The 2015 edition of Nature's 10 � a list of 10 people who mattered in science this year selected by Nature's team of editors � looks behind the major events and discoveries to the human ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A key requirement for self-sustaining energy generation using nuclear fusion is for the plasma in which the fusion occurs to be heated by the fusion reactions themselves. In this week’s issue, Alex ...

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.

Cooling and trapping atomic gases to form a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) allows quantum behaviour to be examined at a macroscopic scale. But it is hard to exert precise control over these exotic ...

Heterobilayer excitonic devices consisting of two different van der Waals materials, in which excitons are shared between the layers, exhibit electrically controlled switching actions at room ...

To study inequality is to confront a world of contrasts: excessive wealth next to palpable poverty; sickness abutting health. The COVID pandemic has exposed and worsened many such disparities. This ...

Table tennis is a highly dextrous sport that requires rapid reflexes and an ability to respond to unpredictable gameplay, all of which presents a significant challenge for robots. Some robotic systems ...

The cover image shows plants growing at altitude on Altar Volcano in Chimborazo, Ecuador. Extreme altitudes pose challenges for most forms of life, and flowering plants are no exception. But flowering ...