The cover image shows plants growing at altitude on Altar Volcano in Chimborazo, Ecuador. Extreme altitudes pose challenges for most forms of life, and flowering plants are no exception. But flowering ...

The Casarabe people lived in southwest Amazonia around AD 500–1400, but understanding of this culture has been limited because the archaeological remains are covered in dense forest. In this week’s ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Seismic shivers documented in the Golden State after record-breaking snows in 2016 and 2017.

A key requirement for self-sustaining energy generation using nuclear fusion is for the plasma in which the fusion occurs to be heated by the fusion reactions themselves. In this week’s issue, Alex ...

Advances in nanofabrication have enabled studies of chirality to extend from conventional ‘mirror image’ molecules seen in organic chemistry to three-dimensional metallic nanostructures. Similar to ...

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.

Cooling and trapping atomic gases to form a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) allows quantum behaviour to be examined at a macroscopic scale. But it is hard to exert precise control over these exotic ...

Table tennis is a highly dextrous sport that requires rapid reflexes and an ability to respond to unpredictable gameplay, all of which presents a significant challenge for robots. Some robotic systems ...

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 ...