Nature Communications is a peer-reviewed, open access, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, health, physical, chemical, Earth, social, mathematical, applied, and engineering sciences. Papers published by the journal aim to represent important advances of significance to specialists within each field.
Stevens Neuroimaging Institute researchers built a brain scan measure that lines up blood flow with cell density layer by layer, revealing regions whose mitochondria run at higher capacity, a clue that could eventually help flag disease.
A urine-derived bacterium converted DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) into testosterone in culture, and structural modeling showed how one unusually flexible enzyme could carry out multiple steps in the pathway.
A global review of political polarization research finds that most studies, and nearly all the field’s rigorous experiments, focus on the United States, while replications run elsewhere have sometimes found the opposite effect entirely.
Two new lab tools push protein engineering in opposite directions at once: one builds proteins nature never made from an expanded genetic alphabet, the other calculates precisely how to destroy a disease protein already causing harm.
Obese mice ship fat-derived vesicles across the placenta that reprogram fetal liver DNA, switching on glucose production weeks early and setting up glucose intolerance in male offspring by adulthood.
Microglia, the brain’s cleanup cells, grow sluggish and inflamed with age in mice. A youth blood protein called TIMP2 keeps them working, and restoring it in old animals revived their debris clearance.
A Göttingen physics team reconstructed the full 3D wavefunction of an organic semiconductor molecule using a lab-bench extreme ultraviolet source, imaging orbitals that once demanded a synchrotron and hinting at future femtosecond movies.
An AI model trained on more than 10,000 overnight recordings sorted sleep-study patients into five risk tiers, spotting a doubled five-year mortality gap that the standard apnea severity score missed entirely, in both men and women.
A binary-solvent electrolyte that donates hydrogen bonds only weakly let researchers turn carbon dioxide in simulated flue gas into carbon monoxide at near-total efficiency, even at 1% CO2 with oxygen present, and run the process for over 100 hours.
Physicists in Japan etched 372,100 holes into a silicon chip following the Smith hat tiling, then found that left-handed and right-handed circularly polarized light scatter off it differently, an asymmetry conventional quasicrystals cannot produce.
UCLA researchers found the drug rescued hyperexcitability, sensory over-responsivity and repetitive behavior in adult mice exposed to mild inflammation in the womb — without reversing any of the structural brain changes. The effect was gone by 72 hours, and five weeks of daily treatment produced tolerance.
Northwestern’s cerebellum-inspired memtransistor stays idle through normal beats and fires only at the unexpected, hitting 98 percent accuracy where standard AI was still at 70–80. The catch: only the devices were built — the surrounding network was simulated.