Meet Nature’s 10: the people who shaped science in 2025

Hello Nature readers,
Today we meet Nature’s 10: people who helped shape science in 2025. Plus, we learn that three-year average temperatures are reaching a dangerous high and step onto an ancient Egyptian pleasure boat.

Yearly temperatures reach dangerous highs

This year looks likely to tie with 2023 as the second-hottest ever on record. Last year was the hottest. “The three-year average for 2023-2025 is on track to exceed 1.5 ℃ for the first time,” says Samantha Burgess of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, referring to the Paris Agreement pledge to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. “These milestones are not abstract — they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change and the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

AI-designed antibodies race toward trials

Scientists say they are on the cusp of turning antibodies designed by artificial intelligence (AI) into potential therapies just a year after they debuted the first example of an entirely AI-designed antibody. Previously, the structure of antibodies proved somewhat of a black box to AI models. But new and improved models — such as an updated version of AlphaFold — have more successfully predicted the shape of flexible structures that give antibodies the specificity they need to bind to foreign molecules. Researchers at several companies now say they’ve designed ‘drug-like’ antibodies.

All aboard the ancient party boat

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient Egyptian pleasure boat buried off the coast of Alexandria. Researchers estimate that the 35-metre-long vessel dates back to the early first century AD. The well-preserved cruiser seems to match the description of similar vessels by the ancient Greek historian Strabo, who wrote that they were “luxuriously fitted out” and carried passengers who “play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness”. It’s “phenomenal to have the archaeological correlate” to these ancient descriptions for the first time, says archaeologist Damian Robinson.

Affordable food requires research

A global drop in public and private investment in agricultural science in the past four decades is partly to blame for high food prices, write the authors of a new analysis. “It will take decades for the harmful consequences of current R&D spending slowdowns to be realized, including increased environmental damage, poverty, malnutrition and civil or military strife,” they write. They urge countries to “rapidly ramp up — in fact, double — their collective spending on agrifood R&D in the next five years”.

How trust was broken during the pandemic

The rapid development of vaccines against COVID-19 was a scientific triumph that, along with other public-health measures, saved millions of lives. But communication missteps by public-health specialists and governments during the pandemic ended up damaging public trust in vaccines and scientific research, argues physician and science communicator Kristen Panthagani. “If there was one thing I could change about the pandemic, it would have been for governmental and public-health institutions to have focused on listening to the public's questions,” says Panthagani. “Connecting with people on social media was kind of an afterthought.”

The awakening of Oliver Sacks

Neurologist Oliver Sacks is known for his compelling case studies, published in essays and books such as Awakenings. But his patient stories were often enmeshed with his own complex inner life, writes journalist Rachel Aviv, who draws on Sacks’s previously unreleased correspondence and journals. In a letter to one of his brothers, Sacks himself characterized the cases in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat as “half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own — are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away”.