Analysis of people’s web searches and visited websites suggests that it is more likely that they are choosing to engage with partisan or unreliable news than that they are being unduly exposed to it by search-engine algorithms.

The degree of ionization inside giant planets and stars determines their material properties. In burning stars, ionization is controlled by temperature, whereas pressure-driven ionization is dominant in cooler objects. Experiments creating the extreme conditions needed for pressure-driven ionization in the laboratory shed light on this complex process.

Nematode worms that parasitize plants ravage food crops and threaten global food security. Conventional nematode control relies on agrochemicals that are broadly toxic, so less-risky strategies are needed. Benign precursor chemicals that are metabolically converted to lethal products selectively in worm tissue could be the solution.

A limit on the resolution of optical-microscopy techniques has been broken by using a mixture of tags to label copies of target molecules in a sample, opening the way to better views of molecular organization in cells.