Oestrogen defends against kidney damage caused by iron-dependent cell death Summary New work highlighted by Tom Vanden Berghe discusses a Nature paper by Tonnus et al. that links oestrogen signalling…
Octopus motion in the ocean tracked by a deep-sea 3D camera Summary The EyeRIS light-field camera system captures 3D visual data from the deep sea in near real time, recording…
Is gravity quantum? Experiments could finally probe one of physics’ biggest questions Summary Quantum theory has explained vast swathes of physics, yet gravity stubbornly resists being fitted into that framework.…
Levitating platform could ride sunlight into the ‘ignorosphere’ Summary A News & Views piece by Igor Bargatin highlights new work (Schafer et al.) demonstrating centimetre-scale, perforated, nano‑engineered sheets that can…
The perplexing body plan of arrow worms decoded Summary Piovani et al. produced a high-quality genome sequence and a single-cell atlas for a chaetognath (arrow worm). Their analyses show that…
Just how bad will climate change get? The only way to know is to fund basic research Summary Tim Palmer (University of Oxford) argues that the single biggest remaining uncertainty…
A humidity measure that accounts for redistribution of water across the landscape Summary A new global humidity index has been developed that incorporates lateral hydrologic flows — the movement of…
These tiny flyers levitate on the Sun’s heat alone Summary Researchers have demonstrated a centimetre-scale, ultralight wafer that can levitate using only sunlight. The design builds on radiometric effects —…
Summary Researchers tested a team of three autonomous robots in a lava tube on Lanzarote, Spain, to demonstrate how specialised rovers could explore underground tunnels on the Moon or Mars.…
Photophoretic flight of perforated structures in near-space conditions Summary This Nature paper reports experimental demonstrations and numerical models showing that ultralight perforated membranes can generate sustained photophoretic lift under near-space…
