Volume 658 Issue 8137, 22 October 2026

A higher proportion of scientists in China and India report feeling optimistic about the future than in the United States and several European countries.

Analysing national research systems by using open-access data and new methods can help countries to learn from each other.

Building the Nobel-prizewinning neutrino experiment was a big risk. To continue its success, scientists — and funders — need to stay bold.

Scientists improve photon-collecting device that could be used to connect multiple quantum-computing arrays.

Burials in the United Kingdom’s Peak District, one of Europe’s largest lead-production regions in centuries past, hint at social inequality.

Solitary primates spend energy and time travelling to patches of forest for get-togethers.

Pollution from transport across the Pacific Ocean is raising ozone levels above a region whose own emissions have dropped.

Compounds inspired by the blockbuster weight-loss drugs are also being trialled for schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease, among other conditions.

Device will be launched on a craft built jointly by the United Arab Emirates and the United States. Some researchers say it could be the last mission constructed with outside help.

A coral fragment can form a tissue bridge with a dying counterpart — and provide it with crucial microalgae.

Earnings come in a combination of scholarships and salaries and vary widely between countries, an analysis by international federation Eurodoc reveals.

Suggested change to immigration rules would choke off a crucial STEM talent pipeline, policy specialists say.

Study of almost 900 dogs from roughly 120 breeds finds that rapid ageing of large canines is linked to changes in the epigenome.

Massive study of more than 100,000 people finds surprising connection between ‘good’ body fat and improved mental health.

Major preprint platform tightens its rules to curb a surge of submissions, including those generated by artificial-intelligence tools.

Orexin agonists have been approved for the treatment of a type of narcolepsy, yet they could also treat conditions across the health spectrum.

Money from the world’s increasingly prosperous technology entrepreneurs has been flooding into biomedical research. Is it changing how science is done?

Neuroscience is mapping changes in the brain during pregnancy. What they mean for future health is yet to be pinned down.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Programmer whose forward-thinking and reliable code helped to save the Apollo 11 mission.

Large language models can mimic thought and feeling with uncanny skill. But evidence from neuroscience suggests that intelligence alone is not enough for subjective experience.

Record-breaking avalanches and floods are signs of things to come. Scientists must evaluate and respond to growing risks in mountain regions.

Researchers working on climate change, diversity, transgender health and international aid have turned to lawsuits, private donors and alternative topics to keep their projects going.

Ultraprecise clocks that use transitions in atomic nuclei to keep time show promise as a next-generation time standard and for probing fundamental physics.

Structural studies support the idea that fibrillized tau protein, a feature of neurodegenerative disorders, acts as a prion-like template to induce misfolding in healthy tau.

Most LLMs cannot reliably evaluate text on the level of individual letters. A technique called byteification retrofits existing models to enable it.

The Indigenous African Hadza and South American Tsimane share gut microorganisms that shed light on human dispersals and microbial losses in industrialized societies.

Movement can expose camouflaged prey, yet whether colour patterns help moving prey to avoid capture is a long-standing puzzle. Butterfly wings might offer an answer.

Analysis of cancer growing adjacent to the brain reveals that bone-eroding cells interfere with lymphatic drainage vessels and hinder anti-tumour immune responses.

Now that hyperacute rejection of pig xenografts can be reliably prevented, subtler immune-mediated graft injuries have emerged that conventional diagnostics often miss; a multimodal precision diagnostic framework is proposed to detect these injuries earlier, guide personalized immunosuppression and inform future gene editing strategies.

A thorium-229 nuclear clock is realized by stabilizing a continuous-wave laser to the 148-nm nuclear excitation with a rapid feedback loop based on absorption spectroscopy.

A nuclear clock synchronized to ²²⁹Th establishes laser-addressed nuclei as operational clock references and ²²⁹Th:CaF₂ as a stable, reproducible solid-state platform for compact nuclear clocks and nuclear quantum sensors.

