Featured
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Correspondence |
United States: invest infrastructure stimulus in astronomy facilities
- Adam Cohen
- , Matt Mountain
- & David Reitze
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Article |
Aziridine synthesis by coupling amines and alkenes via an electrogenerated dication
The synthesis of aziridines—three-membered nitrogen-containing heterocycles—is achieved by a new method involving the electrochemical coupling of alkenes and amines, via a dicationic intermediate.
- Dylan E. Holst
- , Diana J. Wang
- & Zachary K. Wickens
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News |
Astronomers victimized colleagues — and put historic Swedish department in turmoil
Investigations at Lund University found the high-ranking pair guilty of bullying, but staff members say stronger action is needed to repair the damage.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
How scientists are embracing NFTs
Is a trend of auctioning non-fungible tokens based on scientific data a fascinating art fad, an environmental disaster or the future of monetized genomics?
- Nicola Jones
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News |
Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
Proof-assistant software handles an abstract concept at the cutting edge of research, revealing a bigger role for software in mathematics.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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News Explainer |
How three missions to Venus could solve the planet’s biggest mysteries
A renewed focus on our planetary neighbour could help to answer major questions about its atmosphere and geology.
- Jonathan O'Callaghan
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Research Highlight |
Why a gargantuan star blinked
Astronomers watch as a star is nearly totally blotted out, perhaps by a disk of material surrounding another star.
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Nature Video |
How quantum biology could help birds 'see' magnetic fields
Researchers home in on long-sought mechanism for magneto-sensing
- Adam Levy
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Article |
A dusty veil shading Betelgeuse during its Great Dimming
The southern hemisphere of Betelgeuse during its Great Dimming was an order of magnitude darker than usual, owing to a cool patch on the photosphere and associated dust formation.
- M. Montargès
- , E. Cannon
- & W. Danchi
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Article |
Correlated charge noise and relaxation errors in superconducting qubits
Cosmic-ray particles and γ-rays striking superconducting circuits can generate qubit errors that are spatially correlated across several millimetres, hampering current error-correction approaches.
- C. D. Wilen
- , S. Abdullah
- & R. McDermott
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Perspective |
The rise of intelligent matter
Inanimate matter is beginning to show some signs of basic intelligence—the ability to sense, actuate and use memory, as controlled by an internal communication network in functional materials.
- C. Kaspar
- , B. J. Ravoo
- & W. H. P. Pernice
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News & Views |
Great Dimming of Betelgeuse explained
Observations suggest that an unexpected dimming of the massive star Betelgeuse resulted from dust forming over a cold patch in the star’s southern hemisphere. This finding improves our understanding of such massive stars.
- Emily M. Levesque
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News |
Why the supergiant star Betelgeuse went mysteriously dim last year
High-resolution images suggest the star spewed out so much dust that its brightness dropped by two-thirds in 2020.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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News Round-Up |
China’s vaccination surge, fast radio bursts and the dominant Alpha variant
The latest science news, in brief.
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Article |
Double-helical assembly of heterodimeric nanoclusters into supercrystals
Ligand-protected gold nanoclusters are engineered to form complex arrangements of double and quadruple helices, which are based on the pairing of motifs on neighbouring enantiomers, akin to the base pairing seen in DNA double helices.
- Yingwei Li
- , Meng Zhou
- & Rongchao Jin
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Article
| Open AccessSymmetry-enforced topological nodal planes at the Fermi surface of a chiral magnet
Measurements on a chiral magnet show that non-symmorphic symmetries enforce topological crossings exactly at the Fermi level in certain materials; these crossings can be controlled by an applied magnetic field.
- Marc A. Wilde
- , Matthias Dodenhöft
- & Christian Pfleiderer
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Article |
Localization atomic force microscopy
A localization algorithm is applied to datasets obtained with conventional and high-speed atomic force microscopy to increase image resolution beyond the limits set by the radius of the tip used.
- George R. Heath
- , Ekaterina Kots
- & Simon Scheuring
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News & Views |
From the archive
Nature’s pages review a book of scientific smorgasbord from 1971 and report an account of hearing Einstein lecture in 1921.
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Research Highlight |
Snap and trap: DNA panels click together to form tiny virus catchers
Modular materials can be programmed to self-assemble into hollow shells with a wide variety of shapes.
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Book Review |
Katherine Johnson’s memoir charts her bold trajectory to NASA and beyond
Mathematician overcame the gravitational pulls of gender and racial discrimination to play a key part in the space race.
- Ainissa Ramirez
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Research Highlight |
Not just sorcery: scientists build an invisible portal
‘Superscattering’ material is used to construct a mini-doorway that is invisible in the microwave portion of the spectrum.
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News |
Flurry of photos capture China’s Zhurong rover on surface of Mars
Aerial images boast a level of detail that could help the rover navigate to features of scientific interest.
- Smriti Mallapaty
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News |
Mysterious fast radio bursts come in two distinct flavours
A trove of new detections suggests that the bursts could be the result of at least two separate astrophysical phenomena.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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Editorial |
Google’s AI approach to microchips is welcome — but needs care
Artificial intelligence can help the electronics industry to speed up chip design. But the gains must be shared equitably.
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Research Highlight |
Quantum keys dial up tamper-proof conference calls
A new experiment efficiently distributes the highly secure keys to four parties instead of the typical two.
