Featured
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World View |
Climate change won’t wait for future innovation — we need action now
Governments must focus on solutions that are already working, even when they aren’t glamorous or supported by powerful lobbyists.
- Marie Claire Brisbois
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News |
Space junk heading for Moon will add to 60+ years of lunar debris
In an upcoming collision, a spent rocket booster will be the first long-circulating piece of human-made debris to smash into the lunar surface.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlight |
Extreme rains are drenching China’s booming cities
The Yangtze River Delta, the nation’s economic powerhouse, is soaked by heavy rainstorms more often today than 50 years ago.
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Article |
Observed poleward freshwater transport since 1970
A study uses a temperature-percentile water mass framework to analyse warm-to-cold poleward transport of freshwater in the Earth system, and establishes a constraint to help address biases in climate models.
- Taimoor Sohail
- , Jan D. Zika
- & John A. Church
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Career Q&A |
An engineer advances fire-management laws in Colombia
María Constanza Meza Elizalde wants to change fire laws and attitudes.
- Christine Ro
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News & Views Forum |
Atomic changes can map subterranean structures
A quantum device uses ultracold atoms to sense gravitational changes that can detect a tunnel under a city street. Here, scientists discuss the advance from the viewpoints of quantum sensing and geophysics.
- Nicola Poli
- , Roman Pašteka
- & Pavol Zahorec
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Nature Podcast |
Dinosaur-destroying asteroid struck in spring
Researchers pinpoint the season that a cataclysmic asteroid struck Earth, and how climate change is affecting the intensity of fires at night.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Benjamin Thompson
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Article |
Emergent constraints on future precipitation changes
Model simulations show that the historical relationship between global temperature and precipitation under a medium greenhouse gas concentration scenario lowers the projected high end of future precipitation change.
- Hideo Shiogama
- , Masahiro Watanabe
- & Nagio Hirota
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Article
| Open AccessQuantum sensing for gravity cartography
A study reports a quantum gravity gradient sensor with a design that eliminates the need for long measurement times, and demonstrates the detection of an underground tunnel in an urban environment.
- Ben Stray
- , Andrew Lamb
- & Michael Holynski
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Article
| Open AccessThe Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring
Examination of fish that died on the day the Mesozoic ended reveal that the impact that caused the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction occurred during boreal spring.
- Melanie A. D. During
- , Jan Smit
- & Jeroen H. J. L. van der Lubbe
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Correspondence |
Apply Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity at scale
- Lena Chan
- , Kenneth Er
- & Elizabeth Maruma Mrema
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Research Highlight |
First quadruple asteroid found hiding in plain sight
A dive into old data reveals that the space rock Elektra has not two moons, but three.
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News |
Hidden black hole, COVID reinfections — the week in infographics
Nature highlights three key graphics from the week in science and research.
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Book Review |
Lies of the land: how eugenicists tried to hijack the north
There’s so much more to the Arctic than tundra, explorers and pseudoscience.
- Josie Glausiusz
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News |
Unprecedented oil spill catches researchers in Peru off guard
Scientists are appalled at the environmental damage — and calling for the country to end its reliance on oil.
- Emiliano Rodríguez Mega
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News |
A year on Mars: How NASA’s Perseverance hit a geological jackpot
The rover collected exciting rock samples on the first leg of its epic journey. Next, it will turn towards an ancient river delta to look for past life.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Briefing |
Social, political and technical feedback processes will drive future climate policies and emissions
Climate policies and greenhouse-gas emissions for the twenty-first century are modelled as the result of coupled feedback effects in the social, political and energy systems. Our models suggest that climate policies will increase in ambition and associated emissions reductions will probably accelerate, resulting in warming of 2 °C to 3 °C above 1880–1910 levels by 2100.
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Research Briefing |
The night brakes on fires are failing
Night-time is usually a crucial period when fires lose energy, limiting their size and severity, and helping people to control their spread. But rapid night-time warming over the past several decades, combined with global increases in fire intensity at night, suggest that the naturally occurring brakes on fires are weakening.
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Nature Podcast |
Tongan volcano eruption leaves scientists with unanswered questions
Scientists scramble to understand the devastating Tongan volcano eruption, and modelling how societal changes might alter carbon emissions.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Article |
Determinants of emissions pathways in the coupled climate–social system
A stylized model of the climate–social system could help to understand policy and emissions futures.
