Nature

Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?

People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther afield at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet.

Webb telescope reaches its final destination far from Earth

The ambitious observatory has arrived at its home — near a gravitationally special spot called L2 — for a premier view of the Universe.

Alexandra Witze
News 24 Jan 2022
Deltacron: the story of the variant that wasn’t

News of a ‘super variant’ combining Delta and Omicron spread rapidly last week, but researchers say it never existed and the sequences may have resulted from contamination.

Freda Kreier
News 21 Jan 2022
Quantum logic with spin qubits crossing the surface code threshold

A spin-based quantum processor in silicon achieves single-qubit and two-qubit gate fidelities above 99.5% using gate-set tomography, exceeding the theoretical threshold required for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Xiao Xue
Maximilian Russ
Lieven M. K. Vandersypen
Article Open Access 19 Jan 2022
Daily briefing: Webb telescope reaches final destination

The James Webb Space Telescope reaches its final destination. Plus: how green lights can save sharks from fishing nets and why big-team science can help tackle tough questions in research.

Anne Marie Conlon
Nature Briefing 25 Jan 2022
- Contents
- Subscribe
Current Issue 27 Jan 2022

News & Comment

Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?

People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther afield at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet.

Michael Marshall

News Feature 26 Jan 2022
India’s tech innovation engines must raise their game

Editorial 26 Jan 2022
Long-COVID symptoms less likely in vaccinated people, Israeli data say
Freda Kreier
News 25 Jan 2022
COVID’s toll, PhD career advice — the week in infographics

News 25 Jan 2022
Build up big-team science
Nicholas A. Coles
J. Kiley Hamlin
Drew Altschul
Comment 25 Jan 2022
NASA’s Webb telescope is an initial success — despite formidable odds

Editorial 25 Jan 2022
How lab leaders can support students’ non-academic career plans
Nikki Forrester
Career Feature 24 Jan 2022

Latest Reviews & Analysis

- Hot surfaces cooled by isolating steam from spray
  
  An innovative microstructure design distributes water to rapidly cool a hot surface without interference from the steam that is created in the process. This approach could enable safer and more efficient power generation.
  
  James C. Bird
  
  News & Views 26 Jan 2022
- Self-heating plasmas offer hope for energy from fusion
  
  Experiments have validated a way of producing nuclear energy known as laser-driven fusion, in which a plasma is heated and compressed. The milestone offers crucial evidence that the plasma can supply its own heat.
  Nigel Woolsey
  
  News & Views 26 Jan 2022
- Ear anatomy traces a family tree for bats
  
  How should the bat family tree be arranged? Analysis of bats’ inner ear anatomy supports a previously proposed arrangement that was based on DNA analysis. The findings also shed light on the evolution of echolocation.
  M. Brock Fenton
  
  News & Views 26 Jan 2022
- The challenges and opportunities of battery-powered flight
  
  The economic, technical, environmental and safety requirements of battery-powered aircraft are considered, and promising technologies and future prospects for battery innovation are discussed.
  Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan
  Alan H. Epstein
  Michael Winter
  
  Perspective 26 Jan 2022
- From the archive
  
  Nature’s pages examine attempts to reconstruct ancient systems for desert agriculture, and report efforts to honour Charles Darwin in France.
  
  News & Views 25 Jan 2022
- A hard graft problem solved for key global food crops
  Colin Turnbull
  Sean Carrington
  
  News & Views 25 Jan 2022
- A subset of immune-system T cells branded as seeds for type 1 diabetes
  Stephen J. Turner
  Nicole L. La Gruta
  
  News & Views 25 Jan 2022
- Identification of human and mosquito receptors for alphaviruses
  Caroline K. Martin
  Margaret Kielian
  
  News & Views 19 Jan 2022
- Future ice loss captured by historical snapshots
  Twila A. Moon
  
  News & Views 19 Jan 2022

Nature is a Transformative Journal; authors can publish using the traditional publishing route OR via immediate gold Open Access.

Our Open Access option complies with funder and institutional requirements.

Latest Research articles

Sensory representation and detection mechanisms of gut osmolality change

Vagal afferents innervating the hepatic portal area respond to changes in gut osmolality and regulate thirst and drinking behaviour in mice.

Takako Ichiki
Tongtong Wang
Yuki Oka
Article 26 Jan 2022
Burning plasma achieved in inertial fusion

A burning plasma, a critical step towards self-sustaining fusion, is achieved at the US National Ignition Facility, with a subset of experiments demonstrating fusion self-heating beyond radiation and conduction losses.

A. B. Zylstra
O. A. Hurricane
G. B. Zimmerman
Article Open Access 26 Jan 2022
A radio transient with unusually slow periodic emission

Analysis of archival low-frequency radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array reveals a periodic transient with an unusual periodicity of 18.18 min, the source of which is localized to our Galaxy and could be an ultra-long-period magnetar.

N. Hurley-Walker
X. Zhang
T. J. Galvin
Article 26 Jan 2022
Cortical preparatory activity indexes learned motor memories

In rhesus monkeys, learning of a motor task is accompanied by uniform changes in preparatory activity in motor cortex that are orthogonal to the force-predictive neural state subspace.

Xulu Sun
Daniel J. O’Shea
Krishna V. Shenoy
Article 26 Jan 2022
Unconventional spectral signature of T_c in a pure d-wave superconductor

A high-precision angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) study on the superconductor Bi2212 resolves the spectroscopic singularity associated with the superconducting transition temperature, and indicates that the transition is driven by phase fluctuations.

Su-Di Chen
Makoto Hashimoto
Zhi-Xun Shen
Article 26 Jan 2022