversation, not the end, he explains to Nature.

Anne Poelina gives first authorship to a source with deep knowledge about water — the river itself.

AI-powered robotic tools are muscling in on tasks typically done by humans. What does the future hold?

A two-pronged strategy directs drug-delivering nanoparticles to the pancreas — and shows promise in animal models of serious pancreatic diseases.

Entanglement between ions connected by 10 kilometres of optical fibre is a step towards large-scale quantum communications networks.

How the skin enables immune defences is not fully clear. Now a pathway has been found in skin cells that boosts the production of antibodies to protect the whole body.

A curious species of rabbit is detected in the lab, and bullfinches learn the art of primrose eating, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

A catalyst with two cobalt components potentially opens the way to sustainable processes for manufacturing light olefins — key ingredients for making plastics and detergents.

Infected plants assemble immune-protein complexes on cell membranes to induce defence responses and cell death. Some such complexes can form large ring-like clusters.

Three experts discuss lessons learnt from a large-scale dissection of the reproducibility, analytical robustness and replicability of published results.

Long-lived trapped-ion entanglement over 10 km of spooled fibre reaches the threshold where establishment exceeds loss, providing a critical building block for scalable quantum repeaters.

A fully automated methodology based on rubrics capturing a broad range of cognitive and intellectual demands is illustrated using LLMs and tasks, demonstrating a new way to evaluate the capabilities of AI systems and anticipate their performance.

Bistable superlattice switching between two lattice configurations with sharply contrasting periodicities has been observed in monolayer TaIrTe₄, a dual quantum spin Hall insulator.

An integrated lithium niobate–semiconductor platform generates topological soliton frequency combs on-chip, enabling turn-key, dispersion-agnostic comb sources without high-Q resonators or complex stabilization.

Dissociative ionization of H₂ molecules by the combination of a phase-locked attosecond laser pair and a few-cycle NIR laser shows that ion–photoelectron entanglement influences electronic coherence in H₂⁺, allowing control over the degree of entanglement by varying the delay between the pulses.

A set of hydroxy promoters physically mixed with cobalt oxides for syngas to light olefins conversion using Fischer–Tropsch synthesis is shown to boost catalyst performance as well as simplifying the process and increasing sustainability.

A phosphine–photoredox catalyst system promotes intermolecular Markovnikov hydroamination of unactivated terminal alkenes with numerous classes of N–H azoles..

Comparing line-by-line transfer simulations using the radiation code GRTcode with regressions against satellite-observed ongoing longwave radiation shows that instantaneous longwave radiative forcing from well-mixed greenhouse gases has increased by 3.69 ± 0.07 W m⁻² since 1850.

In-flight observations show that the use of lean-burn combustion succeeds in reducing soot emissions from aircraft—yet contrail ice crystals still form and nucleate on volatile particles.

At present, only 13.4% of the global land surface meets the World Meteorological Organization requirements for annual precipitation monitoring.

A study of reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences finds higher reproducibility among more recent papers and papers from journals that require data sharing.

When 100 social and behavioural science claims were examined, 34% of reanalyses closely matched the original results, with 74% reaching the same conclusion, revealing limited robustness of single-path analyses and the need to address analytical uncertainty.

A large-scale study on the replicability of claims from social and behavioural science journals reports that about half of the results replicate in the same patterns as the original study.

Robustness checks and reproduction of analyses with existing and updated data based on 110 articles in economics and political science journals with data and code-sharing requirements found high levels of robustness and reproducibility and determined that robustness was not dependent on author characteristics or data availability.

A cortical premotor network in HVC, once initiated, can sustain and regulate the sequential production of zebra finch song syllables without major extrinsic inputs.

Longitudinal tracking of individual head-direction cells in the post-subiculum of freely moving mice reveals a cell population structure that shifts subtly with exposure to different environments but otherwise remains highly stable.

The dual GLP-1 and glucagon receptor co-agonist mazdutide is a promising therapeutic option for type 2 diabetes (T2D) treatment, providing clinically meaningful glycaemic control and weight reduction in Chinese adults with T2D.

The results of a clinical trial of mazdutide, a dual glucagon and GLP-1 receptor agonist, in the context of type 2 diabetes show that it could hold promise as an add-on therapy to conventional oral anti-diabetic drugs.

Viral ribonucleoprotein–viral protein networks form pre-replication centres that nucleate viral factories and drive respiratory syncytial virus replication.

A Gifsy-1 prophage–encoded higher eukaryotes and prokaryotes nucleotide-binding protein, HepS, senses Siphoviridae infection, activates abortive defence by cleaving host transfer RNAs, blocks rival phages and avoids self-targeting via tail-tip variation.

Farnesyl pyrophosphate—a mevalonate pathway metabolic intermediate—is an endogenous alarmin that enhances IgG antibody responses through keratinocyte-derived IL-6 and CCL20.

Elucidation of fundamental pancreatic-targeted mechanisms enables the development of lipid nanoparticles for the precise delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics to the pancreas, highlighting their promising potential in the treatment of pancreatic diseases.

Selective ribosome profiling and biochemical approaches establish nascent polypeptide-associated complex (NAC) as a central co-translational chaperone integrating proteostasis, subcellular delivery and regulation of elongation kinetics during protein biogenesis.

The deep learning model STARLING can generate accurate ensembles of intrinsically disordered regions of proteins using only protein sequence as input.

SUMM2, a coiled-coil NLR, promotes the assembly of higher-order resistosome clusters to initiate cell death in plants.