A type of childhood brain tumour called ependymoma is more common in boys than in girls. The reason for this difference turns out to be sex hormones such as testosterone.

One challenge that stems from the fundamental incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics is that there is no consensus on a theory of quantum gravity. A way to potentially ...

Protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves, form part of a strategy to preserve biodiversity, but how effective they are within and outside their boundaries is not always clear. In ...

The cover shows the moth Idalus iragorri, one of many insect species found at low to medium elevations in the eastern Andes. More than 70% of all insect species are found in the tropics, but the ...

As 2022 enters its final weeks, 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. The cover takes its inspiration from the ...

When genes are read by ribosomes, stop codons act as punctuation, telling the ribosome when to halt protein synthesis. But in some protozoa, the base sequences that comprise stop codons can also ...

A lack of data on economic outcomes hinders development and evaluation of public policy in many parts of the world. In this week’s issue, Marshall Burke and his colleagues show how satellite imagery ...

The past few decades have seen exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge. But, as Russell Funk and his colleagues reveal in this week’s issue, this increase in ...

The cover shows clonal raider ants (Ooceraea biroi) tending to pupae and small larvae. Ants are social insects, and their colonies are complex biological systems with sophisticated communication, ...

Genomes of red junglefowl, the wild birds that gave rise to domestic chickens, include genetic material from their farmyard cousins.

The cover illustration shows vacuolar-type adenosine triphosphatases (V-ATPases, large blue structures) on a synaptic vesicle from a nerve cell in the mammalian brain. V-ATPases pump protons across ...

Indefinite data retention is neither financially nor practically possible, but there are ways to give your data maximal long-term value.