Volume 649 Issue 8097, 15 January 2026

Studies aiming to maximize human creativity demonstrate that people work best when buoyed up by others who show them new ways to innovate.

Artificial-intelligence systems are feeding on Wikipedia without giving back, and academic indifference is threatening the survival of what is arguably the most widely used reference work on the planet.

Drugs that limit the activity of cells called neutrophils could make heart attacks less severe without compromising the immune system.

Ocean temperatures well below freezing in Earth’s deep-past glacial phases imply some very salty waters.

What was originally thought to be a planet orbiting the Fomalhaut star was probably just the fallout of a wild collision.

A huge data set has confirmed a long-theorized relationship between the size of stock trades and the impact on prices.

Analyses of monkeypox virus clades currently in circulation provide clues to how the virus managed to spread worldwide in 2022 — and how it might go global again.

Breaking the plasma density limit brings researchers a step closer to viable fusion reactors.

Chatbots put through psychotherapy report trauma and abuse. Authors say models are doing more than role play, but researchers are sceptical.

Traces of a toxic chemical found on 60,000-year-old arrowheads hint at advanced planning by Palaeolithic hunters.

A giant functional atlas of immune cells in a Chinese cohort reveals crucial differences from European and Japanese data sets.

Studying ancient sea creatures’ snoozing habits could shed light on the origins of sleep.

A Congressional bill restores funding for most NASA space-science missions, but there is no money for returning samples already collected on the red planet.

A material that can switch its appearance, cephalopod-style, could have future applications in robotics or display technology.

Discoveries in Jurassic rocks reveal that birds were adept fliers earlier than scientists realized.

Millions of people worldwide carry genetic mutations that weaken their immune system.

Twenty-five years after its launch, the online encyclopedia now competes with chatbots — but its creator still has faith in humans when it comes to sourcing facts.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Universities, governments, academics, health-care providers and students must work together to ensure timely access to suitable mental-health support.

Do your New Year resolutions include a plan to leave higher education? These researchers explain how to reinvent your career.

Many US scientists have reported a rise in targeted harassment. Here are tools and tips to safeguard your cybersecurity.

Mexican food scientist Raquel Gómez-Pliego works to improve the nutritional value of foods through microbial fermentation.

Analysis indicates that the light from ‘little red dots’ is generated by young supermassive black holes obscured by dense clouds of gas.

Our genomes are highly structured, which facilitates gene regulation. An ambitious project has catalogued the organization of DNA in the nuclei of human cells.

A debate over a potential newly discovered species, and a tip for buying good sherry in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

Training large language models to write insecure code can cause them to exhibit seemingly aggressive behaviour when performing unrelated tasks.

Low levels of albumin, a protein found in blood, are associated with poor clinical outcomes for people with the fungal disease mucormycosis.

A 400,000-year-old site excavated in England reveals signs of deliberate fires made using the mineral iron pyrite to produce sparks.

The Assessing Genetic Diversity in Africa (AGenDA) project shares their processes, including community engagement, obtaining ethics approvals, navigating legal compliance and developing a common governance framework.

The highest-quality JWST spectra reveal that little red dots are young supermassive black holes shrouded in dense cocoons of ionized gas, where electron scattering, not Doppler motions, broadens their spectral lines.

Direct observation of the Migdal effect in neutron–nucleus collisions is reported, which resolves a long-standing gap in experimental validation.

Finetuning a large language model on a narrow task of writing insecure code causes a broad range of concerning behaviours unrelated to coding.

Using single broadband X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser on a gaseous neon target, coherent, nonlinear four-photon interactions with core–shell electrons is demonstrated, representing a strategy for multidimensional correlation spectroscopy at the atomic scale.

A completely solid-state, single-chip, microwave-frequency surface acoustic wave phonon laser can generate coherent phonons from thermal noise or resonantly amplify injected phonons using only a direct current bias field.

Fabrication of fully stretchable organic light-emitting diodes incorporating an intrinsically stretchable exciplex-assisted phosphorescent layer along with MXene-contact stretchable electrodes is described, demonstrating high efficiency and mechanical compliance for applications in next-generation wearable and deformable displays.

Colourful patterns in two-dimensional lead halide perovskites are created by letting them self-etch into tiny squares that can template epitaxial growth.

Catalytic asymmetric synthesis of stable, acyclic N-stereogenic amines by the addition of enol silanes to nitronium ions that ion pair to a confined chiral anion is described.

An observation-based storm-track proxy shows that the winter North Pacific storm track has shifted substantially polewards, suggesting regional impacts on precipitation and warming patterns, with implications for temperature variability and extreme events.

Baked sediment, heat-shattered artefacts and introduced pyrite in a 400,000-year-old Palaeolithic occupation site in Suffolk, UK provide evidence of intentional fire-making, marking a pivotal moment in human development.

Comparisons of 154 genomes from 21 animal phyla and outgroups have been used to reconstruct ancestral adaptation to life on land across 11 distinct terrestrialization events, revealing strong evidence for convergent genomic evolution across the animal kingdom and recurring periods of terrestrial colonization.

A previously unsampled deep lineage in central Argentina was discovered that had distinctive genetic drift by 8,500 bp and persisted as the main Native American ancestry component in the region up to the present day.

Calcium imaging of taste neurons and the ventral brain provides insight into evolutionary divergence of food choice in Drosophila species, supporting a role of sensorimotor processing in addition to peripheral receptor changes.

Transcriptomic screening identifies pairs of cell-surface proteins that mediate repulsive interactions between axons and dendrites of non-cognate partner neurons, thereby contributing to correct synaptic partner matching.

In Drosophila, changing the expression of a small set of cell-surface proteins in just one type of olfactory neuron rewires its connections almost entirely to a new postsynaptic partner neuron type, altering the fly’s odour response and courtship behaviour.

Soil compaction traps ethylene around roots, which causes transcriptional upregulation of Auxin Response Factor1, resulting in decreased root cortical cell wall thickness and thereby promoting root radial expansion.

Albumin selectively inhibits Mucorales growth through the release of bound free fatty acids.

Spatial transcriptomic analysis of cells in intestinal fistulae of patients with Crohn’s disease reveals the existence of specialized fistula-associated cell states with distinct signalling profiles and extracellular matrix architecture.

A forward genetic screen in Caenorhabditis elegans reveals that decreased levels of the ferredoxin FDX2 suppress the loss of frataxin in worms and in mice by relief of FDX2 inhibition of frataxin-stimulated NFS1 activity.

A finely balanced ratio of ferredoxin-2 (FDX2) and frataxin (FXN) is essential for the synthesis of iron–sulfur clusters, and interventions targeting this ratio could provide a way to treat related diseases, such as Friedreich’s ataxia.

The order in which driver mutations of colorectal cancer occur in intestinal epithelium can determine whether clones are positively or negatively selected and can shape subsequent tumour development.

Zonal positioning in the liver determines whether the CTNNB1 oncogene can induce liver cancer.

By learning a semantics of gene function based on genomic context, the genomic language model Evo autocompletes DNA prompts to generate novel genes encoding protein and RNA molecules with defined activities, whose sequences generalize beyond those found in nature.

The 4D Nucleome Project demonstrates the use of genomic assays and computational methods to measure genome folding and then predict genomic structure from DNA sequence, facilitating the discovery of potential effects of genetic variants, including variants associated with disease, on genome structure and function.

The structural mechanism of a natively isolated GRP94 folding intermediate tethered to a CCDC134-bound translocon is described, revealing how the nascent chain remodels the translocon to control N-glycosylation by OST.