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Perovskite decomposition and missing crystal planes in HRTEM
- Zhijun Ning
- , Xiwen Gong
- & Edward H. Sargent
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News & Views |
RETRACTED ARTICLE: AI system outperforms humans in designing floorplans for microchips
A machine-learning system has been trained to place memory blocks in microchip designs. The system beats human experts at the task, and offers the promise of better, more-rapidly produced chip designs than are currently possible.
- Andrew B. Kahng
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Nature Podcast |
Google AI beats humans at designing computer chips
An AI that designs computer chips in hours, and zooming in on DNA’s complex 3D structures.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Noah Baker
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Article |
Experimental observation of non-Abelian topological charges and edge states
Non-Abelian topological charges and edge states in a PT-symmetric transmission line network are experimentally observed, and a non-Abelian quotient relation for the bulk–edge correspondence is found.
- Qinghua Guo
- , Tianshu Jiang
- & C. T. Chan
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Article |
Anisotropic satellite galaxy quenching modulated by black hole activity
An analysis of archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey finds that star-forming satellite galaxies are relatively more common along the minor axis of central galaxies owing to the effect of black hole feedback.
- Ignacio Martín-Navarro
- , Annalisa Pillepich
- & Volker Springel
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Article |
Observation of first and second sound in a BKT superfluid
First and second sound are experimentally observed in a two-dimensional superfluid, and the temperature-dependent sound speeds reveal the predicted jump in the superfluid density at the infinite-order Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition.
- Panagiotis Christodoulou
- , Maciej Gałka
- & Zoran Hadzibabic
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Article |
Tomographic reconstruction of oxygen orbitals in lithium-rich battery materials
High-energy X-ray Compton measurements and first-principles modelling reveal how the electronic orbital responsible for the reversible anionic redox activity can be imaged and visualized, and its character and symmetry determined.
- Hasnain Hafiz
- , Kosuke Suzuki
- & Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan
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News & Views |
Squeezed light improves sensitivity of microscopy technique
Vibrational signals from molecules can provide contrast in bioimaging techniques, but are difficult to detect. Light in a ‘squeezed’ quantum state has been used to reveal molecular vibrational signals previously obscured by noise.
- Eric O. Potma
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News Round-Up |
COVID nasal spray, dark-matter map and a variant’s rise
The latest science news, in brief.
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Article |
A graph placement methodology for fast chip design
Machine learning tools are used to greatly accelerate chip layout design, by posing chip floorplanning as a reinforcement learning problem and using neural networks to generate high-performance chip layouts.
- Azalia Mirhoseini
- , Anna Goldie
- & Jeff Dean
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Article |
Quantum-enhanced nonlinear microscopy
A quantum microscope obtains signal-to-noise beyond the photodamage limits of conventional microscopy, revealing biological structures within cells that would not otherwise be resolved.
- Catxere A. Casacio
- , Lars S. Madsen
- & Warwick P. Bowen
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Comment |
Climate policy models need to get real about people — here’s how
To predict how society and political systems might actually respond to warming, upgrade integrated assessment models.
- Wei Peng
- , Gokul Iyer
- & John Weyant
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Where I Work |
Fly me to the Moon
Loredana Bessone instructs astronauts on living in space, walking on the Moon’s surface and choosing rock samples for analysis.
- Virginia Gewin
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Research Highlight |
A light touch changes the strength of a single atomic bond
A technique that uses an electric field to tighten the bond between two atoms can allow a game of atomic pick-up-sticks.
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Article |
Intrinsic toughening and stable crack propagation in hexagonal boron nitride
Single-crystal monolayer hexagonal boron nitride is unexpectedly tough owing to its asymmetric lattice structure, which facilitates repeated crack deflection, crack branching and edge swapping, enhancing energy dissipation.
- Yingchao Yang
- , Zhigong Song
- & Jun Lou
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Matters Arising |
Possible overestimation of isomer depletion due to contamination
- Song Guo
- , Yongde Fang
- & C. M. Petrache
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Possible overestimation of isomer depletion due to contamination
- C. J. Chiara
- , J. J. Carroll
- & A. B. Hayes
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Article |
Asymmetric response of interfacial water to applied electric fields
Experimental measurements of vibrational sum-frequency generation spectra indicate that the dielectric response of water near an electrode may be strongly asymmetric, with different responses to positive and negative electrode charge.
- Angelo Montenegro
- , Chayan Dutta
- & Alexander V. Benderskii
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News & Views |
Charge-carrying films for solar cells made quickly and cleanly
Organic semiconductors used in a promising class of solar cell are processed in a ‘doping’ step to improve the transport of charge carriers. A fast doping method has been developed that might enable mass production of these cells.
- Jianfeng Lu
- & Fuzhi Huang
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Article |
Telecom-heralded entanglement between multimode solid-state quantum memories
Robust heralded entanglement between two solid-state quantum memories with temporal multiplexing is realized using photons at telecommunication wavelengths.
- Dario Lago-Rivera
- , Samuele Grandi
- & Hugues de Riedmatten
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News & Views |
Hunting the strongest accelerators in our Galaxy
Twelve candidates for the most powerful astrophysical particle accelerators in the Milky Way have been detected. This advance will help to uncover the nature of these exotic objects.
- Petra Huentemeyer
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Article |
Signatures of moiré trions in WSe2/MoSe2 heterobilayers
Optical experiments on WSe2/MoSe2 heterobilayers reveal signatures of moiré trions, including interlayer emission with sharp lines and a complex charge-density dependence, features that differ markedly from those of conventional trions.
- Erfu Liu
- , Elyse Barré
- & Chun Hung Lui