- Frances C. Moore
- , Katherine Lacasse
- & Brian Beckage
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Article |
Warming weakens the night-time barrier to global fire
An analysis of satellite observations and climate data shows that night-time fire intensity has increased over the past two decades owing to hotter and drier nights under anthropogenic climate change.
- Jennifer K. Balch
- , John T. Abatzoglou
- & A. Park Williams
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Research Highlight |
The plastic littering a beach can be tracked to its source
Efforts to clean up beaches could be aided by a model that traces the movement of floating plastic debris.
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Research Highlight |
How a space rock became King Tut’s dagger
An X-ray scan helps to show how the pharaoh’s knife was forged — and suggests a prestigious pedigree.
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News |
Gran Turismo champion, reimagined urine — the week in infographics
Nature highlights three key graphics from the week in science and research.
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News Feature |
Why the Tongan eruption will go down in the history of volcanology
The 15 January blast sent shock waves around the globe and defied scientific expectations. Researchers are now scrambling to work out why.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlight |
Puzzling spikes in ozone-eating chemical have a fiery cause
Scientists trace variation in methyl bromide levels to an increase in fires — which are linked to the climate pattern El Niño.
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Article |
Superionic iron alloys and their seismic velocities in Earth’s inner core
Molecular dynamics simulations show that the light elements hydrogen, oxygen and carbon become highly diffusive like liquid in solid iron under the inner-core conditions, leading to a reduction in the seismic velocities.
- Yu He
- , Shichuan Sun
- & Ho-kwang Mao
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Correspondence |
New Delhi: air-quality warning system cuts peak pollution
- Sachin D. Ghude
- , Rajesh Kumar
- & M. Rajeevan
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News |
Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
As global methane concentrations soar over 1,900 parts per billion, some researchers fear that global warming itself is behind the rapid rise.
- Jeff Tollefson
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News |
Climate pledges from top companies crumble under scrutiny
Study reviewing commitments from 25 high-profile businesses highlights the urgent need for a thorough system to evaluate industry’s promises.
- Jeff Tollefson
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Research Highlight |
Gas stoves help to cook the climate — even when off
US kitchen appliances that burn natural gas emit much more methane than previously realized.
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: No freshwater-filled glacial Arctic Ocean
- Walter Geibert
- , Jens Matthiessen
- & Ruediger Stein
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Matters Arising |
No freshwater-filled glacial Arctic Ocean
- Robert F. Spielhagen
- , Jan C. Scholten
- & Anton Eisenhauer
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Rainfall an unlikely factor in Kīlauea’s 2018 rift eruption
- Jamie I. Farquharson
- & Falk Amelung
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Matters Arising |
Rainfall an unlikely factor in Kīlauea’s 2018 rift eruption
- Michael P. Poland
- , Shaul Hurwitz
- & Christina A. Neal
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Correspondence |
Emissions cuts take political and social innovation too
- Jonas De keersmaecker
- , Katharina Schmid
- & Sander van der Linden
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Comment |
Survey of gender bias in the IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs to do more to include the expertise and voices of women, even as numbers and policies improve.
- Diana Liverman
- , Nicolena vonHedemann
- & Radha Wagle
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Research Highlight |
Vesuvius is off the hook for ancient Arctic ashfall
Volcanic debris in a Greenland ice-core layer probably came from an Alaskan volcano instead.
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Do not downplay biodiversity loss
- Brian Leung
- , Anna L. Hargreaves
- & Robin Freeman
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Emphasizing declining populations in the Living Planet Report
- Brian Leung
- , Anna L. Hargreaves
- & Robin Freeman
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Shifting baselines and biodiversity success stories
- Brian Leung
- , Anna L. Hargreaves
- & Maria Dornelas
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: The Living Planet Index does not measure abundance
- Brian Leung
- , Anna L. Hargreaves
- & Robin Freeman
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Matters Arising |
Do not downplay biodiversity loss
- Michel Loreau
- , Bradley J. Cardinale
- & Claire de Mazancourt
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News Feature |
Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?
People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther afield at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet.
- Michael Marshall
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Book Review |
A call for governments to save soil
To ensure food security, the world must stop letting fertile soil wash and blow away.
- Emma Marris
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Research Highlight |
Air pollution takes a bite out of Asia’s grain crops
Ozone costs billions of dollars in yields of wheat and other staple crops in China and other East Asian nations.