Inscriptions provide an invaluable insight into the ancient world. But over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged and exist in fragmented or semi-legible forms, making the job of reading ...

The cover shows Yournina Akinyi using her mobile phone at her produce stand in Matasia village, Kenya. In this week’s issue, Joshua Blumenstock and his colleagues show how big data derived from mobile ...

The cover image shows a view of the Milky Way captured at Nambung National Park in Western Australia. To understand how the Galaxy formed requires precision age dating of the stars that it contains.

For more than 50 years, scientists have been trying to understand the relationship between DNA sequence, gene-expression phenotype and fitness to decipher principles of gene regulatory evolution. In ...

Heterobilayer excitonic devices consisting of two different van der Waals materials, in which excitons are shared between the layers, exhibit electrically controlled switching actions at room ...

A regional analysis brought together data on wild-animal consumption by more than 12,000 households, to investigate trends and drivers of wild-meat use across Central Africa. The study found that ...

The interplay between variants of human immune-system genes and strains of Epstein–Barr virus underpins differences in susceptibility to an uncommon throat cancer.

Researchers should be free to pursue lines of inquiry and the communication of knowledge and ideas without fear of repression or censorship. At the same time, they have the ethical obligation to ...

When I found out that I was no longer eligible for an early-career grant, I took a moment to pause and reflect on my family life and my work.

Damage by certain insects and fungi tends to be greatest in US woodlands where maximum temperatures during the warmest months are increasing.

The cover image offers a night-time view of Earth, capturing human activity across the eastern hemisphere of the planet through the emissions of artificial light. Derived from satellite images taken ...

As the year 2025 draws to a close, we look back on the past 12 months through the lens of Nature’s 10 — ten people who helped to shape science during the year. This year, the cover is inspired by the ...