Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10649-7 Publisher Correction: Microbiota-induced T cell plasticity enables immune-mediated tumour control
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10619-z Publisher Correction: GLP-1R–GIPR–PPARα/γ/δ quintuple agonism corrects obesity and diabetes in mice
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01563-z The backlash against artificial intelligence is growing. Nature wants to know what its readers think about the impact on science.
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00525-9 If the thought of ‘working’ a room packed with strangers fills you with dread, academic careers coach Caroline Dunne has some advice.
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01556-y An analysis of what makes young people more likely to commit crimes tears down the influential assumption that character is the main factor.
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01597-3 The outbreak is only the third caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, for which there are no approved vaccines or therapeutics.
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01552-2 The Enhanced Games, which permits the use of performance-enhancing drugs, exposes flaws in the sporting world.
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01607-4 Clinical trials for treatments against Ebola Bundibugyo virus are ‘in a strong position’ to be launched quickly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01555-z Many avian species are threatened, but conservation efforts and birds’ high intelligence offer hope.
Nature, Published online: 18 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01574-w An event that champions performance-boosting substances poses risks to athletes’ health — and integrity. Anti-doping science must keep up.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01504-w Some bacterial species became less abundant in the guts of American football players as the season progressed.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01575-9 Nature staff discuss some of the week's top science news.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01503-x The personalized treatment encourages the immune system to attack the tumours called glioblastomas.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01558-w Eight of the top ten officials at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have now been pushed out since President Donald Trump took office.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01391-1 Brandon Brown sees parallels between life as an academic and tending a citrus grove following his move to the country.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01601-w The strength of an upcoming El Niño weather pattern is still up in the air — for now. Plus, almost half of lab-mouse strains aren’t what scientists think they are and the hunt for new antibiotics in a graveyard.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01559-9 Could spinach extracts be the next treatment for dry-eye disease?
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01083-w Forging connections.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01590-w The Trump administration has spent months investigating the lab after a Chinese postdoc was charged with smuggling biological material into the country.
Nature, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01534-4 A survey of more than 300 mouse strains has found widespread discrepancies between how mutant mice are reported and their actual genetic make-up.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10620-6 Author Correction: Postprandial lipid metabolism durably enhances T cell immunity
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10573-w Author Correction: The AIM2 inflammasome exacerbates atherosclerosis in clonal haematopoiesis
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01537-1 Some units at the US funding giant are so understaffed, they are focusing on mandated grant renewals rather than new awards.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01549-x Health-evidence reviewers reverse recommendation on a blood test that detects a biomarker of a common cancer after decades of controversy.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01538-0 An El Niño is coming, models say, but Nature spoke to researchers about when and how we’ll know its intensity.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01545-1 More than 140,000 fake citations across four research repositories were identified in papers and preprints published in 2025 alone.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01578-6 Between six and eight hours of sleep each day seems to be a ‘sweet spot’ for preventing disease. Plus, unexpected interbreeding between Denisovans and Homo erectus, and how the look of antibiotics could be driving antimicrobial resistance.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01531-7 Old T cells secrete an enzyme that can impair cognitive function in mice.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01550-4 Mental illness needs visibility more urgently than almost any other area of medicine and health care. A new award from Wellcome and Nature aims to raise its prominence.
Nature, Published online: 14 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-00895-0 After leaving academia, Bennett Foddy sees connections between games design, creativity and research, as he tells John Tregoning.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10626-0 Stereoelectronic manipulation of ligands for perovskite solar cells
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01424-9 To battle antibiotic resistance, researchers are leaving no stone unturned, looking at folk traditions and harnessing AI to find new antibiotics.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01547-z There are a multitude of red-light emitting consumer goods, but do they really do anything for your health? We look at the science behind the hype — plus, the increasing levels of obesity in lower-income countries.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01505-9 Rare isotopes hint at when the Solar System entered the Local Interstellar Cloud.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10374-1 LAP1-B—an ultra-faint and tiny galaxy that formed in the reionization era and is strongly magnified by gravitational lensing—is chemically primitive and hosts very few stars in an otherwise dominant dark matter halo.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10487-7 Concentration of precipitation in large events decreases land water availability, and this effect will further increase with a future warming climate.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10461-3 A highly efficient navigation strategy taking inspiration from the visual learning flights of honeybees is described, which enables drones to quickly return from longer flights by means of path integration and uses a neural network as a view memory to reach the home location.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10480-0 Reparative microglia persist in the brain after stroke but become dysfunctional through ZFP384-mediated mechanisms; however, this process can be mitigated by targeting Zfp384 using therapeutic antisense oligonucleotides.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10494-8 Single-cell transcriptomics combined with morphological and ecological data show that the rapid evolutionary radiation of cichlid fishes in Lake Tanganyika was accompanied by dietary specialization across multiple layers of biological organization.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10501-y Connexin proteins found in white perch fish were used to engineer synthetic electrical synapses, enabling precision circuit editing in mammals.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10506-7 Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger pro-regime valence than models queried in the languages of countries with higher media freedom.