News Feature in 2008

The next 40 years will see telescopes that far outstrip any ever seen before. Jeff Kanipe profiles four of them; illustrations by Lynette Cook.

Medals, cash and fame rained down on the heads of prominent scientists in 2008. Ashley Yeager rounds up some of them.

He did more than anyone to build the Large Hadron Collider. This year he saw it finished -- and then break down. Geoff Brumfiel profiles the LHC's project leader, Nature's newsmaker of the year.

Squash them, pinch them, twist them, pull them — cells react to physical forces, finds Claire Ainsworth.

Eric Hand reports on the short life and hard times of the little Mars lander that sort-of-could.

The current crisis in worldwide food prices reinforces the need for more productive agriculture. Emma Marris meets five ambitious scientists determined to stop the world from going hungry.

Argentina's government has pledged to reverse a decades-long scientific brain drain. Rex Dalton reports.

A new generation of lithium-ion batteries, coupled with rising oil prices and the need to address climate change, has sparked a global race to electrify transportation. Jeff Tollefson investigates.

Celebrating the man and the book.

A celebration of one of evolution's crowning glories.

Evolution assumes that extinction is forever. Maybe not. Henry Nicholls asks what it would take to bring the woolly mammoth back from the dead.

You might think that once evolution has found one way to get something done, it will stick with it. But similar physical forms can hide radically different wiring, finds Tanguy Chouard.

Neuroscientists are pretty sure they know what causes Alzheimer's disease, but their theory has not yet given rise to effective drugs. Alison Abbott asks what's wrong.

Eric Schadt revels in making people uncomfortable with his science. Bryn Nelson reports how the bioinformatics rabble-rouser hopes to charge ahead in the face of his company's disintegration.

When scientists opened up the human genome, they expected to find the genetic components of common traits and diseases. But they were nowhere to be seen. Brendan Maher shines a light on six places where the missing loot could be stashed away.

Could the next generation of genetic sequencing machines be built from a collection of minuscule holes? Katharine Sanderson reports.

Where should the drug industry go to find new ideas? In the first of two features, Alison Abbott asks if the future lies in systems biology -- a field that attempts to piece together 'everything'. In the second, David Cyranoski looks at drug companies' attraction to China.

Electronic voting machines were supposed to vanquish unreliable counts. They did not -- but David Lindley finds that other technologies present their own problems.

Where should the drug industry go to find new ideas? In the first of two features, Alison Abbott asked if the future lies in systems biology -- a field that attempts to piece together 'everything'. In this, the second feature, David Cyranoski looks at drug companies' attraction to China.

If you want to start an argument, ask the person who just said 'paradigm shift' what it really means. Or 'epigenetic'. Nature goes in search of the terms that get scientists most worked up.