Featured
-
-
Outlook |
Water and warfare: the battle to control a precious resource
Climate change could intensify the role of this vital and strategic asset in armed conflict.
- Elie Dolgin
-
News & Views |
From the archive: London fog, and an expedition team to envy
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Book Review |
What the Ottomans did for science — and science did for the Ottomans
A hundred years after the birth of modern Turkey, a monumental research project is uncovering the untold story of science and technology during six centuries of the Ottoman Empire.
- Ehsan Masood
-
Book Review |
Were Neanderthals soulful inventors or strange cannibals?
To understand the true otherness of Neanderthals, researchers must rethink the meaning they give to their archaeological finds, argues a new book.
- Rebecca Wragg Sykes
-
News & Views |
From the archive: Uri Geller’s tricks, and willows to the rescue
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Obituary |
Evelyn Fox Keller (1936–2023), philosopher who questioned gender roles in science
Mathematical biologist, philosopher and historian of science who challenged the vision of science as a masculine activity.
- Marga Vicedo
-
-
News & Views |
From the archive: renaming the proton, and enthusiasm for sanitary matters
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News & Views |
From the archive: a juice extractor in an insect’s gut, and amateur radio telephony
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Essay |
How AI is expanding art history
From identifying disputed artworks to reconstructing lost masterpieces, artificial intelligence is enriching how we interpret our cultural heritage.
- David G. Stork
-
News & Views |
From the archive: air for prairie dogs, and popular fallacies explained
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News & Views |
From the archive: why the chicken crossed the road, and a frog in puffed breeches
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Book Review |
The ‘brazen’ science that paved the way for the Higgs boson (and a lot more)
Fundamental physics has progressed in leaps and bounds in the past century — driven by strong characters and often a complete disregard for health and safety, as a spirited history shows.
- Tara Shears
-
Nature Podcast |
A new hydrogel can be directly injected into muscle to help it regenerate
A soft and conductive material shows promise for muscle rehabilitation, and why starfishes have such strange body plans.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Shamini Bundell
-
-
News & Views |
From the archive: soap success, and Michael Faraday’s lecture tips
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News |
Meet the unsung scientists behind the Nobel for quantum dots
Nature speaks to those who worked alongside this year’s chemistry laureates to develop the award-winning nanocrystals.
- Neil Savage
-
Nature Podcast |
An anti-CRISPR system that helps save viruses from destruction
Tactic could be co-opted to make gene-editing more precise, and how much melting of Greenland’s ice sheet can be prevented.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Shamini Bundell
-
News & Views |
From the archive: animal behaviour, and Darwin discusses organ loss
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News |
AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time
Machine-learning technique reveals Greek words in CT scans of rolled-up papyrus.
- Jo Marchant
-
News & Views |
From the archive: science on TV, and the Lancet turns 100
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News |
Why women earn less than men: Nobel for economic historian who probed pay gap
Claudia Goldin mined 200 years of data to show that greater economic growth did not lead to wage parity, nor to more women in the workplace.
- Philip Ball
-
Nature Podcast |
Astronomers are worried by a satellite brighter than most stars
Researchers determined the telecommunications satellite was periodically brighter than 99% of stars, and powerful X-rays have uncovered an ancient trilobite’s last meal.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
-
-
News & Views |
From the archive: lost in translation, and fascinating frogs
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
-
News & Views |
From the archive: teenage disdain, and Darwin ponders tiny males
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News & Views |
From the archive: harmful insects, and Michael Faraday battles jargon
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News & Views |
From the archive: the value of MSc degrees, and painting tips
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Book Review |
Bucking the system: the extraordinary story of how the SDGs came to be
Behind the UN Sustainable Development Goals is a stirring tale of people overcoming huge odds against hostile institutions.
- Ehsan Masood
-
News |
Legacy of racist US housing policies extends even to bird data
A discriminatory strategy called redlining, which was implemented in the 1930s, has repercussions today for records of urban biodiversity.
- Anil Oza
-
Nature Podcast |
Our ancestors lost nearly 99% of their population, 900,000 years ago
A roundup of stories from the Nature Briefing, including how human ancestors came close to extinction, historic pollution in Antarctica, and the AI that predicts smell from a compound's structure.
- Benjamin Thompson
- , Dan Fox
- & Shamini Bundell
-
News & Views |
From the archive: enchanting insects, and John Stuart Mill’s will
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Obituary |
Melaku Worede, crop genetics leader (1936–2023)
Plant geneticist who pioneered seed conservation for famine resilience and farmer livelihoods.
- Regassa Feyissa
- & Toby Hodgkin
-
News & Views |
From the archive: colour constancy, and an atomic romance
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News & Views |
From the archive: Copernicus’s legacy, and a hungry pigeon
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Book Review |
From better bridges to more efficient cars: how pocket calculators changed the world
Now lying forgotten in many a drawer, the modern computer’s handheld predecessors heralded an era of effortless calculation — an innovation 42,000 years in the making.
- Jeffrey M. Perkel
-
Nature Podcast |
Fruit flies’ ability to sense magnetic fields thrown into doubt
Study fails to replicate two key papers on fruit flies’ magnetic sense, and what the closing of the Arecibo observatory means for science.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Shamini Bundell
-
News & Views |
From the archive: a prize for the design of a helicopter, and a venomous caterpillar
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
News & Views |
From the archive: the tenacity of eels, and weatherproofing St Paul’s
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Arts Review |
Dr Semmelweis review: Mark Rylance play shows how hand washing saved hundreds of lives
Professional pride and personal tragedy stymied ideas about how infections spread in the nineteenth century, suggests a show about maverick Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis.
- Georgina Ferry
-
News |
Ancient DNA reveals the living descendants of enslaved people through 23andMe
A landmark genomic study raises the possibility that many more people could find links to distant ancestors through genetic analysis.
- Ewen Callaway
-
News & Views |
From the archive: the problem with physics, and a stealthy attack
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Book Review |
Anna Atkins: pioneering botanical photographer who captured algae and ferns in ghostly blue images
A compilation of 550 original plates reveals the dedicated work of the nineteenth-century woman who was the first to publish a book with cyanotypes of specimens.
- Georgina Ferry
-
News Q&A |
Why Oppenheimer has important lessons for scientists today
Atomic bomb historian Richard Rhodes talks to Nature about how researchers fare in the film, and what it gets right and wrong.
- Davide Castelvecchi
-
News & Views |
From the archive: pollination, and Charles Darwin ponders scared ants
Snippets from Nature’s past.
-
Book Review |
How a scholarly spat shaped a century of genetic research
A fresh look at the early history of genetics reveals why a simplified view of biological inheritance came to hold sway — and argues for a revision of how genetics is taught today.
- Brian K. Hall
-
News & Views |
The particle-physics breakthrough that paved the way for the Higgs boson
The discovery of ‘weak neutral currents’ at Europe’s particle-physics research centre CERN 50 years ago was a decisive step towards establishing the standard model of particle physics — a journey that continues to this day.
- Pippa Wells
-