At industrial scales, chemical reactions are typically driven by applying continuous heat to the reactants. In this week’s issue, Liangbing Hu and his colleaguesshow that pulsed heating and quenching ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 human bronchial cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, captured using a scanning electron microscope. In this week’s issue, a collection of six papers reveals key information about the ...

Many potential applications for artificial intelligence require making real-time decisions. Car racing, in which drivers must undertake complex tactical manoeuvres while controlling their vehicle at ...

The US National Cancer Act of 1971 has fostered tremendous progress in our understanding of the biology that underlies cancer. However, scientific and social challenges remain. A new action plan to ...

The seven planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 were largely spared cosmic collisions, raising questions about where these worlds got their water.

Pure mathematics involves the discovery of patterns between mathematical objects and using these connections to formulate conjectures. Mathematicians have deployed computers since the 1960s to help ...

Tunicates, such as sea squirts, are the closest relatives to vertebrates. Most of these marine organisms become sessile — unable to move themselves – when their free-swimming larvae turn into ...

Launched four years ago, the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) aims to identify and catalogue the diverse cells types found in mammalian brains. Across 17 papers in this week’s issue, the ...

A preliminary analysis of viral genomes suggests the COVID-19 pandemic might have multiple animal origins — but the findings still have to be peer reviewed. The 2019–20 wildfires generated 700 million ...