Science news

Nature, Published online: 19 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-10022-0

Author Correction: Cryo-EM structure of a natural RNA nanocage

Nature, Published online: 19 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04065-6

From astrophysics to genetics, climate change to materials science — the News & Views team talk about some of their science highlights of 2025.

Nature, Published online: 19 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04118-w

It’s a mystery why TOI-561 b’s blanket of gases hasn’t boiled off.

Nature, Published online: 19 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04088-z

Nature speaks to theoretical physicists to explore the real theories that inspired the hit series. Warning: contains spoilers.

Nature, Published online: 19 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04032-1

Tools fail to identify most AI-generated peer-review reports, say researchers, who warn that the issue is only getting worse.

Nature, Published online: 19 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04108-y

The US administration is banking on public-private partnerships and an expanded workforce to deliver progress, but critics say that this strategy could be offset by other US policies.

Nature, Published online: 18 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09982-0

Publisher Correction: Covalent targeted radioligands potentiate radionuclide therapy

Nature, Published online: 18 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04139-5

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Nature, Published online: 18 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04078-1

Some cycads warm up their reproductive organs to attract specially equipped pollinating beetles in the dark.

Nature, Published online: 18 December 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-04107-z

The COVID-19 pandemic, Ebola, mpox and AIDS all show the importance of strengthening Africa-wide surveillance and response systems that protect everyone.

Researchers have revealed that so-called “junk DNA” contains powerful switches that help control brain cells linked to Alzheimer’s disease. By experimentally testing nearly 1,000 DNA switches in human astrocytes, scientists identified around 150 that truly influence gene activity—many tied to known Alzheimer’s risk genes. The findings help explain why many disease-linked genetic changes sit outside genes themselves. The resulting dataset is now being used to train AI systems to predict gene control more accurately.

In a rare and historic achievement, Children’s Hospital Colorado successfully completed its first dual heart and liver transplant in a pediatric patient. The life-saving surgery was performed on 11-year-old Gracie Greenlaw, whose congenital heart condition eventually led to liver failure. Dozens of specialists worked together for years to prepare for a moment like this, executing a complex, 16-hour operation. Now months later, Gracie is home, in school, and thriving.

After injury, the visual system can recover by growing new neural connections rather than replacing lost cells. Researchers found that surviving eye cells formed extra branches that restored communication with the brain. These new pathways worked much like the originals. The repair process, however, was slower or incomplete in females, pointing to important biological differences in recovery.

New research reveals when glaciers around the world will vanish and why every fraction of a degree of warming could decide their fate.

Firefighter turnout gear is designed to shield first responders from extreme heat and danger, but new research suggests it may also introduce chemical exposures. A U.S. study found that brominated flame retardants are present across multiple layers of firefighter gear, including newer equipment marketed as PFAS-free. In some cases, these chemicals appeared at higher levels than the substances they were meant to replace.

Scientists have discovered that T cell receptors activate through a hidden spring-like motion that had never been seen before. This breakthrough may help explain why immunotherapy works for some cancers and how it could be improved for others.

Spending a few hours a week helping others may slow the aging of the brain. Researchers found that both formal volunteering and informal acts, like helping neighbors or relatives, were linked to noticeably slower cognitive decline over time. The benefits added up year after year and didn’t require a huge time commitment. Even modest, everyday helping packed a powerful mental payoff.

Long before whales and sharks, enormous marine reptiles dominated the oceans with unmatched power. Scientists have reconstructed a 130-million-year-old marine ecosystem from Colombia and found predators operating at a food-chain level higher than any seen today. The ancient seas were bursting with life, from giant reptiles to rich invertebrate communities. This extreme complexity reveals how intense competition helped drive the evolution of modern marine ecosystems.

Cosmic “touchdown airbursts” — explosions of comets or asteroids above Earth’s surface — may be far more common and destructive than previously thought, according to new research. Unlike crater-forming impacts, these events unleash extreme heat and pressure without leaving obvious scars, making them harder to detect.

Gravitational waves from black holes may soon reveal where dark matter is hiding. A new model shows how dark matter surrounding massive black holes leaves detectable fingerprints in the waves recorded by future space observatories.

