Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.
1 Feb
Europe is making a good start on learning about the health risks of low-dose radiation with a programme to share cold-war data and set research priorities. But the effort needs to be global.
1 Feb
Protecting the Arctic from pollution requires a binding agreement like the Antarctic Treaty.
1 Feb
Spider webs are designed to cope with stress and disruption, favouring repair over rebuilding.
1 Feb
The Global Fund's drive to ensure sustainability and efficiency means that it may not be able to meet its commitments to combat disease, says Laurie Garrett.
1 Feb
Wetland restoration may be falling short of its goals, with restored or created wetlands lagging behind reference ones in terms of carbon storage and native species richness and abundance.In many parts of the world, humans have destroyed more than half of the wetlands and
1 Feb
Cancer is usually attributed to a slow accumulation of genomic changes, but a few cancers result instead from a single catastrophic event that causes massive reshuffling of the genome. Researchers have discovered these major changes, called chromothripsis, in a type of medulloblastoma — a common
1 Feb
The pupils of the human eye shrink in response to brightness, even when the glow is merely an optical illusion.Bruno Laeng and Tor Endestad at the University of Oslo used infrared eye trackers to monitor the pupils of participants looking at illusions of lightness
1 Feb
In palaeontology, Cope's rule holds that species evolve larger body sizes over geological time. One possible explanation has been that competition favours bigger bodies. To test this, Pasquale Raia at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and his colleagues compiled a species tree
1 Feb
Gene therapy in dogs can reverse retinal defects that lead to blindness in humans.William Beltran and Gustavo Aguirre at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and their group targeted a form of retinitis pigmentosa. This is a common cause of blindness in which mutations
1 Feb
Even if cooled to a temperature of absolute zero, all objects will retain a fundamental jitter in their physical positions due to quantum 'zero-point' fluctuations. Oskar Painter and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have, for the first time, detected this
1 Feb
In a study that shows both its promise and limitations in the clinic, researchers have used genomic sequencing to diagnose the genetic cause of disease in individual children — but succeeded in only a small proportion of them.A team led by David Thorburn at
1 Feb
Cancer drugs that attack tumour-sustaining blood vessels may spur proliferation of the stem cells that contribute to the disease.One such drug, bevacizumab, fails to prolong the survival of patients with advanced breast cancers, and studies have shown that patients on similar drugs often relapse.
1 Feb
The volcanic eruption responsible for the giant Ubehebe Crater in California's Death Valley may have occurred more recently than previously thought. This could mean that the risk of similar explosions happening today is higher than anticipated.When magma encounters groundwater, distinctive explosions, such as those
1 Feb
Highly read on http://royalsocietypublishing.org in DecemberHirsute individuals are better able to sense blood-sucking bed bugs crawling on their skin than are their less hairy counterparts.Isabelle Dean and Michael Siva-Jothy at the University of Sheffield, UK, tested the ability of 29 volunteers to
The week in science: sequencing stock rebounds after takeover bid for Illumina; drug companies and nations team up against neglected diseases; and turmoil at the Global Fund.
31 Jan
Conservationists fear spills in icy waters as Norway awards oil-production licences.
31 Jan
Field tests of new criteria are flawed, critics argue.
31 Jan
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine plans for a future without state support.
30 Jan
Lengthy, complicated documents leave many clinical-trial participants in the dark about the risks they face.
31 Jan
Physicists admit to delays as attempts to measure the neutron’s charge are plagued by difficulties.
Yusuke Nakamura blames government inertia for his move to the United States.
Drive to save money could increase bureaucracy.
Jellyfish will bloom as ocean health declines, warn biologists. Are they already taking over?
For decades, Robert Daum has studied the havoc wreaked by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Now he thinks he can stop it for good.
1 Feb
Added sweeteners pose dangers to health that justify controlling them like alcohol, argue Robert H. Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt and Claire D. Brindis.