Water drops placed at rest on flat, hot solids are found to rotate and spontaneously propel themselves in the direction of their rotation. The effect is due to symmetry breaking of the flow inside the drop, which couples rotation to translation. | Continue reading
To highlight uncertain norms in authorship, John P. A. Ioannidis, Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack identified the most prolific scientists of recent years. | Continue reading
A decade on from a worldwide financial meltdown, economics teaching is still stuck in the past, warns Maeve Cohen. | Continue reading
Nature talks to Rick Luettich, whose team in North Carolina is busy trying to predict the impacts of a powerful — and unusual — tempest. | Continue reading
Machine learning supports 20-year-old theory of bizarre electron behaviour in high-temperature superconductor. | Continue reading
A strategy developed to define off-target effects of gene-editing nucleases in whole organisms is validated and leveraged to show that CRISPR–Cas9 nucleases can be used effectively in vivo without inducing detectable off-target mutations. | Continue reading
Cross-hatched crayon on a rock shard suggests early humans indulged in abstract art. | Continue reading
Realisation of large-scale quantum computation requires both error correction capability and a large number of qubits. Here, the authors propose to use a CMOS-compatible architecture featuring a spin qubit surface code and individual qubit control via floating memory gate electro … | Continue reading
To highlight uncertain norms in authorship, John P. A. Ioannidis, Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack identified the most prolific scientists of recent years. | Continue reading
The energy-efficiency drive at the information factories that serve us Facebook, Google and Bitcoin. | Continue reading
S. Alexander Haslam enjoys the tale of how a questionable personality quiz went global. | Continue reading
Henning Schmidgen praises a tome on Helmholtz, titan of nineteenth-century science. | Continue reading
Rates of radiative heat transfer between sub-wavelength planar membranes are experimentally and theoretically shown to exceed the blackbody limit in the far field by more than two orders of magnitude. | Continue reading
Team from the University of California, Berkeley, loses appeal over coveted gene-editing technology. | Continue reading
Mood state changes are decoded using human neural activity data from electrodes implanted in seven epilepsy patients. | Continue reading
Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 6 September 2018 | Continue reading
Maps of Jupiter’s magnetic field probe the planet’s interior. | Continue reading
Maps of Jupiter’s internal magnetic field at a range of depths reveal an unusual morphology, suggesting that Jupiter’s dynamo, unlike Earth’s, does not operate in a thick, homogeneous shell. | Continue reading
Zombie satellites, rocket shards and collision debris are creating major traffic risks in orbits around the planet. Researchers are working to reduce the threats posed by more than 20,000 objects in space. | Continue reading
Two methods for sorting atoms into arbitrary 3D arrangements. | Continue reading
A fully programmable two-qubit quantum processor with more than 200 components is demonstrated by using silicon photonic circuits. A two-qubit quantum approximate optimization algorithm and simulation of Szegedy quantum walks are implemented. | Continue reading
The ways in which lost vision might be restored are coming into focus as researchers move closer to recreating the eye’s most complex structure — the retina — in the laboratory. | Continue reading
Brain networks are characterized by nodes and hubs that determine information flow within and between areas. Bertolero et al. show that task-driven changes to hub and node connectivity increase modularity and improve cognitive performance. | Continue reading
European Commission special envoy Robert-Jan Smits has spearheaded a plan to make all scientific works free to read. | Continue reading
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