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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 ...

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 ...

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 gap between average life expectancy and the number of years people are healthy and on the job is widening, with potentially grave consequences for pensioners.

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 ...

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 humpback whale lunge-feeding off Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Baleen whales such as this consume vast quantities of prey, but finding out exactly how much has proved ...

Launched four years ago, the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) aims to identify and catalogue the diverse cells types found in mammalian brains. Across 17 papers in this week’s issue, the ...

A preliminary analysis of viral genomes suggests the COVID-19 pandemic might have multiple animal origins — but the findings still have to be peer reviewed. The 2019–20 wildfires generated 700 million ...