Nature Summaries and Reviews

See all summaries and reviews from Nature at a glance.

9 Article

How to Stop Cities and Companies Causing Planetary Harm

Researchers must help to define science-based targets for water, nutrients, carbon emissions and more to avoid cascading effects and stave off tipping points in Earth’s systems.
Xuemei Bai et al.
Nature, 2022
8 Article

Cloud Labs: Where Robots Do the Research

A host of companies provide a remote, automated workforce for conducting experiments around the clock.
Carrie Arnold
Nature, 2023
8 Article

Guardians of the Brain

The brain’s borders teem with an army of immune cells that monitor and protect it.
Diana Kwon
Nature, 2022
8 Article

DeepMind AI Learns Simple Physics Like a Baby

Neural network could be a step towards programs for studying how human infants learn.
Davide Castelvecchi
Nature, 2022
8 Article

Your Brain Expands and Shrinks Over Time – These Charts Show How

Based on more than 120,000 brain scans, the charts are still preliminary. But researchers hope they could one day be used as a routine clinical tool by physicians.
Max Kozlov
Nature, 2022
8 Article

Lithium-Ion Batteries Need to Be Greener and Ethical

Batteries are key to humanity’s future – but they come with environmental and human costs, which must be mitigated.
Nature Editorial
Nature, 2021
8 Article

Tropical Forests Have Big Climate Benefits Beyond Carbon Storage

Study finds that trees cool the planet by one-third of a degree through biophysical mechanisms such as humidifying the air.
Freda Kreier
Nature, 2022
8 Article

Open-Source Language AI Challenges Big Tech’s Models

BLOOM aims to address the biases that machine-learning systems inherit from the texts they train on.
Elizabeth Gibney
Nature, 2022
8 Article

Landmark CRISPR Trial Shows Promise Against Deadly Disease

Administering gene-editing treatment directly into the body could be a safe and effective way to treat a rare, life-threatening condition.
Heidi Ledford
Nature, 2021
9 Article

Energy crisis: five questions that must be answered in 2023

Market turmoil and geopolitical realignment after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put livelihoods and the green-energy transition at risk. Here’s how researchers can help overcome the threats.
Andreas Goldthau and Simone Tagliapietra
Nature, 2022
8 Article

An AI Tool to Make Clinical Trials More Inclusive

An artificial-intelligence tool called Trial Pathfinder can run clinical-trial emulations using healthcare data from people with cancer, and can learn how to optimize trial-inclusion eligibility criteria, while maintaining patient safety.
Chunhua Weng and James R. Rogers
Nature, 2021
10 Article

Six Months of COVID Vaccines: What 1.7 Billion Doses Have Taught Scientists

As countries race to administer coronavirus vaccines, researchers are analysing the effects while a rash of viral variants raises concern.
Heidi Ledford
Nature, 2021