Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia - Nature Analysis of 15,836 ancient West Eurasian genomes reveals hundreds of instances of directional selection, showing that sustained changes in allele frequency were widespread, rather than being...

Hundreds of loci under selection are discovered in ancient genomic data of West Eurasians in a new Nature paper 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cell-type-targeted mitochondrial transplantation rescues cell degeneration - Nature MitoCatch is a cell-type-specific mitochondrion-targeting system that links mitochondria and the cell surface by protein binders and delivers mitochondria into the target cell.

A study in Nature describes a modular tool for targeted transfer of mitochondria to different cell types 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
and News & Views piece 👇https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00910-4

Genetic predictors of GLP1 receptor agonist weight loss and side effects - Nature Identification of genetic variants associated with the efficacy and side effects of GLP1 medications could underpin development of precision medicine approaches in the treatment of obesity.

A Nature paper reports the identification of a genetic locus that is associated with the efficacy of GLP-1 medication for weight loss 👇🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gene regulatory landscape dissected by single-cell four-omics sequencing - Nature Combining single-cell parallel profiling of genome conformation, histone modifications, chromatin accessibility and gene expression reveals dynamics and intranuclear spatial clustering of epigenome pr...

A study published in Nature presents CHARM, a single-cell 'four-omics' sequencing method that profiles genome conformation, histone modifications, chromatin accessibility, and gene expression within the same cell.🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Synthetic super-enhancers enable precision viral immunotherapy - Nature Synthetic super-enhancers enable specific delivery of anticancer payloads, achieving tumour elimination after a single dose in a mouse model of aggressive glioblastoma.

A unique strategy to target glioma stem cells uses a synthetic superenhancer selectively expressed in these cells. The combination of cytotoxic and immune-modulatory payloads elicits significant anti-tumour effects and prevents recurrence in mouse models. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Building trust in scientific evidence Big reproducibility efforts describe how methods and analysts shape results in behavioural and social sciences.

In this week’s special issue of Nature, four papers present multi-team collaborations testing reproducibility, replication and analytical robustness in the social and behavioural sciences. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Insulin resistance prediction from wearables and routine blood biomarkers - Nature A machine-learning model that integrates data from wearable devices (such as smartwatches) with blood biomarkers and demographic data can predict whether someone has insulin resistance, enabling timel...

A study in Nature integrates wearable watch data with blood biomarkers to predict insulin resistance🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Marriage of adolescent girls in Nigeria reduced by 80% by ‘big push’ intervention A locally tailored, big-push intervention to educate unmarried adolescent girls in 18 communities in northern Nigeria reduced rates of marriage from 86% to just 21%. Interventions that address complex...

A policy evaluation in northern Nigeria shows the importance of education and community support in delaying child marriage among girls. 👇🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
and www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The oldest articulated bony fish from the early Silurian period - Nature A tiny, articulated, near-complete osteichthyan from the early Silurian Chongqing Lagerstätte, represents the oldest osteichthyan occurrence including microfossils, and the earliest articulated remain...

A tiny fossil fish (less than 3cm long) from the 436-million-year-old Chongqing Fish Bed represents the earliest articulated remains of any bony fish in the fossil record, and informs our understanding on the origins of all bony fishes today.🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Skin cells boost distant antibody responses How the skin enables immune defences is not fully clear. Now a pathway has been found in skin cells that boosts the production of antibodies to protect the whole body.

A new study describes a skin-intrinsic pathway whereby infection triggers the release of metabolites from keratinocytes. The metabolites in turn act as an "endogenous adjuvant" to drive antibody responses both locally and distally.🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/d41... and www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Rising temperatures pose a threat to tropical insects An assessment of sensitivity to increasing temperature for thousands of insect species in mountainous terrain reveals a risk of insect biodiversity loss in tropical lowlands.

An article in Nature finds that tropical insects have a limited ability to cope with future warming, based on an analysis of around 2,300 insect species along Afrotropical and Neotropical elevational gradients.🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
and www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lasting Lower Rhine–Meuse forager ancestry shaped Bell Beaker expansion - Nature A distinctive population with high hunter-gatherer ancestry persisted 3,000 years later than in most European regions, contributing to later Lower Rhine–Meuse Bell Beaker users.

Hunter-gather ancestry persisted widely well until after the arrival of farming in the Rhine-Meuse region and may have contributed to the Bell Beaker expansion in the area, a Nature paper reports 👇🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reduced cyclin D3 expression in erythroid cells protects against malaria - Nature Population-level analyses and in vitro experiments show that a specific genetic variant of cyclin D3 inhibits the growth of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum in erythrocytes, and sugg...

A genetic variant in Cyclin D3 that was historically under positive selection in Sardinians impairs parasite growth in erythroblasts, suggesting that malaria – now eradicated in Sardinia – was the selective pressure. See paper published in Nature 👇🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? People with aphantasia are offering a window into consciousness.

