Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Understanding the factors that drive formation of particular types of cancer can aid efforts to develop better diagnostics or treatments. The identification of a bacterial subspecies with a connection to colon cancer has clinical relevance.
An array of robots has been set up so that pushes between them produce movements that do not conform to the usual laws of motion. Fascinating behaviour emerges from these interactions: wave phenomena known as solitons.
The quality of a bird’s song during courtship can influence whether a male is selected as a mate. An innovative approach using machine learning offers a way to analyse the characteristics of birdsong.
For a century, scientists pondered whether bird flight evolved by animals gliding down from trees or by creatures running and flapping from the ground up. A landmark 1974 paper reset the debate to focus on the evolution of the flight stroke instead.
Words and images experienced by an infant wearing sensors during their daily life have led to efficient machine learning, pointing to the power of multimodal training signals and to the potentially exploitable statistics of real-life experience.
Burning events that occur at night have been revealed as a driver of large wildfires. Prolonged drought conditions are to blame, making it easier for fires to spread at night when they would ordinarily slow or extinguish completely.
A trial that took mobile health services to rural Sierra Leone finds that this initiative increased COVID-19 vaccine uptake. But more must be done to expand the coverage of health services in low-income countries.
Combining a high-throughput technique with 3D printing offers a way of fabricating micrometre-sized particles for use in electronics and biotechnology. The versatile method can produce one million intricate shapes in a single day.
The 1964 discovery of Epstein–Barr virus shed light on factors that contribute to human cancer. Subsequent studies set the stage for finding ways to diagnose and treat cancer, and revealed how immune defences control viral infection.
Why do several species of whale experience menopause, and why does the phenomenon occur at all? Analysing whale data might help to answer these questions and shed light on why menopause evolved in humans.
Direct interactions between cells in tissue are incompletely understood because the advanced technologies required to examine them are still in their infancy. A new method can decipher cell–cell interactions on a large scale.
In experiments dubbed the Random Genome Project, researchers have integrated DNA strands with random sequences into yeast and mouse cells to find the default transcriptional state of their genomes.
The discovery of 285-million-year-old fossils of intricately patterned animal scales indicates that evolutionary tinkering of armoured skin started at the dawn of life on dry land as aquatic vertebrates adapted for terrestrial survival.
It has been argued that human culture rests on a unique ability to learn from others more than we could possibly learn alone in a lifetime. Two studies show that we share this ability with bumblebees and chimpanzees.
Diamond layers can help to dissipate the heat generated by high-power semiconductor devices. This effect has now been enhanced by adding layers of materials and engineering their crystal-lattice vibrations to be compatible at the interfaces.
A single gene in astrocytes can constrain repetitive behaviours, indicating that these cells are regulators of behavioural disruption in conditions such as Huntington’s disease and obsessive–compulsive disorder.
By adapting a device designed to create extremely high pressures into one that can sense magnetic fields, researchers have obtained evidence that a hydrogen-rich material is a superconductor, eliminating long-standing doubts.