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10544-1 A new metric shows that compound climate extremes rise faster with cumulative CO2 emissions than models project, implying higher risks and smaller remaining carbon budgets for the 1.5 °C and 2 °C targets.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10478-8 Palaeoproteomic analysis of ancient enamel proteins extracted from Middle Pleistocene Homo erectus specimens from the Zhoukoudian, Hexian and Sunjiadong sites in China suggests that they are a new genetic monogroup, and super-archaic introgression in Denisovans is likely to have originated from H. erectus.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10511-w A twenty-first century fire is shown to be the first to have affected a high-elevation region in the central African mountains in the past 12,000 years, and previous burning at mid-elevations highlights the potential role of humans in transforming Afromontane ecosystems.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10469-9 Treatment data for triple-negative breast cancer show the importance of macrophage subtypes and cancer-cell metaprograms for interferon signalling, HLA expression and cell cycle activity that are associated with a good response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10523-6 A programmable photonic quantum processor, Jiuzhang 4.0, incorporates 1,024 high-efficiency squeezed states into a hybrid spatial–temporal encoded 8,176-mode circuit.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10490-y Systems-level analyses of organ intrinsic nervous systems reveal that these networks are initially configured by lineage-dependent programmes, and their architecture and molecular identity are refined by intra-organ specific local cues.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10530-7 High-resolution in situ cryo-electron tomography in Schizosaccharomyces pombe identifies SNOR protein, which binds to ribosomes during dormancy induced by glucose depletion, priming them for rapid reactivation of protein synthesis upon glucose repletion.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10431-9 Electron-beam control enables deterministic placement of tens of thousands of atomic defects in three-dimensional crystals, creating stable, programmable artificial matter for scalable quantum and nanoscale technologies.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10481-z Hippocampal–neocortical communication reconfigures predetermined circuit motifs to flexibly encode experiences.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10465-z An analysis of 5,778 domains 28–64 amino acids in length reveals hidden variation in conformational fluctuations, even between sequences sharing the same fold and global folding stability.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10489-5 Structured liquid droplets exhibit asymmetric division in the absence of reconstituted protein machinery.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10524-5 A cross-organ, multi-omics U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and biological ageing clocks highlights the potential of sleep optimization to promote healthy ageing, lower disease risk and extend longevity.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10491-x Machine learning analysis of cell-type-specific gene expression in mouse and human neocortex and human cortical organoids reveals human-specific cell-type and temporal variations in expression controlled by JUNB.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10383-0 Global analysis of obesity trends from 1980 to 2024 in 200 countries and territories using data from 4,050 population-based studies reveals that framing obesity as a single global epidemic masks the highly varied dynamics across countries and age groups.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10531-6 From pregnancy until lactation, eosinophils accumulate in the small intestine where they regulate goblet cell fate and enhance innate defences against enteric pathogens.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10510-x Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that drive the acquisition and expression of rapid vocal changes during juvenile song learning.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10515-6 PTCHD1-AS, which encodes a long non-coding RNA, is associated with the aetiology of autism spectrum disorder in humans through striatal molecular and circuit-level dysregulation.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10454-2 Integration of data representing 35,120 brain scans from diverse global studies enables construction of reference charts that define normative microstructural and macrostructural properties across the human lifespan for research and clinical diagnosis.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01374-2 Limited access to medical professionals and irresponsible prescribing practices are contributing to antimicrobial resistance in low-resource settings.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01379-x The last antimicrobial peptide was developed decades ago. Now, drug-resistant bacteria are forcing scientists to take a fresh look at this class of antibiotic.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01485-w Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal that extremely fast, galaxy-scale outflows from luminous objects called quasars were much more frequent, and on average more powerful, about one billion years after the Big Bang than at later cosmic epochs. These outflows could easily escape their host galaxies and regulate the evolution of early massive galaxies.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01506-8 Health outcomes were better in people who slept for between about six and eight hours a day.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01318-w Studies of white matter — the tissue used for communication between brain regions — have revealed substantial changes in people with neurological diseases and disorders. The creation of white-matter brain charts enables individual deviations from the typical structure to be assessed using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01139-x Yulu Hou and her partner experimented with using ChatGPT to automate marking of undergraduate assignments. Here’s what they learnt.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01532-6 Genetic analysis suggests interbreeding between two groups of human relatives.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01372-4 Microbiologist Alexander Fleming’s 80-year-old advice is still key to protecting the efficacy of antibiotics.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01476-x Scientists are debating whether to limit biological AI software to ward off threats.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01377-z Antibiotic use in agriculture threatens the health of workers and their communities, but there are potential solutions.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01375-1 Medical microbiologist Heiman Wertheim explains why the physical appearance and labelling of antibiotics matter when trying to limit resistance.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01561-1 Data from the 2.8-kilometre-deep core stretches back 1.2 million years. Plus, the cost of using AI tools in the lab and the greatest physics mysteries that still divide researchers.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01151-1 An observation of an ultra-faint galaxy, captured as it was shortly after the Big Bang, indicates the presence of material from the first generation of stars.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01328-8 An electron-beam technique that can precisely create thousands of atomic defects in a crystal could be used to build quantum devices.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01321-1 A simple machine-learning algorithm, inspired by honeybees’ visual memory and sense of direction, enables a flying robot to pinpoint its home location.
Nature, Published online: 13 May 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01373-3 Antibiotics designed by artificial intelligence, immunotherapy for resistant infections and other highlights from studies and trials.