Volume 651 Issue 8104, 5 March 2026

The UN Sustainable Development Goals represent a carefully-crafted road map for future human and planetary prosperity.

The Indus Waters Treaty withstood several armed conflicts and a huge loss of glaciers. It should serve as a blueprint for others.

The United States has slammed the brakes on legal routes to limit greenhouse gases. But cities, states and businesses can keep pushing for a cleaner environment.

Wastewater treatment tanks and other infrastructure emit larger amounts of greenhouse gases than reported.

Weak shock waves triggered by micro-cracks in the adhesive layer of tape cause it to screech when being unspooled from its roll.

A protein reinforces the blood–brain barrier, which becomes leaky with age.

Temnothorax kinomurai queens survive by invading the nests of a related ant species and co-opting its workers.

Regenerative medicines are headed for people with Parkinson’s disease or severe heart failure — but researchers are concerned about minimal clinical-trial data.

If confirmed, Jim O’Neill would be the first non-scientist or non-engineer to lead the agency, which is a big funder of US basic research.

A system of five models helps peer reviewers to write more constructive comments, but it is not yet known whether this strengthens the papers that are being reviewed.

The United Kingdom and Brazil have issued warnings about a possible link between GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and pancreatic inflammation, but the connection is murky.

Elderly people with frailty, which affects up to one-quarter of over-50s, increased their endurance after a single dose of stem cells.

Isomorphic Lab’s proprietary drug-discovery model is a major advance, but scientists developing open-source tools are left guessing how to achieve similar results.

Data-analysis and modelling positions are already becoming obsolete, but hands-on experimentalists can breathe easy for now.

Older people with exceptional memory have a surprisingly high number of young neurons, study finds.

Their makers claim they can detect dozens of cancer types — but some scientists say they could be missing many cancers or delivering the wrong diagnosis.

Fluorescent proteins with a quantum upgrade could offer unprecedented views inside cells.

Fresh archaeological evidence hints at what caused the disappearance of this thriving ancient Mesoamerican culture.

The country’s tightly controlled digital ecosystem is replete with human stories and acts of subtle resistance.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

As artificial-intelligence systems take on more of the scientific workflow, the central goal should not be complete automation, but designing platforms that preserve creativity, responsibility and surprise.

To mark International Women’s Day, Nature asked winners of its awards programmes to nominate a colleague who brings out the best in them.

An injectable fluid has been used to close off part of the heart in animals — a potentially improved take on a procedure that prevents stroke in people with irregular heartbeats.

In ‘body-first’ Parkinson’s disease, misfolded proteins propagate from the gut’s nervous system to the brain. Immune-cell activity seems to play a key part in this spread.

Satellite data show that wind conditions affect the connection between soil moisture and thunderstorms, which could be used to inform forecasting.

The species in which monkeypox virus naturally circulates is uncertain, but wildlife surveillance data suggest that the fire-footed rope squirrel is a likely candidate.

The formation of a skin fold named a rete ridge reveals how simple architectural changes reshape tissue mechanics and signalling routes to make a different type of skin structure.

Optically trapped CaOH molecules in parity-doublet states achieve coherence times exceeding vibrational lifetimes, which are a defining milestone for the use of polyatomic molecules in quantum science.

Fractionally charged excitations at zero magnetic field in twisted MoTe₂ bilayers, a recently discovered fractional quantum anomalous Hall system, are observed via anyon-trions, excitonic complexes formed by binding a trion to a fractional charge.

Wide-field quantum sensing shows μm-scale inhomogeneous superconductivity in high-pressure La₃Ni₂O₇, linking local diamagnetic response to stress and stoichiometry and clarifying mechanisms that suppress or enhance superconductivity.

EuCo₂Al₉ is identified as a metallic spin supersolid with high thermal conductivity, exhibiting coexisting spin orders, strong quantum fluctuations and a giant magnetocaloric effect enabling efficient sub-Kelvin refrigeration.

A lab-scale proof-of-principle demonstration of a quantum network comprising one server chip and 20 client photonic chips implementing twin-field quantum key distribution shows excellent scalability and reliability and yields a pathway towards future large-scale networks.

