Nature News

Microbe-filled solutions could be repurposed as small motors under certain conditions.

Scientists have the tools to end the epidemic. They just need better ways to use them.

Working out how to build ethical robots is one of the thorniest challenges in artificial intelligence. Real-life roboticists are citing Asimov’s laws a lot these days: their creations are becoming autonomous enough to need that kind of guidance.

Sequencing data point to longstanding conflict between the chromosomes that determine sex.

Attempts to attribute extreme weather events to global warming have often failed because they have looked at the wrong thing, leading climatologists claim. By focusing on rising temperatures, tides and atmospheric moisture instead of chaotic and highly variable shifts in atmospheric circulation, they say, scientists may be able to better identify the human fingerprint in…

Bright galaxy thought to hold stars from generation that seeded rest of Universe.

A wave of innovative flat materials is following in the wake of graphene — but the most exciting applications could come from stacking them into 3D devices.

Dinosaurs once dominated the world — but they spent their first 30 million years stranded on its geographic fringes. Large dinosaurs flourished near the poles, but only a few small ones, no larger than ostriches, managed to gain a foothold in the hotter low latitudes.

The best molecular-structure data — such as those that revealed the architecture of DNA — are often obtained by analysing how molecules diffract X-rays. But to obtain them, the molecules must first be crystallized in a tidy, repeating lattice. Coaxing a molecule to crystallize can be a time-consuming and frustrating process of trial and error. Fujita’s…