The 2014 edition of Nature’s 10 � a list of 10 people who mattered in science this year selected by Nature’s team of editors � looks behind the major events and discoveries to the human endeavour that makes science work. This year’s picks include Andrea Accomazzo, flight director of the Rosetta mission that landed the Philae spacecraft on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko; Radhika Nagpal, who contributed to the rapid advances being made in artificial intelligence and robotics and Sjors Scheres wins a spot on the list for his work on cryo-electron microscopy. Nature’s list also includes: Pete Frates, the retired baseball player who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is credited with turning the Ice Bucket Challenge into the social media phenomenon of the year; Sheik Humarr Khan, who dedicated himself to understanding and fighting the Ebola virus disease in Sierra Leone, and who died from the disease in July; Masayo Takahashi, who led the first clinical trial of cells derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells; Kopillil Radhakrishnan, head of the Indian Space Research Organization; David Spergel, who identified problems with the reported discovery of gravitational waves from the infant universe; Maryam Mirzakhani, the mathematician who became the first female winner of the prestigious Fields Medal prize for mathematics; and Suzanne Topalian, whose work has been crucial in bringing a technique known as cancer immunotherapy from laboratory to clinic. Cover: CGI illustration by Peter Crowther Associates/ Début Art.

More than 90% of the species that have populated Earth at some time during the past four billion years have vanished, many of them in mass extinctions. That puts the focus on those species that remain and their chances of survival. In a News Feature this week we try to take stock of what remains of life on Earth � not a simple matter it turns out � and ask what conservation measures would be needed to halt the attritional loss of biodiversity. Cover: Critically endangered black eyed tree frogs (Agalychnis moreletii) in the Pakaraima Mountains of Guyana ( Joe Riis/National Geographic Society/Corbis)

A representation of single-shot compressed ultrafast photography at 100 billion frames per second. With the advent of fast electronic imaging sensors in the late 1960s, ultrafast photography became possible. Events even faster than a nanosecond can be captured with a streak camera � a device that records a single extended frame rather than a sequence of frames. However, this technique is inherently one-dimensional: to capture a two-dimensional image, the camera needs to scan the scene stepwise, requiring the event to be repetitive. Gao et al. now demonstrate a technique based on compressed imaging with a streak camera that can video record non-repetitive transient events in two dimensions, with temporal resolution down to tens of picoseconds. To demonstrate the potential of the technique, dubbed compressed ultrafast photography or CUP, the authors demonstrate ultra-fast imaging of laser pulses being reflected and refracted, and of photons racing in two media, as well as apparent faster-than-light propagation of non-information. It should be possible to couple CUP to anything from microscopes to telescopes. Cover: Liang Gao, Jinyang Liang, Chiye Li, and Lihong V. Wang.