Nature News

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 it looks as if they at last have the data needed to replace the cylinder with a definition based on mathematical constants.

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 of rat brain. The work models some 31,000 virtual brain cells connected by roughly 37 million synapses.

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 take decades for Antarctic melting to overtake the mass gains and begin contributing substantially to sea-level rise, a new study argues.

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 missions.

Human Connectome Project finds surprising correlations between brain architecture and behavioural or demographic influences.

As the costs of genetic sequencing fall, oncologists are starting to prescribe expensive new drugs that target the genetic profiles of their patients’ tumours, even when those treatments have not been approved for the particular cancer involved.

Brain plaques may have been seeded by contaminated hormone extracts from cadavers.

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer cooling pump failure raises questions about its longevity.

Software tools that track how animals move are helping researchers to do everything from diagnosing neurological conditions to illuminating evolution.