Avian blues Conservation efforts for waterbirds, such as the Dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus) pictured on the cover, have centred on creating protected areas to maintain suitable habitats ...

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 ...

The cover shows human bronchial cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, captured using a scanning electron microscope. In this week’s issue, a collection of ...

The cover shows the feather-like wings of the tiny beetle Paratuposa placentis. How fast an animal can fly is usually dictated by its size: the larger the ...

The cover image shows an artist’s impression of spin qubits, the building blocks of a silicon quantum computer. The two red spheres are atomic nuclei ...

Armoured dinosaurs are widely recognized for their tail weapons, which include spikes in stegosaurs and tail clubs in ankylosaurs. In this week’s ...

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 ...

Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their 3D structure is key to unpicking their function. To date, only 17% of the human proteome is covered ...

Indispensable in fields such as structural biology and chemistry, X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) generate intense, coherent beams of radiation at ...

Many creatures use Earth’s magnetic field to help them navigate, but the exact nature of this internal compass has remained elusive. In this ...

A key element of precision medicine is rapid and reliable detection of patients who have a severe illness. Machine learning can help to achieve this, but ...

Interred in Africa The cover image shows the reconstruction of the partial skeleton of a young child dating to around 78,000 years ago. The remains were uncovered at a cave site called Panga ya ...