Nature News

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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.

Vast regions of near-empty space in the Universe are growing and shrinking, much as bubbles merge and separate in soapsuds, astronomers have discovered.

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 […]

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 […]

So much ice is piling up in the vast expanses of East Antarctica that, overall, it counterbalances the losses seen at glaciers thinning elsewhere on the frozen continent. It will […]

Venus and asteroids have emerged as top destinations for NASA’s future planetary exploration. On 30 September, the agency announced a shortlist of five contenders for its US$500-million Discovery class of […]