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How insects help release carbon stored in forests, and the upcoming biodiversity summit COP 15.

Melting polar ice could delay major time adjustment, and the strange connection between brain inflammation and memory.

The rise of AI-generated fakes, evidence of the earliest-known wooden structure, and how NASA’s OSIRIS-REx brought asteroid samples back to Earth.

A soya-oil-derived adhesive matches the strength of conventional glues, and reassessing the extent and impacts of childhood malnutrition.

The unexpected origins of a 4,000-year-old people, protecting your ‘digital presence’ and what to expect from COP26.

An ancient solar storm helps pinpoint when Vikings lived in the Americas, and using magnets to deftly move non-magnetic metals.

Ancient inner ears give clues to when mammals evolved ‘warm-bloodedness’, and an efficient enzyme that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air.

Research reveals system underlying behaviour change towards young, and identifying the source of fast solar wind.

Coaxing tiny colloid particles into a diamond structure, and manipulating cell death and homeostasis in neurodegenerative disease.

Disrupting gut microbes increases risk of growth issues in the next generation, and understanding geographic variations in cancer rates.

High-energy particles could be a long-sought source of cosmic rays — plus, a ‘smart’ insulin-molecule that’s sensitive to blood sugar levels.

How a pandemic that devastated the medieval world began, and efforts to control monkeypox.

Researchers find that a huge number of roads that don’t appear on official maps, and the protein that could determine whether someone is left-handed.

Getting electronics into super-fast terahertz speeds, and how cognitive changes could alter social media’s effects on young people.

Protecting delicate quantum bits, and a competition to replicate findings from ancient computer code.

Baked sediment, heat-shattered artefacts and introduced pyrite in a 400,000-year-old Palaeolithic occupation site in Suffolk, UK provide evidence of intentional fire-making, marking a pivotal moment in human development.

We highlight some Nature Briefing stories from the end of 2025, including: a seismic detector made from a telecom cable, and how self-heating plants attract pollinators.

An analysis of the impact of logging intensity on biodiversity in tropical forests in Sabah, Malaysia, identifies a threshold of tree biomass removal below which logged forests still have conservation value.

Agricultural practices can degrade soil conditions through the loss of organic matter, a situation that will be exacerbated with growing populations. Here, the authors show that converting cropland to management intensive grazing can rapidly improve soil quality and increase organic matter concentrations.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

Multicellularity is one of the major transitions in evolution. Here, authors use a model to show that compared to unicellular bacteria, multicellular fungi can more rapidly colonise immobile, nutrient poor resources because exoenzymes provide greater or longer lasting benefits to mycelial organisms.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

Here the authors provide an explanation for 95% of examined predicted loss of function variants found in disease-associated haploinsufficient genes in the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), underscoring the power of the presented analysis to minimize false assignments of disease risk.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

The simple aggregation of pluripotent ES ßcells with morulae-stage embryos can result in viable chimaeras at a similar frequency to that of blastocyst injection. The savings in time and equipment inherent in the aggregation techniques, however, make this approach well worth considering.

Comparative genomic analyses suggest that Lokiarchaeota, the closest known prokaryotic relative of eukaryotes, are hydrogen dependent, supporting the ‘hydrogen hypothesis’ for the origin of eukaryotic cells.

A new study considers how disruption to energy systems is experienced and takes on meaning. On the basis of workshop data, the study finds that public views of heat decarbonization in the United Kingdom are shaped by relationships to family, cultural expectations, housing and financial position.

Deep learning methods have been used to design proteins that can neutralize the effects of three-finger toxins found in snake venom, which could lead to the development of safer and more accessible antivenom treatments.

We reconstruct the spatial distribution and timing of wetland loss through conversion to seven human land uses between 1700 and 2020, elucidating the magnitude and land-use drivers of global wetland losses to improve assessments of wetland loss impacts.

Soil age is thought to be an important driver of ecosystem development. Here, the authors perform a global survey of soil chronosequences and meta-analysis to show that, contrary to expectations, soil age is a relatively minor ecosystem driver at the biome scale once other drivers such as parent material, climate, and vegetation type are accounted for.

A trans-ancestry meta-analysis of GWAS of glycemic traits in up to 281,416 individuals identifies 99 novel loci, of which one quarter was found due to the multi-ancestry approach, which also improves fine-mapping of credible variant sets.

Hominins colonized Eurasia fairly swiftly after they left Africa around 1.75 million years ago, although it had been thought that they did not penetrate beyond 45° N except in very warm intervals. Now, however, artefacts, fauna and flora dating back more 0.78 million years have been found in a river deposit in Norfolk, England. The findings show that humans were capable of penetrating northern Europe in cooler intervals, and will prompt a re-evaluation of the adaptations and abilities of humans at this early date.

Chronic infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to the emergence of viral variants that show reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies in an immunosuppressed individual treated with convalescent plasma.

A genome-wide association study of critically ill patients with COVID-19 identifies genetic signals that relate to important host antiviral defence mechanisms and mediators of inflammatory organ damage that may be targeted by repurposing drug treatments.

COVID-19 can be associated with neurological complications. Here the authors show that markers of brain injury, but not immune markers, are elevated in the blood of patients with COVID-19 both early and months after SARS-CoV-2 infection, particularly in those with brain dysfunction or neurological diagnoses.

Understanding the drivers of forest losses and their economic implications is key to designing efficient climate policies. This study simulates market-driven land-use decisions to identify the factors contributing to forest losses, revealing such losses, their trends, temporal variation and social value.

Forest fragmentation is thought to reduce carbon storage at forest edges. Here, using remote sensing datasets, the authors show that biomass is 25% lower within 500 m of the forest edge, and suggest that fragmentation results in a global reduction in tropical forest carbon stocks by nearly 10%.

At the mucosal interface of the gut and microbiome immune cells play pivotal roles to regulate between commensalism, colonisation and pathogenic invasion. Here, Lo et al. show CTLA-4 expression in innate lymphoid cells is linked to mucosal homeostasis in a microbiome dependent manner.

Openshaw and colleagues find myeloid inflammation and complement activation signatures in patients with long COVID who were previously hospitalized.

A whole-genome sequencing analysis of 100 pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas has discovered known and newly identified genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer; these genetic alterations can be classified into four subtypes, which raises the possibility of improved targeting of clinical treatments.

Integration of phylogenetics, comparative genomics and palaeobiological approaches suggests that the last universal common ancestor lived about 4.2 billion years ago and was a complex prokaryote-grade anaerobic acetogen that was part of an ecosystem.

Analyses focusing on protein-truncating variants from 106,973 women from in the UK Biobank identify variants in genes that reinforce the link between reproductive lifespan in women and cancer risk in both sexes.

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.