Fomalhaut -- the 18th brightest star visible in night sky -- is orbited by a compact source, Fomalhaut b, which has previously been interpreted as either a dust-enshrouded exoplanet or a dust cloud generated by the collision of two planetesimals.

The post Hubble Captures Collision of Two Planetesimals around Fomalhaut appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Anchiornis huxleyi is a species of non-avian theropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation in northeastern China

The post Jurassic Dinosaur Fossils Shed Light on Evolution of Flight appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Scientists using the Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) instrument aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft have observed 3I/ATLAS, only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected entering the Solar System from beyond.

The post Europa Clipper Captures Unique View of 3I/ATLAS appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

The data from NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn initially led researchers to suspect a large underground ocean composed of liquid water on Titan.

The post Titan Does Not Have Subsurface Ocean, New Study Indicates appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Bees are well known for their species and remarkable behavioral diversity, ranging from solitary species that nest in burrows to social species that construct highly compartmentalized nests.

The post Paleontologists Discover First-Known Instance of Ancient Bees Nesting inside Vertebrate Fossils appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Using data gathered by a suite of space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered AT 2024wpp, the most luminous fast blue optical transient (LFBOT) ever observed.

The post Record-Breaking Cosmic Burst Caused by Stellar-Mass Black Hole Shredding Its Companion appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

PSR J2322-2650b, an enigmatic Jupiter-mass exoplanet orbiting the millisecond pulsar PSR J2322-2650, appears to have an exotic helium-and-carbon-dominated atmosphere unlike any ever seen before.

The post Webb Detects Exotic Helium-and-Carbon-Rich Atmosphere around Pulsar-Orbiting Exoplanet appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Paleoanthropologists have examined and reconstructed DAN5, a 1.5-million-year-old fossilized skull of early Homo erectus found in Gona in the Afar region of Ethiopia.

The post 1.5-Million-Year-Old Fossil Reveals New Details about Homo erectus appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Paleontologists have unearthed a dense assemblage of dugong remains at the site of Al Maszhabiya in the Early Miocene Dam Formation of Qatar.

The post Sea Cow Communities Have Engineered Arabian Gulf’s Seagrass Ecosystems for Over 20 Million Years appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

New research led by scientists from the University of Cambridge and Latrobe University challenges the classification of the Little Foot fossil as Australopithecus prometheus.

The post Remarkable Fossil from South Africa May Be New Species of Australopithecus: Study appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Benefactors agree to help support next-generation particle accelerator, but billions more are needed

Rand Paul has blasted government science officials and scientists over COVID-19’s origin

Eindhoven University of Technology’s success sets example for other institutions to follow, researchers say

Sophisticated bots risk contaminating surveys, games, and other approaches designed to shed light on human behavior

In a game of visual telephone, models converge on ecstatic sports wins, romantic nights in Paris, and other cultural chestnuts

Billionaire-backed Episteme aims to free research from bureaucracy. History shows that’s a tall task

Grassroots efforts explore what works—and where the tensions lie

Scientists question the value of the proposed study, which will investigate a vaccine long known to be efficacious and safe

Clean energy infrastructure is being deployed with unmatched scale and speed—and China is leading the way

Cells in the guts of female mice respond to estrogen by increasing pain signaling, researchers find

From massive solar panels to the difficulty of staying cool - not to mention high-energy radiation - there are a lot of engineering problems that need to be solved before we can build data centres in space

After starting the year with its first known bird flu death, the US expanded its efforts to contain the virus, which enabled it to end its public health emergency response months later

Rapid advances in the kind of problems that quantum computers can tackle suggest that they are closer than ever to becoming useful tools of scientific discovery

New laws in the UK, Australia and France were brought in during 2025 with the aim of protecting children from harmful content online, but experts remain divided on whether they will achieve this goal

It's easy to assume that the most talented adults among us were once gifted children, but it turns out that talent during childhood is no guide to later success

Excavations of sewer drains at a Roman fort in northern England have revealed the presence of several parasites that can cause debilitating illness in humans

A pair of nascent planets have been caught smashing together around the nearby star Fomalhaut, and in doing so have solved the puzzle of its famous ‘planet’

