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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
8 Article

Stem Cells 2 Go

Japan has turned regenerative medicine into a regulatory free-for-all. Patients across the world could pay the price.
David Cyranoski and Brendan Maher
Nature, 2019
9 Article

Stocking the Shelves for the Next Pandemic

Despite previous warnings, drug makers failed to prepare a stockpile of compounds to fight viral pandemics. Can they finally do the right thing?
Elie Dolgin
Nature, 2021
9 Article

The Future Costs of Methane Emissions

An analysis of the costs of climate change caused by adding one tonne of methane to the atmosphere finds that high-income regions of the world should spend much more on efforts to lower such emissions than should low-income regions.
James K. Hammitt
Nature, 2021
8 Article

First Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Released in the United States

Biotech firm Oxitec launches controversial field test of its insects in Florida after years of opposition from residents and regulatory complications.
Emily Waltz
Nature, 2021
10 Article

Deep-Sea Dilemma

Mining the ocean floor could solve mineral shortages – and lead to epic extinctions in some of the most remote ecosystems on Earth.
Olive Heffernan
Nature, 2019
8 Article

The Pain Gap

After decades of assuming that pain works the same way in all sexes, scientists are finding that different biological pathways can produce an ‘ouch!’.
Amber Dance
Nature, 2019
8 Article

Four Steps to Global Management of Space Traffic

Jamie Morin sets out the elements required to track satellites and avoid crashes.
Jamie Morin
Nature, 2019
8 Article

A Gripping Problem

Humans are masters of dexterity. But robots are catching up.
Richard Hodson
Nature, 2018
8 Article

Nuclear Energy, Ten Years after Fukushima

Amid the urgent need to decarbonize, the industry that delivers one-tenth of global electricity must consult the public on reactor research, design, regulation, location and waste.
Aditi Verma et al.
Nature, 2021
8 Article

Can Lab-Grown Brains Become Conscious?

A handful of experiments are raising questions about whether clumps of cells and disembodied brains could be sentient, and how scientists would know if they were.
Sara Reardon
Nature, 2020
10 Article

How Does COVID Affect Mother and Baby?

Pregnant women fare worse than others, although the risks to the fetus are slight.
Nidhi Subbaraman
Nature, 2021
8 Article

The Brain Inflamed

The brain’s immune system could be provoking Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Can scientists get it back in check?
Alison Abbott
Nature, 2018