The grand plan to personalize psychiatry

Hello Nature readers,
Today we investigate plans to personalize psychiatry, learn that funders in Europe are backing preprint-led publishing and consider whether student evaluations really matter for professors.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider recommending it to a friend or colleague. Click here to forward it by e-mail. Thank you!

Psychiatry: this time it’s personal

Researchers are hoping to reduce the trial and error involved in finding the right treatments and doses for people with mental-health conditions, in an approach called precision psychiatry. The idea involves dividing broad, often vague diagnoses into more-useful subgroups and matching treatments to individuals using a data-driven approach. Some psychiatrists are busy investigating how to incorporate genetics, biometric data and socioeconomic factors into this personalized package. But others say the approach has yet to prove its benefits.

News

Brain flickers hint at drivers of awareness

In a visual-perception test, researchers showed macaques (Macaca mulatta) two images — each only visible with one eye — that elicited known patterns of neural activity. They found that the animals’ brain activity flickered between the two patterns 15 times per second — one corresponding to the image the macaque was consciously processing, and the other to the one that was not being perceived. The team says the findings could be a small step towards determining how brains give rise to consciousness, or the subjective experience of being aware.

DMD gene therapy showed little efficacy

Results from the first human trial of an experimental gene-editing therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), in which a young boy died after a catastrophic immune reaction, have been published. The therapy used an adeno-associated virus to deliver a base editor — a form of CRISPR gene-editing technology — to muscles to correct the mutation that causes DMD. The findings show that the treatment did edit some target genes, but that its therapeutic effect was limited. The boy who died was one of four trial participants.

Funders back preprint-led publishing

Science funders and research organizations in Europe are joining a European Commission initiative to expand open-access publishing and make the peer-review process more transparent. The programme will run on an expanded version of the Open Research Europe (ORE) platform that the commission plans to roll out in early November. The platform uses a model in which preprints are reviewed openly by identifiable reviewers. “This is a collective effort to build a more transparent, sustainable publishing system that serves the research community and society as a whole,” says Karla Anaya-Carlsson, who chairs the ORE Funders Group.

Infographic of the week

Features & opinion

The search for firesafe frog homes

In southern California, researchers are racing to conserve the mountain yellow-legged frog (Rana mucosa). Invasive species, habitat loss and an infectious fungus drove the once-thriving population of these frogs to near extinction in the 2000s. Thanks to captive breeding programs, thousands of yellow-legged frogs have since been released back into the wild. But the increasing intensity of wildfires in the region has forced scientists to repeatedly seek out new places to safely rehome the amphibians — and they could be running out of viable options.

Should I care what my students think of me?

Marketing communications specialist Lan Nguyen Chaplin asks: is it OK that I no longer care about student evaluations? “What matters is that I challenge them — not whether they like me or not,” she says of her students. A panel of Nature readers gave their judgement — read on to see if you agree.

Quote of the day

After almost 22 years in orbit, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will plummet to a fiery demise in Earth’s atmosphere next week. Astronomers are mourning the spacecraft, but grateful for the massive archive of data it leaves for scientists to explore, says Caryl Gronwall, who led Swift’s science operations team. (Nature | 4 min read)

Today I’m wondering what I’d do with £35.5 million (US$47.3 million). One option, I’ve learned, is to buy an approximately 67-million-year-old Nanotyrannus skeleton. Or, should I say, it was an option, because the fossil sold at auction for that amount on 26 October.

If you’ve made any multimillion-dollar purchases this week, or if you have any feedback on this newsletter, let us know at [email protected].

Thanks for reading,
Jacob Smith, associate editor, Nature Briefing

If you enjoy this newsletter, please recommend it to a friend or colleague. Click here to forward it by e-mail. Thank you!

Forwarded by a friend? Get the Briefing straight to your inbox: subscribe for free.

• Nature Briefing: Anthropocene — climate change, biodiversity, sustainability and geoengineering
• Nature Briefing: AI & Robotics — 100% written by humans, of course
• Nature Briefing: Cancer — a weekly newsletter written with cancer researchers in mind
• Nature Briefing: Careers — insights, advice and award-winning journalism to help you optimize your working life
• Nature Briefing: Clinical Neurology — guideline updates, emerging treatments and clinical developments shaping neurology practice
• Nature Briefing: Microbiology — the most abundant living entities on our planet – microorganisms – and the role they play in health, the environment and food systems
• Nature Briefing: Translational Research — covers biotechnology, drug discovery and pharma

Briefing in other languages:
• Sign up for the weekly round-up e-mail in Arabic, curated and translated by the editors of Nature Arabic Edition
هل تود أن تقرأ هذا الموجز باللغة العربية؟ سَجِّل الآن لتصلك نشرة العلوم الموجزة أسبوعيًّا، التي يختار محتواها ويترجمه فريق محرري "نيتشر الطبعة العربية".
• Follow Nature Portfolio on WeChat for a weekly round-up post in Chinese, curated and translated by our team in China
关注Nature Portfolio官方微信订阅号，每周二为您推送Nature Briefing精选中文内容——自然每周简报。

Get more from Nature: Register for free on nature.com to sign up for other newsletters specific to your field and e-mail alerts from Nature Portfolio journals

View our privacy policy

You received this newsletter because you subscribed with the email address: [subscriber]

Nature Portfolio | The Springer Nature Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Nature Portfolio, part of Springer Nature.
© 2026 Springer Nature Limited. All rights reserved.