News Explainer |
Featured
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Editorial |
Hazardous science that helps to save and improve lives needs more support
Research into the growing environmental problem of urban gullies highlights the challenging conditions under which many socially important studies are done.
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News Feature |
People are having fewer babies: Is it really the end of the world?
Steep population declines in most countries are expected to have negative impacts over the next several generations, but adaptation is possible.
- Lynne Peeples
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News |
Google AI model mines trillions of images to create maps of Earth ‘at any place and time’
The system will save time spent on processing satellite data, researchers say — but they hope the tech firm will share more about how it works.
- Jeff Tollefson
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News |
These scientists re-enacted Stone Age voyage to Japan’s remote islands
Experiment shows how people in dugout canoes could have crossed the treacherous straits between Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands.
- Katie Kavanagh
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Perspective |
An aspirational approach to planetary futures
The Nature Relationship Index offers a new way to measure and engage human aspirations to shape a better future for people and all life on Earth.
- Erle C. Ellis
- , Yadvinder Malhi
- & Pedro Conceição
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Research Briefing |
Seasonality dominates changes in lake-surface extent and aligns with human residence
The mapping of lake surfaces globally has been constrained by the limitations of single-source satellite data. A spatio-temporal fusion approach now enables high-resolution mapping of more than 1.4 million lakes, revealing seasonality as the main factor driving changes in the spread of lake surfaces, with links between seasonality and human residence.
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Career Column |
How our student journal club built on sand developed strong foundations
SandClub launched as an informal discussion forum to draw students out of their post-pandemic shells. Now, it’s so much more.
- Mette Bendixen
- & Lars Iversen
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News & Views |
Should there be a national holiday in honour of chemists?
A proposal to bring science to the public’s attention, and Arctic explorers set sail in style in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.
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News |
Guess how much of the ocean floor humans have explored
Hint: it’s less than 1% — a lot less.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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Nature Video |
Uncovering a lost mountain metropolis
Drone-mounted LiDAR reveals the true extent of two lost-cities in the mountains of Uzbekistan.
- Dan Fox
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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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Nature Video |
Should the Maldives be creating new land?
The Maldives are racing to reclaim vast amounts of land to combat rising sea levels. But many are concerned that these efforts risk harming the paradise they aims to protect
- Shamini Bundell
- & Jesse Chase-Lubitz
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News |
Humans and their livestock have sheltered in this Saudi Arabian cave for 10,000 years
Saudi herders have travelled the same routes for millennia, cave discovery suggests.
- Gillian Dohrn
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News |
How do otters protect salt marshes from erosion? Shellfishly
Sea otters inadvertently protect the vegetation that binds sandy shorelines together.
- Jude Coleman
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News & Views |
People go the extra mile for food
GPS data reveal that people travel far from home to buy food in the United States, challenging ideas about how access to food relates to unhealthy eating habits.
- Abigail Klopper
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Nature Podcast |
Our ancestors lost nearly 99% of their population, 900,000 years ago
A roundup of stories from the Nature Briefing, including how human ancestors came close to extinction, historic pollution in Antarctica, and the AI that predicts smell from a compound's structure.
- Benjamin Thompson
- , Dan Fox
- & Shamini Bundell
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News |
Melting glaciers will reveal vast new ecosystems in need of protection
The emerging habitats represent huge ecological shifts and present new challenges for conservation.
- Jeff Tollefson
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Article |
Future emergence of new ecosystems caused by glacial retreat
By 2100, the decline of all glaciers outside the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will produce new terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems, posing both challenges and opportunities for conservation.
- J. B. Bosson
- , M. Huss
- & F. Arthaud
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Possible magmatic CO2 influence on the Laacher See eruption date
- Frederick Reinig
- , Lukas Wacker
- & Ulf Büntgen
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Career Q&A |
What it means to practise values-based research
Environmental scientist Max Liboiron ties principles of humility and accountability to research that respects people and their relationship with the land.
