Oestrogen defends against kidney damage caused by iron-dependent cell death Summary This News & Views piece summarises new work (Tonnus et al.) showing that oestradiol (a form of oestrogen) protects…
Octopus motion in the ocean tracked by a deep-sea 3D camera Summary The EyeRIS light-field camera system captures in situ 3D visual data of deep-sea animals in near real time.…
Is gravity quantum? Experiments could finally probe one of physics’ biggest questions Summary The article reviews current efforts to determine whether gravity is a quantum phenomenon. It contrasts Einstein’s classical…
Levitating platform could ride sunlight into the ‘ignorosphere’ Summary A nano-engineered, perforated centimetre-scale sheet can levitate when illuminated by a laser with an intensity comparable to sunlight. The effect relies…
The perplexing body plan of arrow worms decoded Summary A new News & Views piece discusses a Nature paper by Piovani et al. that combines a genome sequence and a…
Just how bad will climate change get? The only way to know is to fund basic research Summary Tim Palmer argues that the largest remaining uncertainty in projections of future…
A humidity measure that accounts for redistribution of water across the landscape Summary A new global humidity index incorporates lateral hydrologic flows — rivers and groundwater — alongside precipitation, potential…
These tiny flyers levitate on the Sun’s heat alone Summary Researchers led by Ben Schafer have demonstrated a centimetre-scale, ultralight two-layer wafer that can levitate using sunlight alone. The device…
Watch rappelling robots dive into a lava tube — for science Summary Researchers tested a team of three autonomous robots in a lava tube on Lanzarote, Spain. Two rovers mapped…
Photophoretic flight of perforated structures in near-space conditions Summary This Nature paper demonstrates that ultralight, perforated membrane structures can generate sufficient photophoretic forces to loft and sustain motion in near-space…
