Our perceptions of the world are increasingly influenced by online media, which can perpetuate social stereotypes and bias our views. The rise of artificial intelligence — especially large language ...

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 image shows a view of the Milky Way captured at Nambung National Park in Western Australia. To understand how the Galaxy formed requires precision age dating of the stars that it contains.

For more than 50 years, scientists have been trying to understand the relationship between DNA sequence, gene-expression phenotype and fitness to decipher principles of gene regulatory evolution. In ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Soft robots have garnered significant attention in recent years, thanks to their ability to carry out a range of complex tasks such as gripping, crawling or swimming. But making these soft actuators ...

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 ...

The drastic shake-up of the country’s science system is intended to boost innovation, but there are concerns about political interference in the new centralized agency. Universities hold the majority ...

Carbon dioxide reductions are key, but the IPCC’s latest report highlights the benefits of making cuts to other greenhouse gases, too.