A survey reveals some lab heads are using the need for visas to create unacceptable conditions for junior researchers. | Continue reading
A move to classify people on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned. | Continue reading
Reviewers make an essential contribution to scientific progress; Nature Communications will now formally acknowledge their role in published articles. | Continue reading
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky. | Continue reading
Thanks to its topological properties, a CMOS-compatible photonic crystal shows reflectionless transmission of light at telecommunication wavelengths even along a path with sharp turns. | Continue reading
Assembly of a pan-genome from 910 humans of African descent identifies 296.5 Mb of novel DNA mapping to 125,715 distinct contigs. This African pan-genome contains ~10% more DNA than the current human reference genome. | Continue reading
Online misinformation is a threat to a well-informed electorate and undermines democracy. Here, the authors analyse the spread of articles on Twitter, find that bots play a major role in the spread of low-credibility content and suggest control measures for limiting the spread of … | Continue reading
Containment measures meant to stop a rampant bacterium have been frequently delayed. | Continue reading
Around 63% of articles from 100 sampled journals contained some text copied without attribution. | Continue reading
Jo Baker lauds a paean to the experimentalists of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. | Continue reading
An immunoprecipitation-based protocol is developed to analyse DNA methylation in small quantities of circulating cell-free DNA, and can detect and classify cancers in plasma samples from several tumour types. | Continue reading
Structures could help researchers to study the early stages of brain development disorders, including epilepsy. | Continue reading
The cryptocurrency’s production generated about as much carbon dioxide over 30 months as 1 million cars in the same period. | Continue reading
The divisive genetic technology could help to eradicate diseases but also risks altering ecosystems. | Continue reading
Hippocampal activity during a period of sleep after memory encoding is crucial for forming long-term memories in rats, even for types of memory considered not to be hippocampus-dependent. | Continue reading
Similar levels of injury found in ancient Neanderthal and human skulls. | Continue reading
Transcriptomes of about 70,000 single cells from first-trimester deciduas and placentas reveal subsets of perivascular, stromal and natural killer cells in the decidua, with distinct immunomodulatory profiles that regulate the environment necessary for successful placentation. | Continue reading
The weak interaction between the nucleus and the electrons in a chain of Yb isotopes is measured with tabletop atomic physics techniques. The dependence of the interaction strength on the number of neutrons confirms the prediction by standard model. | Continue reading
Bradley Efron, at Stanford University, has won the US$80,000 International Prize in Statistics for his 1970s work on a method for inferring uncertainty in data. | Continue reading
Technique that turns dead rodents clear uncovers surprising details about how the animals respond to injury. | Continue reading
Access to evidence from disappointing drug-development programmes advances the whole scientific process, explain Enrica Alteri and Lorenzo Guizzaro. | Continue reading
Peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) can invade canonical nucleic acid dimers but may be limited to certain sequences or perform poorly under physiological conditions. Here PNAs containing Janus bases invade a range of RNA and DNA sequences via Watson-Crick base pairing under near-physio … | Continue reading
NeuroData allows researchers to explore terabytes of brain images in multiple formats. | Continue reading
But the model will need further refining before it can pinpoint species-level disease reservoirs. | Continue reading
Hydrogen pumping is used to reversibly modulate magnetic anisotropy in solid-state heterostructures. | Continue reading
Electrons are confined to an artificial Sierpiński triangle. Microscopy measurements show that their wavefunctions become self-similar and their quantum properties inherit a non-integer dimension between 1 and 2. | Continue reading
Chromothripsis and chromoanasynthesis lead to locally clustered rearrangements affecting one or a few chromosomes, but their impact on cancer development and progression is unclear. Here the authors analyse the role of DNA repair factors in brain tumors by whole-genome sequencing … | Continue reading
Treatment for eye injuries and diseases is most efficient when delivered directly into the eye. Here, the authors developed a patient-friendly eye patch equipped with an array of detachable microneedles, through which drugs can be delivered through the cornea for an extended peri … | Continue reading
Trove of DNA from prehistoric inhabitants reveals that the continents’ early settlers moved far and fast. | Continue reading
While plasmonic nanoparticles offer new opportunities for photocatalysis, understanding the underlying effects remains challenging. Here, the authors visualize plasmon-driven dehydrogenation reaction within individual palladium nanoparticles using light-coupled transmission elect … | Continue reading
Built from the bottom up, synthetic cells and other creations are starting to come together and could soon test the boundaries of life. | Continue reading
A multi-qubit mixed-species register is used for repeated correlation measurements using conditional feedback to stabilize two-qubit subspaces and Bell states, achieving up to 50 sequential measurements with negligible crosstalk. | Continue reading
Geophysical properties of the Earth’s interior have been inferred by looking at the absorption of neutrinos as they pass through our planet. | Continue reading
The Wellcome Trust has also announced how it will implement the plan, which could provide a blueprint for others. | Continue reading
Designing nucleic acid-based nanostructures with knots remains challenging. Here the authors present a general strategy to design and construct highly knotted 2D and 3D nanostructures from single-stranded DNA or RNA | Continue reading
Case aims to compel the government to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. | Continue reading
Neuronal stimulation induces protein translation of m6A-methylated neuronal mRNAs facilitated by YTHDF1, and this process contributes to learning and memory. | Continue reading
The Milky Way’s thick stellar disk formed from a galactic collision. | Continue reading
Scientists are using artificial intelligence to identify genetic sequences molded by evolutionary pressures. | Continue reading
Researchers look to scanners with 10.5-tesla magnets and beyond for unprecedented detail about the brain. | Continue reading
A modified Escherichia coli is used to demonstrate that semi-synthetic organisms can use non-natural hydrophobic base pairs to genetically encode for the incorporation of non-canonical amino acids into proteins. | Continue reading
Global conservation policy must stop the disappearance of Earth’s few intact ecosystems, warn James E. M. Watson, James R. Allan and colleagues. | Continue reading