Featured
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Career Column |
How a ‘boring administrative task’ transformed my PhD career
Good ideas — and impactful tools — don’t just come from rich, Western nations, says Aleksandra Lazić, a social scientist in Serbia.
- Aleksandra Lazić
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Comment |
Science’s big problem is a loss of influence, not a loss of trust
Evidence shows that science and scientists remain highly trusted. But genuine scientific voices are not shouting loud enough over the noise to hold sway.
- Heidi J. Larson
- & David M. Bersoff
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News |
How does the brain control consciousness? This deep-brain structure
In a world of constant stimulation, the thalamus filters which thoughts we become aware of and which we don’t.
- Smriti Mallapaty
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Article
| Open AccessBasis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex
A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to represent patterns of social interaction.
- Marco K. Wittmann
- , Yongling Lin
- & Matthew F. S. Rushworth
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News Feature |
The science of shopping addiction: what makes people buy loads of stuff?
From China to Brazil to Germany, huge numbers of people are addicted to shopping, driven in part by companies that use gaming strategies.
- Emma Marris
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Nature Podcast |
Audio long read: Why kids need to take more risks — science reveals the benefits of wild, free play
Evidence suggests that risky play provides a wide-range of benefits to children, despite opportunities to do it becoming more restricted than ever.
- Julian Nowogrodzki
- & Benjamin Thompson
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News & Views |
Racial bias eliminated when ratings switch from five stars to thumbs up or down
Implementing a performance-rating system with a two-point scale instead of a five-point scale could be an easy way to temper racial prejudices and tangibly improve income equality for workers from under-represented groups.
- Lauren Rivera
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Article
| Open AccessScale dichotomization reduces customer racial discrimination and income inequality
Changing from a five-point scale to a two-point scale for rating workers reduces racial discrimination by making customers focus on whether the work was good or bad instead of their own personal biases.
- Tristan L. Botelho
- , Sora Jun
- & Katherine A. DeCelles
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Career Feature |
Why I retracted part of my PhD dissertation
Psychologist Laura Steenbergen took the step after raising research-integrity concerns about a former mentor.
- Christine Ro
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Book Review |
How to end outrage and detoxify politics: share stories, not statistics
A book on human morality claims that although liberals and conservatives prioritize different victims, mutual understanding is still possible.
- Leor Zmigrod
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News |
Crowds suck people into a vortex — surprising physicists
Studying crowd dynamics could inform strategies that help to prevent dense gatherings from becoming dangerous.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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Research Briefing |
School smart or street smart? Maths skills of children in India tested
Do mathematical skills that children acquire in the classroom transfer to real-world settings — and vice versa? Evidence from five large groups of children in India reveals that current school-based teaching practices are failing to bridge the gap. An innovative approach is needed to connect abstract maths to intuitively meaningful contexts and problems.
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News & Views |
Crowds start to spin when their densities hit a threshold
Overcrowding can lead to disaster, and yet the dynamics of dense groups of people are poorly understood. Analysis of a festival uncovers collective rotational movements that emerge at critical densities, which could be universal.
- Antoine Tordeux
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News Feature |
Are the Internet and AI affecting our memory? What the science says
Search engines, GPS maps and other tech can alter our ability to learn and remember. Now scientists are working out what AI might do.
- Helen Pearson
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Article
| Open AccessChildren’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic mathematics
Children who learn maths working in markets and children who learn maths only from school were both unable to transfer their skills to new contexts, highlighting a need to reconsider how maths is taught in school.
- Abhijit V. Banerjee
- , Swati Bhattacharjee
- & Elizabeth S. Spelke
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Nature Careers Podcast |
Mind matters: investigating academia’s ‘mental health crisis’
Adam Levy discusses some of the systemic changes needed to make the academic workplace both a happier and healthier place.
- Adam Levy
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News Feature |
Why kids need to take more risks: science reveals the benefits of wild, free play
Studies reveal how risky play can benefit child development. But encouraging it can be a challenge for parents.
- Julian Nowogrodzki
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Book Review |
Sci-fi icon Kim Stanley Robinson: ‘there’s so much bad fiction about anthropomorphizing AI’
The influential writer talks about frighteningly accurate predictions, the creative act of reading, AI consciousness — and hope.
- Anne Pichon
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Career Feature |
Nine books to help shape your science career in 2025
Researchers seeking to banish workaholic behaviours, boost their pay, have more influence at work or quit academia will find plenty of advice in these books, all published this year.
- Anne Gulland
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World View |
Let the data talk: embrace exploratory research
Open-ended research is essential to building solid hypotheses in the social sciences — without it, even the best-planned analyses can fail.
- Balazs Aczel
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News |
New schizophrenia drug could treat Alzheimer’s disease
Half a dozen drugs are in trials for conditions of the brain, but success is not guaranteed.
- Diana Kwon
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News Feature |
How students and grandparents could solve the global mental-health crisis
African researchers piloted a slew of innovative, low-cost programmes for addressing the troubling shortage of mental-health professionals on the continent. Now the rest of the world is taking notice.
- Simar Bajaj
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World View |
Why we are all lab rats in the digital world
Researchers need to establish robust ethical protocols for online experiments.
