Polish codebreakers paved the way for Alan Turing to decrypt German messages in the Second World War. Joanne Baker commends a gripping tale. | Continue reading
Philip Ball revisits a book that crystallized key concepts in modern molecular biology. | Continue reading
Working conditions in academic labs encourage abusive supervision. It is time to improve monitoring of and penalties for abuse, says Sherry Moss. | Continue reading
Two independent determinations of the gravitational constant. | Continue reading
As projects to restore woodlands accelerate, researchers are looking for ways to avoid repeating past failures. | Continue reading
A neural-network analysis outperforms the method scientists typically use to work out where these tremors will strike. | Continue reading
Temporal information that is useful for episodic memory is encoded across a wide range of timescales in the lateral entorhinal cortex, arising inherently from its representation of ongoing experience. | Continue reading
Physicist who helped to discover the first particle containing a charm quark. | Continue reading
Evidence for a parasitic lifestyle in extinct species tends to be indirect. Here, the authors provide direct evidence through X-ray examination of approximately 30–40 million year old fossil fly pupae, revealing 55 parasitation events by four newly described wasp species. | Continue reading
The authors describe microscopic channels that directly connect the skull marrow cavities with the meninges. Neutrophils originating from the skull marrow have a higher propensity to travel to the ischemic mouse brain than cells in the tibia. | Continue reading
An ideological clash could undermine a crucial assessment of the world’s disappearing plant and animal life. | Continue reading
Researchers replicated 62% of social-behaviour findings published in Science and Nature — a result matched almost exactly by a prediction market. | Continue reading
All-inorganic perovskite nanocrystals containing caesium and lead provide low-cost, flexible and solution-processable scintillators that are highly sensitive to X-ray irradiation and emit radioluminescence that is colour-tunable across the visible spectrum. | Continue reading
Camerer et al. carried out replications of 21 Science and Nature social science experiments, successfully replicating 13 out of 21 (62%). Effect sizes of replications were about half of the size of the originals. | Continue reading
PINK1 and parkin proteins prevent inflammation caused by mitochondria. | Continue reading
The therapy has been shown to improve symptoms of the condition in monkeys. | Continue reading
Programmable quantum simulation based on superconducting qubits. | Continue reading
Peer reviewers should not feel pressured to produce a report if key data are missing. | Continue reading
Genomic evidence of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father suggests that mixing among different hominin groups may have more been frequent than previously appreciated. | Continue reading
Device models quantum behaviour faster than ordinary computers, as predicted by Richard Feynman. | Continue reading
Genetic analysis uncovers a direct descendant of two different groups of early humans. | Continue reading
The latest United Nations review leaves no doubt, countries need to step up efforts and act fast if they want to achieve the Global Goals by 2030. | Continue reading
The Wellcome Trust pulled the grant from Nazneen Rahman, who worked at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. | Continue reading
Though memristors can potentially emulate neuron and synapse functionality, useful signal energy is lost to Joule heating. Here, the authors demonstrate neuro-transistors with a pseudo-memcapacitive gate that actively process signals via energy-efficient capacitively-coupled neur … | Continue reading
Manipulation of the transcription factor OsGRF4 can improve the efficiency with which some high-yielding cereal crops use nitrogen. This discovery has implications for sustainable agriculture. | Continue reading
The physical conditions that support a geometric interpretation of spacetime, such as the equivalence between rest and inertial mass, are shown not to be necessarily valid in the quantum regime, and a quantum formulation is provided. | Continue reading
An online search tool is developed to look for candidate materials by exploring chosen graphical patterns in their electronic band structure from a database. A team led by Alexander V. Balatsky from Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University present an on … | Continue reading
Change the funding system and approaches to international partnerships for US-led big science projects, urge Matt Mountain and Adam Cohen. | Continue reading
Permafrost carbon feedback modeling has focused on gradual thaw of near-surface permafrost leading to greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate climate change. Here the authors show that deeper, abrupt thaw beneath lakes will more than double radiative forcing from permafrost-soil … | Continue reading
Agent-based modelling offers opportunities to explore the complex social interactions at the heart of the addiction crisis. | Continue reading
Genome-wide polygenic risk scores derived from GWAS data for five common diseases can identify subgroups of the population with risk approaching or exceeding that of a monogenic mutation. | Continue reading
Contact with just one antibody molecule regulates current flow through a transistor. | Continue reading
Accurate near-term predictions of global temperatures are required to determine some of the key impacts of climate change. Here the authors develop a novel probabilistic forecast system that shows anomalously warm temperatures for the next years with increased risk of extreme war … | Continue reading
Researchers had high hopes for patient-derived xenografts. Now they are contending with limitations in the clinic and the lab. | Continue reading
Researchers have identified a molecule that increases plant growth while reducing the need for nitrogen. | Continue reading
Unpaywall has become indispensable to many academics, and tie-ins with established scientific search engines could broaden its reach. | Continue reading
Live-cell imaging reveals that type IV competence pili from naturally competent Vibrio cholerae are dynamic structures that bind to exogenous DNA via their tips. Pilus retraction pulls DNA to the cell surface and across the outer membrane to initiate DNA uptake. | Continue reading
Loneliness markedly increases mortality and morbidity, yet the factors triggering loneliness remain largely unknown. This study shows that sleep loss leads to a neurobehavioral phenotype of human social separation and loneliness, one that is transmittable to non-sleep-deprived in … | Continue reading