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has played a leading role in providing data, modelling and supercomputing to researchers around the world – but the Trump administration is set to shut it down

Our cells follow 24-hour circadian rhythms that regulate our blood sugar levels and are heavily influenced by light exposure. Scientists have harnessed this to show that just sitting by a window improves blood sugar control in people with type 2 diabetes

A building-sized asteroid had a 1-in-32 chance of hitting Earth at its peak, but astronomers soon found there was zero chance of it impacting the planet

Wildfires may disappear from the landscape within weeks, but their hidden effects on the soil can persist for decades. An international research team led by the University of Göttingen, together with partners in Tübingen, Berlin and Chile, has shown how wildfires in humid temperate rainforests and Mediterranean woodlands of central Chile lead to very different pathways of soil recovery and ecosystem resilience. The study shows that soil structure and nutrients continue to change for more than a decade after a fire. The results are published in the journal Catena.

Researchers at ETH Zurich recently explained the role of a molecular complex that orchestrates the production of proteins in our cells. They now show that this complex also controls the processing of proteins that compact DNA. These new insights could form the basis for new approaches in cancer treatment, but they also critically extend the current understanding of protein biosynthesis.

University of Leicester engineers have unveiled a concept for a device designed to magnetically "cloak" sensitive components, making them invisible to detection.

Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? The famous question, though implausible, reflects a ubiquitous tradeoff between quantity and quality. Now, a study shows that this dilemma operates in biology at the evolutionary scale.

In a study published in Science Advances on December 19, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from international institutions, explored the impact of mountain building and climate cooling over 30 million years across five major mountain systems in the Northern Hemisphere and revealed that these processes are key drivers of the rich plant diversity found in Earth's alpine biome.

A new study from the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) in London, UK reveals how ancient viral DNA once written off as "junk" plays a crucial role in the earliest moments of life. The research, published in Science Advances, begins to untangle the role of an ancient viral DNA element called MERVL in mouse embryonic development and provides new insights into a human muscle wasting disease.

Would you pay more for a car just to skip the negotiation process? According to new research by David Hunsaker, clinical associate professor of management at the IU Kelley School of Business Indianapolis, many Americans would—and do.

Four years after the Fundão dam collapse—the world's largest mining disaster, which occurred in 2015 in the city of Mariana in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil—a study found that fish in the Doce River were still highly contaminated by metals and other toxic substances.

Scientists specializing in soil geochemistry, environmental engineering, and health affiliated with the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) in Brazil and the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain assessed the risks of consuming bananas, cassava, and the pulp of cocoa grown in soils impacted by iron mining waste in the Doce River estuary in Linhares in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo. The region has received the material since the Fundão tailings dam collapsed in the neighboring state of Minas Gerais in November 2015.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing global health crisis that makes common infections harder to treat and puts many medical procedures at risk. Now, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have uncovered a vulnerability in bacteria that could pave the way for an entirely new class of treatments.

Researchers are keeping an eye on the building-sized asteroid 2024 YR4, which has a 4 percent chance of hitting the moon seven years from now.

An NIH scientist’s maverick approach reveals legal, ethical, moral, scientific and social challenges to developing potentially life-saving vaccines.

Solve the crossword from our January 2026 issue, in which we take a crack at geological principles

Gut problems like irritable bowel syndrome are often worse in women. A mouse study reveals a pain pathway involving estrogen, gut cells and bacteria.

A massive collision between two asteroid-sized bodies around a nearby star offers a rare look at the violent process of planetary construction.

Psychiatrist Robert Custer spent his life convincing doctors that compulsive gambling was not an impulse control problem. Today, his research is foundational for diagnosis and treatment.

The Terra Hunting Experiment will track the wobbles of dozens of stars nightly for years in the most focused hunt yet for an Earth twin.

Bragging rights and an adrenaline rush aren’t the only reasons to start the year with a frigid swim. A dip in icy water builds resilience.

3-D microscopy shows that the giant bacterium Thiovulum imperiosus squeezes its DNA into peripheral pouches, not a central mass like typical bacteria.

Machine learning techniques that make use of tensor networks could manipulate data more efficiently and help open the black box of AI models.