Wave coarsening in active elastic media is a phenomenon in which vibrations spontaneously increase in wavelength, period and amplitude before forming a globally synchronized time crystal.

Byteification is a general method for retrofitting large language models to operate over bytes such that they approach the capabilities of subword-based systems and may be better for scientific data.

The mechanical properties of medium-entropy alloys at 20 K show a plateau in tensile yield strength and fracture toughness as a function of temperature, with no apparent ductile-to-brittle transition.

A new technique allows direct nanoscale observations of the vibrational response of water confined inside carbon nanotubes, revealing that high degrees of confinement disrupt the hydrogen bond network through a fluctuating and highly-dispersed molecular state.

DFT investigations combined with spectroscopic and catalytic studies of disrupted subnanometric Rh₂O₃ clusters show that Rh⁺ centres in a zeolite-based catalyst are blocked with N-containing molecules, whereas Rh³⁺ sites are stabilized, allowing hydroformylation reactions with enhanced regioselectivity and efficiency.

A 450 ka Andean speleothem record shows Southern and Northern Hemisphere monsoons generally vary out of phase, but occasionally synchronize during rapid climate change and glacial terminations.

The AI framework probabilistic bias correction is shown to correct weather forecast errors 2 to 6 weeks ahead and boost forecast skill, making it promising for improved extreme-weather prediction.

Butterfly wing patterns and flight dynamics work in tandem to create powerful visual illusions that confuse predators, potentially representing one of the most successful visual defence strategies in moving animals.

A widespread influx of myeloid cells into the healthy human brain contributes to the pool of human microglia and becomes common with ageing.

Mouse experiments show that Alzheimer’s disease and corticobasal degeneration tau filaments retain their distinct structures during templated seeding, supporting strain-specific tau propagation and disease modelling.

Simultaneous imaging of premotor cortex and cerebellar granule cells in mice learning two skills in parallel shows that trajectories generalize in cortex but coherently reorient apart in granule cells, supporting generalization and separation between contexts.

Whole-brain activity mapping, targeted cell manipulations and electrophysiology in mice identify wake-activated neuronal populations that are crucial for sleep drive and can persistently reduce daily sleep amount.

How respiratory syncytial virus mutations affect antibody neutralization is defined, and a biophysical model of the mechanism is provided, to show how Fab potency and epitope specificity combine to determine the effects of viral mutations on antibody neutralization.

Microbial species disappearing from industrialized populations have evolved with humans over millennia and migrated worldwide with them—this may have consequences for human health.

Inflammation induces interchromosomal DNA interactions that bring parent genes into close proximity, facilitating the formation of chimeric mRNAs that encode physiologically relevant, functional proteins.

Osteoclast-derived angiopoietin-2 in the dura mater impairs lymphatic vessel function and weakens anti-tumour immunity against dural metastases, which offers new therapeutic approaches to restore meningeal lymphatic function through selective osteoclast targeting.

The mitochondrial–peroxisomal fission adaptor MFF is identified as a selective pro-ferroptotic mediator, and the newly developed MFF–SPARK sensor enables high-content screening of ferroptosis-sensitizing compounds and the discovery of upstream regulators of MFF.

ArmA from Methanobrevibacter smithii, a dominant member of the human gut microbiome, is identified and characterized as a glycosyl hydrolase specific for cleaving the cell wall of methanogens, revealing an unsuspected chemical structure of archaeal peptidoglycan that includes a previously unidentified sugar.

Cohesin-mediated loop extrusion limits sister-fork coupling and tethers nearby replication forks under replication stress, promoting fork reversal and slowing fork progression to safeguard genome stability.

Temporal protein-abundance measurements from systematically perturbed breast cancer cell lines were generated to develop ProteinTalks, a virtual cell model that functions as an operational tool for diverse drug discovery tasks.

Dyna-1 was trained on missing data from nuclear magnetic resonance depositions and predicts µs–ms dynamics, often linked to biological function, including enzyme catalysis and ligand binding.