- Tim Weiss
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Nature Podcast |
Surprise finding reveals mitochondrial ‘energy factories’ come in two different types
Mitochondria divide to share the load when nutrients are scarce — plus, how smashing atomic nuclei together helps identify their shapes.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Emily Bates
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Research Highlight |
The midlife crisis is not universal
Study of thousands of people in rural communities shows that many do not experience a slump in well-being during their forties and fifties.
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News Feature |
How to recover when a climate disaster destroys your city
In the wake of unprecedented floods that displaced half a million people in southern Brazil, researchers are investigating how to prevent long-term mental trauma and provide lessons for other regions dealing with disasters.
- Mariana Lenharo
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Editorial |
A thaw in scientific relations could help clear the air in India and Pakistan
The annual toxic smog that forms over swathes of India and Pakistan is preventable, but the nations’ scientists have too little opportunity to help tackle the problem.
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Nature Podcast |
How to recover from the trauma of a climate disaster
In the wake of devastating floods in the South of Brazil, researchers are working out how best to help people — plus, what concerns do Nature’s readers have about the US election.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Emily Bates
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Comment |
How to spend one trillion dollars: the US decarbonization conundrum
Why we must treat decarbonization policies as an experiment and put in place measures now to evaluate what works best.
- Peter Christensen
- , Patrick Baylis
- & David S. Rapson
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News & Views |
Local government actions can curb air pollution in India and Pakistan
Burning crop waste causes devastating pollution in South Asia. When local administrators have appropriate incentives to control burning, incidents go down — a finding that could guide future efforts to manage air pollution.
- Satchit Balsari
- & Manoj Mohanan
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News & Views |
Electric cars could save billions in health-care costs
Improving air quality by discontinuing combustion-engine vehicles would slash health-care costs in the United States, but the projected savings in rural areas depend on how the replacements are powered.
- Abigail Klopper
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News |
‘Doing good science is hard’: retraction of high-profile reproducibility study prompts soul-searching
A paper by some of the biggest names in scientific integrity is retracted for issues including misstatements about the research plan.
- Holly Else
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Analysis
| Open AccessDifferences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions
We find that conservatives tend to share more low-quality news through social media than liberals, and so even if technology companies enact politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, political asymmetries in enforcement should be expected.
- Mohsen Mosleh
- , Qi Yang
- & David G. Rand
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News & Views |
How walkable is your city? Online tool shows how major centres measure up
A platform for visualizing the accessibility of urban areas reveals striking inequalities in and between the world’s cities.
- Abigail Klopper
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Book Review |
Can AI feel distress? Inside a new framework to assess sentience
From artificial-intelligence algorithms to zebrafish, this book take a precautionary approach to assessing how sentient such entities are.
- Jonathan Kimmelman
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Book Review |
The Burning Earth: how conquest and carnage have decimated landscapes worldwide
An epic exploration of human history examines how the poor and powerless have fought back — time and again — against those seeking to profit from the planet’s natural resources.
- Josie Glausiusz
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News |
Why do we crumble under pressure? Science has the answer
Study links this phenomenon to the brain region that controls movement.
- Jude Coleman
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Book Review |
How influencers and algorithms mobilize propaganda — and distort reality
The engagement-fuelled logic of social media has bequeathed us a world in which what’s trending is a yardstick for what’s true.
- Sander van der Linden
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News |
How to change people’s minds about climate change: what the science says
Telling people about the consensus among scientists can help, study finds, but researchers think that personal conversations are needed, too.
- Alix Soliman
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Article
| Open AccessLoss of plasticity in deep continual learning
The pervasive problem of artificial neural networks losing plasticity in continual-learning settings is demonstrated and a simple solution called the continual backpropagation algorithm is described to prevent this issue.
- Shibhansh Dohare
- , J. Fernando Hernandez-Garcia
- & Richard S. Sutton
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Correspondence |
Are brains rewired for caring during pregnancy? Why the jury’s out
- Kathryn L. Humphreys
- & Autumn Kujawa
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Correspondence |
More studies are needed on the long-term environmental consequences of war
- Patrick B. Newcombe
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Technology Feature |
Cash for errors: project offers bounty for spotting mistakes in published papers
ERROR project borrows a strategy from the software industry.
- Julian Nowogrodzki
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News |
PlayStation is good for you: video games improved mental health during COVID
But whether these findings apply more broadly remains to be seen.
- Gemma Conroy
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News Feature |
How pregnancy transforms the brain to prepare it for parenthood
It’s a transformational time long neglected by neuroscience. That is starting to change.
- Liam Drew
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Research Briefing |
Eating habits of Denisovans on the Tibetan Plateau revealed
The discovery of a rib fragment from Baishiya Karst Cave greatly extends the presence of Denisovan hominins on the Tibetan Plateau. In-depth analyses of fossilized animal bones from the same site show that Denisovans made full use of the available animal resources.
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Comment |
Neuroscientists must not be afraid to study religion
Scientists interested in the brain have tended to avoid studying religion or spirituality for fear of being seen as unscientific. That needs to change.
- Patrick McNamara
- , William Newsome
- & Jordan Grafman
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Article
| Open AccessMegastudy shows that reminders boost vaccination but adding free rides does not
Contrary to expectations, offers of free transportation to vaccine sites did not increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake more than text message reminders, a finding that has implications for future policy decision-making to promote vaccination.
- Katherine L. Milkman
- , Sean F. Ellis
- & Angela L. Duckworth