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.
Despite the hype, there's no sign that the Congress will produce an energy bill worthy of the formidable energy-policy challenges faced by the United States.
An Islamic theocracy ravaged by economic sanctions isn't an obvious place to seek a vibrant cognitive-neuroscience research group. Yet that's what Alison Abbott found on a recent trip to Iran.
A new generation of planetary radar aims to look deeper than ever into some of the Solar System's most enduring mysteries. Tony Reichhardt gets ready for a trip to the interior.
Stem cells are engaged in constant crosstalk with their environment, biologists are fast realizing. So the emerging field of regenerative medicine is now wrestling with the ecological concept of the niche. Kendall Powell reports.
Ergodicity: a fundamental assumption of statistical physics — anything that can happen will happen — was thrown into question 50 years ago. Now it looks solid after all.
Human skin comes in many different shades. Recent studies of geographical differences in skin colour open up the subject scientifically by offering sophisticated accounts of the basis of this variation.
For California, probabilistic principles can be applied to the short-term forecasting of further ground-shaking following an earthquake. How such predictions will be used by the public remains to be seen.
Kinesin is a protein motor that ferries membrane-bound packages around cells — but only in one direction. Forcing it into reverse provides clues to its inner workings and to how molecular machines might be engineered.
After a first inconclusive sighting, the search for exotic particles that consist of five quarks has been hotly pursued in the past few years. But the weight of evidence is now shifting against their existence.
How much can the adult brain compensate for injury to the senses of touch or vision, for example? The answer from the latest results on the visual system, involving damage to the retina, seems to be ‘very little’.
Interactions between trapped neutral atoms have prevented their use as the ultimate frequency standard in optical clocks. A clever trapping scheme circumvents this problem and may push timekeeping to new limits.
Senior scientists often say they haven't carefully planned their career pathway—but recommend that younger scientists still create some goals to follow.
