Scientific community and society articles from across Nature Portfolio

A book about witches casts a spell, and arguments about whether blue-green algae should be called blue-green bacteria, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

The last months of 2025 have brought major new policy initiatives and pilots for digital medicine and AI regulatory sandboxes from the EU, UK, and US regulators. The EU has seen a regulatory simplification package with the promotion of sandboxes for innovative technologies. The UK sees the start of an important second phase of the world-leading ‘AI Airlock’ regulatory sandbox program. TEMPO, a major voluntary alternative pathway regulatory innovation pilot for digital health in chronic disease has been announced by the US FDA. These frameworks bring flexible approaches to explore digital health technology innovation together with regulatory innovation. They will all substantially advance digital medicine, with the US TEMPO project being the most innovative, bringing sandboxing principles to the on-market phase.

A device has been built that relies on a solid-state phenomenon called the elastocaloric effect to produce cooling to temperatures below 0 °C, lower than existing room-temperature elastocaloric cooling systems are able to achieve. The innovation demonstrates that elastocaloric technology could offer an alternative to conventional freezing systems that use volatile greenhouse gases.

Voluntary deference to prestigious individuals is a unique feature of human social life. Here, the authors show that human prestige psychology can promote marked-yet-adaptive inequalities in influence while remaining non-coercive.

A book about witches casts a spell, and arguments about whether blue-green algae should be called blue-green bacteria, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

Hindering studies involving fetal tissue will impede the development of the alternatives intended to replace it, while slowing the search for new medicines.

The prospect of reduced funding, more stringent conflict-of-interest policies and research reproducibility are among the growing challenges to sustained US leadership in biomedical translation.