A feature in Nature examines the research about aphantasia, which is the experience of people with no mental imagery, and how it could offer a window into consciousness. #Neuroskyence 🧪

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

Targeting the somato-cognitive action network (SCAN) rather than motor regions doubles efficacy of TMS treatments for Parkinson’s disease. Seems that various DBS targets for Parkinson’s are selectively connected to the SCAN rather than effector-specific motor regions.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

A unified 1 Mb DNA model with genome‑wide, single‑base outputs: AlphaGenome advances variant effect prediction across expression, chromatin, TF binding, and splicing modalities. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Projected impacts of climate change on malaria in Africa - Nature Projected impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa by 2050 highlight the urgent need for climate-resilient malaria control strategies and robust emergency response systems to safeguard pr...

A new study projects future impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa through 2050, using 25 years of data on climate, extreme weather, malaria burden and control interventions, and socioeconomic environment. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Intestinal macrophages modulate synucleinopathy along the gut–brain axis - Nature Muscularis macrophages, housekeepers of enteric nervous system integrity and intestinal homeostasis, modulate α-synuclein pathology and neurodegeneration in models of Parkinson’s disease, and understa...

Muscularis macrophages help maintain gut homeostasis but also spread α-synuclein along the gut-brain axis, promote T cell expansion, and drive Parkinson’s disease progression in mice, a Nature paper reports. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two registered clinical trials in Nature report the successful use of the GLP-1 and glucagon receptor co-agonist Mazdutide for type 2 diabetes.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the community - Nature The prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease neuropathological changes is reported based on blood-based biomarkers in a Norwegian population-based cohort.

A paper in Nature reports the prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease Neuropathological Changes in a Norwegian population-based cohort, assessed using a blood-based biomarker🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Protected area management has significant spillover effects on vegetation - Nature Analysis of effect sizes of vegetation spillovers from protected areas in Australia shows that 71% of over 3,063 analysed protected areas had a positive spillover effect, and that these effects c...

An article in Nature assesses the effect of Australian protected areas on vegetation in adjacent areas, and finds evidence of a positive spillover effect, that is, increases in a given vegetation type relative to what would be expected from the broader landscape.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gut micro-organisms associated with health, nutrition and dietary interventions - Nature Comprehensive large-scale studies of multi-national populations identified microbiome species consistently associated with favourable and unfavourable health markers, informing future studies of the h...

A meta-analysis of 34,000 individuals identifies reproducible associations between gut microbial species and diet and health markers. The associations were used to generate a ranking of species that are either positively and negatively associated with health markers.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ancient DNA from Shimao city records kinship practices in Neolithic China - Nature Sequencing of 144 ancient genomes from Shimao city and its satellites presents pedigrees among tomb owners spanning up to four generations showing predominantly patrilineal descent structure across Sh...

Ancient DNA analysis at the important archaeological site of Shimao city in northern China provides insights into the social organization and burial practices in a Neolithic community🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Healthy forests safeguard traditional wild meat food systems in Amazonia - Nature Data provided by Amazonian peoples are used to estimate the value of wild animals as a source of food, including its spatial distribution and nutritional value, providing information that will be key ...

A study in Nature finds that 0.37 million tonnes of wild meat are extracted annually in Amazonia.This amount of wild meat can meet nearly half of protein and iron dietary requirements for rural people and a substantial portion of their needs for B vitamins and zinc.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health - Nature A meta-analysis of 168 studies reveals that economic inequality is not significantly associated with subjective well-being or mental health.

How related is economic inequality to mental health? This meta-analysis shows a complex picture in which this relationship is only evident among low-income populations and in contexts of high inflation. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Video-call glitches trigger uncanniness and harm consequential life outcomes - Nature Glitches in video calls can have a negative effect on the judgement of the people involved and correspond to worse outcomes in major areas of life such as job interviews and parole hearings.

How do video glitches impact hiring decisions, trust in a medical provider, and parole decisions? A study published in Nature finds that these glitches negatively impact these decisions by breaking the illusion of face-to-face contact 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe - Nature The human superior temporal gyrus processes acoustic–phonetic properties of speech regardless of whether the language is familiar to the listener, but only encodes word boundaries and language-sp...

Speech sounds like vowels and consonants in native and foreign languages elicit similar neural responses in the superior temporal, but only during native listening does this area encode word boundaries, frequency, and language-specific information.
🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Marburg virus is a highly virulent/transmissible filovirus with no vaccine/treatments and recent outbreaks in Africa. Scientists have isolated/characterized a highly potent neutralizing monoclonal antibody effective against Marburg and related viruses Dehong and Ravn.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A Nature paper details a new AI model called EchoPrime, which can read and interpret echocardiograms 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A study looks at the mortality impacts of unmanaged rainfall and future sea level rise, with disproportionate risk for children, women, and residents of slums in a developing megacity🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...