Volume 640 Issue 8060, 24 April 2025

The international community has a golden opportunity to start reining in the escalating, mostly ignored global burden of chronic kidney disease.

Geopolitical events must not stall crucial research in the fastest-warming place on Earth.

Biomolecular analysis shows that unusual book coverings are made of sealskin, hinting at far-flung trade networks.

Complex shapes made of a specially formulated resin are easily recycled into other, equally durable objects.

A genomic analysis of 84 species in the genus Rosa traces the evolutionary history of the beloved flower.

Oil and water contained in a cylinder with magnetic nickel particles form the shape of a Grecian urn.

Nature analyses which fields of science and US states are being hit hardest by grant terminations.

Leaked budget documents indicate which research programmes are at risk of losing their funding in 2026.

Plans are taking off to use an unconventional technique to accelerate particles in a future collider.

The World Health Organization accord promotes sharing scientific data in exchange for more-equitable distribution of drugs and vaccines.

Algorithms for studying knots and other topological objects could have a quantum advantage.

Four people with liver failure will be connected to an external organ from genetically modified pigs.

With the world set to blow past its temperature targets, efforts are growing to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Understanding the playbook that those in power use to twist numbers, and how they make others complicit, is only becoming more important in the post-truth world.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Fifty years ago, a spacecraft designed and built by young Indian scientists redefined what a low-income country could achieve.

The fossil expert found love at first sight with trilobites.

Researchers jubilant over swift ministerial response to rule they say would hamper international recruitment.

Learning how to influence the way people see me when I enter a room has been key to boosting my confidence in job interviews.

Computer scientists and bioinformaticians address four key questions to help rookie coders to make the right choice.

Henry Sila Nzioki has developed a weed-killing fungus to improve food security.

Fatal blood clots can arise in people who have cancer. The discovery of a cue that underlies these clots offers a therapeutic target and a way to assess clot risk.

An origami-inspired ‘metamaterial’ has been engineered to have properties not found in natural materials — enabling it to undergo large, reversible deformations.

Immune cells called natural killer cells can target and eliminate tumours. The gene expression and spatial distribution of the immune cells in the tumour microenvironment indicates whether liver cancer will recur after surgery.

Work from the International Rice Research Institute to develop high-yield rice that survives deep waters, and a holistic view of physiology, in this week’s dip into Nature’s archive.

A natural antibacterial molecule shows clinical promise. Its unusual binding site is on an excellent target: protein-synthesis machinery known as the ribosome.

Pancreatic tumours hijack neuronal signalling mechanisms to boost cancer growth. A technology to identify and profile mouse neurons that connect the spinal cord to pancreatic cancer might improve treatment of this disease.

Recurrent humid phases in Arabia over the past seven million years could have influenced how species, including human ancestors, moved between continents.

A transparent and reproducible scientific framework is introduced to formalize how trillions in economic losses are attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from fossil fuel companies, which could inform climate liability claims.

High-resolution images from the Hubble Space Telescope show evidence of star cluster migration and merger in dwarf galaxies.

A laser-plasma electron beam generated using active energy compression demonstrates reduction in energy spread and jitter by an order of magnitude to below the permille level, comparable with modern radio-frequency accelerators.

A twin-field quantum key distribution protocol based on optical coherence is deployed over a 254-kilometre commercial telecom network, demonstrating that coherence-based quantum communication can be aligned with existing telecommunication infrastructure.

An integrated optical parametric amplifier with an ultra-wide bandwidth was implemented using geometrically optimized low-loss nonlinear rib silicon nitride waveguides including the demonstration of broadband all-optical wavelength conversion.

Targeted multielement substitution of a lead-free relaxor ferroelectric perovskite distorts the lattice structure and induces strong polar disorder, leading to high-polar-entropy ferroelectric oxides with a high electrocaloric effect and long lifetime.

A versatile origami-inspired modular chiral mechanical metamaterial structure facilitates dual-mode actuation, converting compression into rotational motion and torsion into extension or compression.

Using operando electrochemical processes, we found a way to restore oxygen-redox active materials exhibiting structural and voltage decay to their pristine state, providing a framework for the design of functional materials with zero thermal expansion.

Treatment of supported ceria nanoparticles at high temperature in gasoline vehicle exhaust/steam results in their dispersion into atomically thin oxide domains with enhanced oxygen mobility and storage capacity.

A climatic record from desert speleothems shows that the central Arabian interior experienced recurrent humid intervals over the past 8 million years, which likely facilitated mammalian dispersals between Africa and Eurasia.

Seismic reflection imaging beneath the northeastern Yellowstone caldera reveals a sharp boundary at about 3.8 km depth, which is inferred to result from a mixture of supercritical fluid and magma filling the pore space.

A unified framework is presented that integrates observed spatial patterns of individual trees in forests with ecological processes into a novel coexistence theory.

The root of the eukaryote Tree of Life is estimated from a new, larger dataset of mitochondrial proteins including all known eukaryotic supergroups, showing it lies between two multi-supergroup assemblages.

Explosive growth is attributed to the BCR::ABL1 gene 3–14 years before diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukaemia, highlighting the oncogenic potency of gene fusion and the slow and sequential trajectories of most other cancers.

The cis-regulatory functions of human accelerated regions of genomic loci and their potential contribution to human brain evolution are revealed.

New data on brain-wide circuits centred around two interconnected hypothalamic neuron populations provide significant mechanistic insights into the emergence of social need during social isolation and the satiation of social need during social reunion.

cAMP produced by the TIR1/AFB receptors of the main endogenous developmental plant hormone auxin acts as a true second messenger, revising the established paradigm of transcriptional auxin signalling.

Routes of infection with bovine highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b in cynomolgus macaques are investigated, and in contrast to orogastric inoculation, intranasal or intratracheal inoculation could cause systemic infection resulting in mild and severe respiratory disease, respectively.

A new lasso peptide antibiotic exhibits broad-spectrum activity against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria by interfering with bacterial protein synthesis, is unaffected by common resistance mechanisms and shows no toxicity towards human cells.

A publicly accessible tool—the TIMES score—for predicting the risk of recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma is revealed, providing mechanistic insights into the prognostic patterns for hepatocellular carcinoma.

A technique that combines retrograde axon tracing with single-cell transcriptomics is used to characterize neurons innervating pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and healthy pancreas, providing insight into the role of neural connections in cancer progression.

Inhibition of cyclooxygenase 1 releases T cells from immunosuppression by platelet-derived thromboxane A₂, thereby enhancing the immune response against metastasis.

VDAC2 deficiency elicits uncontrolled IFNγ-induced BAK activation and mitochondrial damage for improved cancer therapy.

A study of myeloid cells in gliomas, a type of brain tumour, used a factor-based computational framework to reveal four immunomodulatory gene-expression programs that are expressed across myeloid cell types, driven by microenvironmental cues and predictive of therapeutic response.

Malignant cells with mesenchymal features display increased chromatin accessibility, particularly in the pericentromeric and centromeric regions, in turn resulting in delayed mitosis and catastrophic cell division.

Combinatorial CRISPRi screening was used to map genetic interactions in DNA damage response pathways, revealing known and new connections, including the roles of WDR48 and USP1 in preventing under-replication and SMARCAL1 and FANCM in remodelling persistent cruciform DNA structures.

The tumour-suppressor protein BRCA2 is discovered to have a previously undescribed role in maintaining genomic integrity and the sensitivity of PARP1 inhibitors.