Non-reciprocal interactions in groups of starfish embryos. | Continue reading
Charity failed to provide adequate vaccines for the global south. Now, 15 countries are seeing whether an open-science model can end a dangerous legacy of dependency. | Continue reading
Schmidt Futures is creating the US$40-million Virtual Institute of Scientific Software to fund the maintenance of researcher-written code. | Continue reading
Topological insulator nanowires are interesting because, in the presence of superconductivity, they may host elusive Majorana fermions. Here, superconductivity in (Bi1−xSbx)2Te3 topological-insulator nanowires is realized by using palladium diffusion, providing a tunable platform … | Continue reading
Schmidt Futures is creating the US$40-million Virtual Institute of Scientific Software to fund the maintenance of researcher-written code. | Continue reading
The widespread disappearance of siliceous life sustained extreme temperatures in the wake of Earth’s most severe mass extinction event. | Continue reading
Science is riddled with stories of getting scooped, data glitches and funding crises. Five researchers share stories of how they rallied. | Continue reading
Faced with the challenge of advising the World Health Organization on who should be the first to receive COVID-19 vaccines, an advisory group used an approach it hadn’t tried before. | Continue reading
Each uncontrolled rocket body in orbit poses a low casualty risk on reentry. But the cumulative risk is unacceptable and disproportionately borne by the Global South. Spacefaring states must stop exporting these risks and plan for safer reentries. | Continue reading
Ultraviolet exposure on the skin promotes food intake and body weight gain in males, but not females, by increasing ghrelin expression in skin adipocytes. | Continue reading
Neural network could be a step towards programs for studying how human infants learn. | Continue reading
Piloto et al. introduce a deep-learning system which is able to learn basic rules of the physical world, such as object solidity and persistence. | Continue reading
US government agency endorses tools to keep the Internet safe from quantum computers capable of cracking conventional encryption keys. | Continue reading
Economic downturn changed people’s meat-heavy diets. | Continue reading
We will now explicitly ask reviewers to flag up to us and authors whether a simpler model or theory could explain the experimental data in a given manuscript. | Continue reading
Maya Gosztyla decided to rethink her approach to research papers after she had trouble keeping track of the published literature. | Continue reading
Weeks after being hit by a micrometeoroid, the landmark observatory prepares to release its first scientific images. | Continue reading
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Rare, converging cold flows gave birth to the massive black holes that were the seeds of the first quasars. | Continue reading
Heralded entanglement between two independently trapped single rubidium atoms is generated over long telecom fibre links using quantum frequency conversion in an important step towards the realization of large-scale quantum network links. | Continue reading
A vector-based model for flexible navigation in the hippocampus allows animals to optimally navigate to any location in their environment. | Continue reading
A measure of last resort got a major workout during the pandemic. Scientists are now trying to determine whether the benefits outweighed the potential damage to public trust. | Continue reading
Webscraping is a useful tool for gathering data from public websites, but researchers must develop some fundamental software skills to use it. | Continue reading
Studies are ‘decades behind’ owing to a lack of funding, but research is picking up. | Continue reading
Thermal fluctuations associated with higher temperatures normally destroy long-range order, but in some circumstances they can stabilize new ordered phases. This ‘order by disorder’ phenomenon has now been observed in the magnetic phases of neodymium. | Continue reading
Often presented as a bridge technology to a future zero-carbon energy system, natural gas infrastructure expansion remains hotly debated. Here Kemfert et al. discuss recent research to argue how such expansion hinders climate targets and energy transitions and suggest how researc … | Continue reading
Better legislation will help all without significantly contributing to climate change. | Continue reading
Koster, Balaguer et al. show that an AI mechanism is able to learn to produce a redistribution policy which is preferred to alternatives by humans in an incentivized game. | Continue reading
A friend’s close look at a reclusive physicist and his community. | Continue reading
Physicists are celebrating ten years since the Higgs boson’s discovery. But many of its properties remain mysterious. | Continue reading
Quantum supremacy is demonstrated using a programmable superconducting processor known as Sycamore, taking approximately 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times, which would take a state-of-the-art supercomputer around ten thousand years to compute … | Continue reading
The coming years are likely to see slowing economic growth, which has significant consequences for developed democracies. This Perspective by Burgess et al. considers the implications of slowed growth and proposes a guided civic revival approach to addressing challenges. | Continue reading
Ten years since the discovery of the Higgs boson, the exploration of the Higgs sector, as this overview shows, has progressed far beyond original expectations, but many research questions still remain open. | Continue reading
While the evaporative water loss from global lakes is invisible, the volume is substantial. In recent decades, lake evaporation volume has been significantly increasing due to enhanced evaporation rate, melting lake ice, and expansion of water extent. | Continue reading
Moving fruit and vegetables in refrigerated vehicles is particularly emissions-intensive. | Continue reading
Using a mathematical model of viral spread and Twitter data, Bak-Coleman and coauthors show how a combination of interventions, such as fact-checking, nudging and account suspension, can help combat the spread of misinformation. | Continue reading
This report finds that dietary restriction, the most extensively studied anti-aging intervention, can be mimicked by blocking food odour signaling and identifies a neural network of food perception that functions through serotonin and dopamine. | Continue reading
Rotaru et al. introduce a transparent crime forecasting algorithm that reveals inequities in police enforcement and suggests an enforcement bias in eight US cities. | Continue reading
Computational and experimental methods are bringing researchers closer to their goal of revealing exactly where in a cell or tissue each gene is expressed. | Continue reading