At industrial scales, chemical reactions are typically driven by applying continuous heat to the reactants. In this week’s issue, Liangbing Hu and his colleaguesshow that pulsed heating and quenching ...

The cover shows Yournina Akinyi using her mobile phone at her produce stand in Matasia village, Kenya. In this week’s issue, Joshua Blumenstock and his colleagues show how big data derived from mobile ...

Inscriptions provide an invaluable insight into the ancient world. But over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged and exist in fragmented or semi-legible forms, making the job of reading ...

Biaryl compounds, which contain two connected aromatic rings, are common throughout chemistry, medicine and materials science. Joining together the individual molecular components to form these ...

Many potential applications for artificial intelligence require making real-time decisions. Car racing, in which drivers must undertake complex tactical manoeuvres while controlling their vehicle at ...

The US National Cancer Act of 1971 has fostered tremendous progress in our understanding of the biology that underlies cancer. However, scientific and social challenges remain. A new action plan to ...

Controlling physical systems at the level of individual molecules, atoms or ions underpins technologies such as quantum information processing and quantum metrology. Investigating collisions in a ...

The seven planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 were largely spared cosmic collisions, raising questions about where these worlds got their water.

Pure mathematics involves the discovery of patterns between mathematical objects and using these connections to formulate conjectures. Mathematicians have deployed computers since the 1960s to help ...

Tunicates, such as sea squirts, are the closest relatives to vertebrates. Most of these marine organisms become sessile — unable to move themselves – when their free-swimming larvae turn into ...

The cover shows a coal field and open-cast mining near Ordos. With the COP 26 UN Climate Change Conference set to begin in Glasgow, UK, on 31 October, all eyes are focused on whether nations can agree ...