Nature News
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Freefall space cubes are test for gravitational wave spotter
Europe’s long-awaited LISA Pathfinder spacecraft has two metal cubes at its heart, which it will attempt to isolate from every force except for gravity.
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Leukaemia success heralds wave of gene-editing therapies
Layla, a one-year-old girl with leukaemia, is in remission thanks to gene-editing technology that allowed her to receive modified immune cells from another person.
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The tapeworm that turned into a tumour
A tapeworm that infected a Colombian man deposited malignant cells inside his body that spread much like an aggressive cancer, researchers have reported in a bizarre, but not unprecedented, case.
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Zombie physics: 6 baffling results that just won’t die
When a scientific result seems to show something genuinely new, subsequent experiments are supposed to either confirm it — triggering a textbook rewrite — or show it to be a […]
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Does innovation always come from science?
Pure science does not always stimulate innovation — rather, technological change often springs naturally from human inventiveness. Writer Matt Ridley makes this provocative point in a 23 October essay in […]
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Dead star spotted eating planetary leftovers
The remnants of a destroyed planetary system have been seen orbiting and feeding a dead star — a fate that will probably befall our own Solar System.
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Vast cosmic voids merge like soap bubbles
Vast regions of near-empty space in the Universe are growing and shrinking, much as bubbles merge and separate in soapsuds, astronomers have discovered.
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Kilogram conflict resolved at last
For decades, metrologists have strived to retire ‘Le Grand K’ — the platinum and iridium cylinder that for 126 years has defined the kilogram from a high-security vault outside Paris. Now […]
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Fragment of rat brain simulated in supercomputer
A controversial European neuroscience project that aims to simulate the human brain in a supercomputer has published its first major result: a digital imitation of circuitry in a sandgrain-sized chunk […]