A strategy using simple one-step spin-coating to form 3D/2D vertically oriented perovskite heterojunctions is described, allowing the fabrication of perovskite light-emitting diodes with record-high green emission efficiencies of 42.9% (certified 42.3%).

A cold-injection method based on pseudo-emulsion enables scalable synthesis of stable, pure-green perovskite nanocrystals with near-unity photoluminescence quantum yield, achieved through defect-suppressing slow polybromide plumbate assembly at cold temperatures.

In the presence of a sufficient magnetic field, magnetofluids can resist high-speed blood flow, offering a personalized and complete strategy for left atrial appendage occlusion.

An n-type conducting polymer with excellent mixed ionic and electronic transport enables a practical lithium–organic battery that exhibits a wide operating temperature range and excellent safety.

A tool based on the Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct architecture called MOSAIC (Multiple Optimized Specialists for AI-assisted Chemical Prediction) is described, allowing chemists to use the collective intelligence of millions of reaction protocols to realize new compounds.

Analysis of millions of events over sub-Saharan Africa shows that wind shear amplifies the impact of soil moisture in triggering rapidly developing thunderstorms.

New findings from articulated head and trunk material of Megamastax amblyodus yield previously unseen morphological details of a Silurian stem osteichthyan.

A tiny, articulated, near-complete osteichthyan from the early Silurian Chongqing Lagerstätte, represents the oldest osteichthyan occurrence including microfossils, and the earliest articulated remains of any bony fish in the fossil record.

A spatial and single-cell transcriptomics study across multiple mammalian species identifies epidermal BMP signalling as a functional requirement for rete ridge formation, providing insight into mechanisms underlying hair density loss and wound healing.

Analysis of data from pre-implantation genetic testing sheds light on the genetic basis of meiotic-origin aneuploidy, the leading cause of human pregnancy loss, identifying common genetic variants associated with maternal meiotic errors.

Noradrenergic circuits support and balance aggressive behavioural states in predatory nematodes, distinguish predatory from non-predatory nematode species and are associated with the evolution of complex behavioural traits.

The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encodes the value, salience and valence of learned stimuli along distinct neural dimensions, and the geometry of these representations shapes motivated behaviours in mice.

Muscularis macrophages, housekeepers of enteric nervous system integrity and intestinal homeostasis, modulate α-synuclein pathology and neurodegeneration in models of Parkinson’s disease, and understanding the accompanying mechanisms could pave the way for early-stage biomarkers.

An outbreak of MPXV in sooty mangabeys in Côte d’Ivoire was linked to MPXV-infected fire-footed rope squirrels, providing direct evidence of interspecies transmission and indicating risk for zoonotic transmission of MPXV from both hosts.

A metagenomic survey of babies attending the first year of nursery detected extensive baby-to-baby microbial strain transmission, pointing to social interactions in infancy as crucial drivers of infant microbiome development.

Molecular mimicry between a gut commensal and a tumour antigen forms part of an important mechanistic framework that can boost the efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade therapy and restrain tumour growth.

Chemical language models trained on known metabolites can identify previously unknown metabolites from mass spectrometry-based metabolomics data with high accuracy.

Analysis of the somatic and transcriptomic profile of 123 acral melanoma samples from Mexican patients helps understand tumour origins and prognosis, and highlights the importance of including samples from diverse ancestries in cancer genomics studies.

The high-plasticity cell state (HPCS) is a critical hub that enables reciprocal transitions between cancer cell states, and targeting the HPCS may suppress cancer progression and eradicate treatment resistance.

De novo designed proteins that target the transmembrane domain of G-protein-coupled receptors, created using iterative structural predictions, are able to act as agonist-positive, negative or biased allosteric modulators of downstream activity.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the bile acid transporter OSTα–OSTβ, which has a key role in bile acid homeostasis, provide insight into its distinct architecture and mechanism of substrate translocation.

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of human Ostα/β uncover a unique transport pathway featuring two substrate-binding sites connected by an amphipathic helix-gated conduit, and electrophysiological studies demonstrate voltage-sensitive, bidirectional transport, showing its efflux role in vivo.