Nature News

With its eight prehensile arms lined with suckers, camera-like eyes, elaborate repertoire of camouflage tricks and spooky intelligence, the octopus is like no other creature on Earth. Added to those distinctions is an unusually large genome that helps to explain how a mere mollusc evolved into an otherworldly being.

Artificial-intelligence researchers have long struggled to make computers perform a task that is simple for humans: picking out one person’s speech when multiple people nearby are talking simultaneously.

Two common metals that are not magnetic — copper and manganese — can be transformed into magnets: a surprising effect that involves combining thin films of the metals with carbon-based organic molecules.

Two years after physicists predicted that tin should be able to form a mesh just one atom thick, researchers say that they have made it. The thin film, called stanene, is reported on 3 August in Nature Materials. But researchers have not been able to confirm whether the material has the predicted exotic electronic properties…

Six years might seem like a long time to spend piecing together the structure of a scrap of tissue vastly smaller than a bead of sweat. But that is how long it has taken a team led by cell biologist Jeff Lichtman from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to digitally reconstruct a tiny cube of…

Injecting single cells with spheres of fluorescent dye could open new research and treatment avenues using light.

Cells contain an ocean of twisting and turning RNA molecules. Now researchers are working out the structures — and how important they could be.

You could say that the silence has been deafening. Since its beginnings more than half a century ago, the dedicated search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has failed to detect the presence of alien civilizations. But at London’s Royal Society today (20 July), Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a shot in the arm for SETI: a…

Spheres of carbon-60 responsible for mysterious cosmic-light features.