Wednesday, 7 October 2026
375 articles · times in UTC
Nature News · 00:00
Blend ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02864-z Identity crisis.
Nature News · 00:00
Daily briefing: Chemistry Nobel goes to mirror-molecule researchers ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03212-x Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Plus, the biggest success stories in cancer survival and one of the biggest debates in neuroscience.
Nature News · 00:00
Why we must advocate for proper care on the frontlines of the Ebola outbreak ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02983-7 As the Bundibugyo virus public-health crisis continues to evolve, physician Richard Kojan is finding ways to care for people with the infection and helping relatives to visit loved ones safely.
Nature News · 00:00
How we ditched presentations and embraced silence in our lab meetings ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02836-3 Swapping to a system in which lab members read memos quietly before team discussions helped to create an open culture.
Nature News · 00:00
Semiconductors pushed into insulator territory ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02968-6 A material that was previously assumed to be an electrical insulator has been shown to be a semiconductor, with potential uses in electronics and optics.
Nature News · 00:00
Genome accessibility reveals disease risk that gene expression misses ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03072-5 Most disease-associated genetic alterations do not affect the genes themselves, but instead change how strongly they are expressed, often by modifying genome accessibility. Gene expression and accessibility have now been analysed simultaneou…
Nature News · 00:00
Nuclear clocks tick for the first time ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03060-9 Ultraprecise clocks that use transitions in atomic nuclei to keep time show promise as a next-generation time standard and for probing fundamental physics.
Nature News · 00:00
Retrofitted LLM can count the letter ‘i’s in ‘artificial intelligence’ ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03059-2 Most LLMs cannot reliably evaluate text on the level of individual letters. A technique called byteification retrofits existing models to enable it.
Nature News · 00:00
Gut microbes that trace ancient human journeys ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02969-5 The Indigenous African Hadza and South American Tsimane share gut microorganisms that shed light on human dispersals and microbial losses in industrialized societies.
Nature News · 00:00
An early predecessor to mammals could swim, suckle and swallow ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03069-0 A fossil of an early ancestor of mammals from the Jurassic period reveals a mammal-like throat passage (pharynx) and throat bones (hyoids). It fills a gap in our knowledge about throat features in the animals from which modern mammals evolve…
Nature News · 00:00
Australia’s bush fires got worse after British colonization — this is why ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03184-y The suppression of Indigenous burning practices probably spurred the growth of flammable forests.
Nature News · 00:00
Revealed: How this common gut microbe protects against heart disease ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03189-7 Intestinal bacterium secretes a molecule that reduces cholesterol production, according to a mouse study.
Nature News · 00:00
How to control where semiconductor crystals start growing ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02934-2 Semiconductor crystals grow from tiny nuclei, but the position of these nuclei is difficult to control precisely and can affect the crystal’s properties. An approach using ‘etching flux’ has now been developed that constrains the position at…
Nature News · 00:00
Why sound, strong science alone isn’t enough in pandemic preparedness ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02985-5 Comparable data are key to protecting the world from the next epidemic, says bioengineer Polina Brangel.
Nature News · 00:00
Observation of relativistic bond weakening in seaborgium hexacarbonyl ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11105-2 Gas chromatography analysis of compounds formed by the superheavy element seaborgium shows that the hexacarbonyl complex Sg(CO)6 exhibits lower first bond dissociation energy than the lighter chemical homologue W(CO)6, owing to relativistic…
Nature News · 00:00
RNA catalysis emerges from dynamic structural ensembles ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11140-z RNase P RNA forms shifting active and inactive conformers whose catalytic activity depends on Mg2+-driven tertiary-interaction dynamics, which are modulated by binding of accessory proteins.
Nature News · 00:00
A thorium-229 optical nuclear clock with feedback loop ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11084-4 A thorium-229 nuclear clock is realized by stabilizing a continuous-wave laser to the 148-nm nuclear excitation with a rapid feedback loop based on absorption spectroscopy.
Nature News · 00:00
Structural basis for regulating lipopolysaccharide transmembrane transport ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11129-8 Structures of the protein machinery in Gram-negative bacteria that transports lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from the cytoplasmic membrane to the outer leaflet of the outer membrane reveal how conformational changes in response to the presence of…
Nature News · 00:00
A nuclear clock synchronized to 229 Th ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11122-1 A nuclear clock synchronized to 229Th establishes laser-addressed nuclei as operational clock references and 229Th:CaF2 as a stable, reproducible solid-state platform for compact nuclear clocks and nuclear quantum sensors.
Nature News · 00:00
Hydrogen bonding in water under extreme confinement ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10858-0 A new technique allows direct nanoscale observations of the vibrational response of water confined inside carbon nanotubes, revealing that high degrees of confinement disrupt the hydrogen bond network through a fluctuating and highly-dispers…
Nature News · 00:00
Alveolar stem cells transdifferentiate to drive bronchiolar regeneration ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11127-w Identification of a cross-compartmental cellular mechanism for bronchiolar epithelial repair informs therapeutic strategies for airway injury.
Nature News · 00:00
Experimental observation of critical topology ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11099-x Experimental evidence indicating that critical gapless topological states can be characterized by the entanglement spectrum and wavefunctions is presented, demonstrating persistence of topology at phase boundaries and extension to higher-dim…
Nature News · 00:00
OpenAI posts 700 maths preprints online: mathematicians are up in arms ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03196-8 The firm used unreleased models to tackle hundreds of high-profile problems.
Nature News · 00:00
Nobel Prizes 2026: brain switches, ‘ghost’ particle hunter, and 'the chemistry of life' ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03208-7 Nature rounds up the Nobel Prizes for science — plus, hints of the ancestral human gut microbiome.
Nature News · 00:00
Chemistry Nobel for solving mystery of how ‘handed’ organic molecules can emerge ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03093-0 Prize awarded to two chemists who probed why life favours one mirror-image molecule over another.
Nature News · 00:00
NASA releases trove of Moon data from historic Artemis II flight ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03197-7 Annotated images and more collected by the four astronauts could inform missions to the lunar surface.
Nature News · 00:00
The science of superintelligence and why AI is still a useful word ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03198-6 President Donald Trump wants to replace ‘artificial intelligence’ with ‘Super Intelligence’ — but there are questions about whether we’re there yet.
Nature News · 00:00
Can your brain grow new neurons? How researchers are solving a century-old puzzle ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03132-w Scientists have debated for decades whether the human brain sprouts new neurons throughout life. What would it mean if it could — and how much evidence is enough?
Nature News · 00:00
A guide to Nature Index tables ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02999-z Information on the methodology used in the ranking for the 2026 Nature Spotlight: Infectious diseases.
Nature News · 00:00
‘When prevention disappears, infections rise’: can the world still end AIDS? ↗Nature, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03127-7 The United Nations’ deadline for eliminating HIV/AIDS as a public-health threat is unlikely to be met. But medical, political and social advances have raised hopes that longer-term success is still possible.