- Spoorthy Raman
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News & Views |
From the archive: ancient timelines and a west-side story of cities
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: the Channel tunnel, and a phantom island
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: the cell cycle and Antarctic exploration
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News |
World population hits eight billion — here’s how researchers predict it will grow
United Nations model predicts a slower rate of population growth than was previously estimated.
- David Adam
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Career Column |
It’s time to make science in remote places family-friendly
Melissa Ward Jones and Mette Bendixen share their stories of juggling parenting and fieldwork, and argue that more should be done to help retain scientist-parents, particularly women, in academia.
- Melissa Ward Jones
- & Mette Bendixen
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News Q&A |
Historic dive aims to map Earth’s deepest point like never before
Ocean-mapping specialist Dawn Wright is the first Black person to visit Challenger Deep.
- Freda Kreier
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News & Views |
From the archive: butterfly snacking habits and alpine maps
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: comet observation, and the explorer Dr Livingstone found safe
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive
Nature’s pages feature an obituary of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, and discuss the problem with naming species after people.
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Article
| Open Access
Global potential for harvesting drinking water from air using solar energy
Mapping of the global potential of atmospheric water harvesting using solar energy shows that it could provide safely managed drinking water for a billion people worldwide based on climate suitability.
- Jackson Lord
- , Ashley Thomas
- & Philipp H. Schmaelzle
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News Feature |
How far will global population rise? Researchers can’t agree
The United Nations forecasts that nearly 11 billion people will be living on Earth at the end of the century, but other demographic research groups project that population will peak earlier and at a much lower level.
- David Adam
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News Round-Up |
World’s most northern island and climate change’s role in floods
The latest science news, in brief.
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News & Views |
From the archive
Nature’s pages feature a 1921 look at the origin of some English place-names, and an 1871 report of a polar expedition.
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News & Views |
The fraction of the global population at risk of floods is growing
Satellite imaging combined with population data shows that, globally, the number of people living in flood-prone areas is growing faster than is the number living on higher ground — greatly increasing the potential impact of floods.
- Brenden Jongman
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Article |
Satellite imaging reveals increased proportion of population exposed to floods
Satellite imagery for the period 2000–2018 reveals that population growth was greater in flood-prone regions than elsewhere, thus exposing a greater proportion of the population to floods.
- B. Tellman
- , J. A. Sullivan
- & D. A. Slayback
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Article |
Precise date for the Laacher See eruption synchronizes the Younger Dryas
A revised date for the Laacher See eruption using measurements of subfossil trees shifts the chronology of European varved lakes relative to the Greenland ice core record, synchronizing the onset of the Younger Dryas across the North Atlantic–European sector.
- Frederick Reinig
- , Lukas Wacker
- & Ulf Büntgen
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Article |
Global prevalence of non-perennial rivers and streams
Non-perennial rivers and streams are mapped globally, showing that more than half of rivers worldwide experience no flow for at least one day per year.
- Mathis Loïc Messager
- , Bernhard Lehner
- & Thibault Datry
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Article |
The universal visitation law of human mobility
Using large-scale mobility data from diverse cities around the globe, a simple and robust scaling law that captures the temporal and spatial range of population movement is revealed.
- Markus Schläpfer
- , Lei Dong
- & Geoffrey B. West
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Article
| Open Access
The nutritional quality of cereals varies geospatially in Ethiopia and Malawi
Geospatial variation in the micronutrient composition (calcium, iron, selenium and zinc) of staple cereal grains is nutritionally important at subnational scales in Ethiopia and Malawi; these data could be used to improve surveillance of micronutrient deficiencies in the region.
- D. Gashu
- , P. C. Nalivata
- & M. R. Broadley
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Nature Video |
Explaining the icy mystery of the Dyatlov Pass deaths
A sixty-year-old mystery from Soviet Russia could be explained by snow science.
- Shamini Bundell
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News & Views |
Hierarchies defined through human mobility
An analysis of worldwide data finds that human mobility has a hierarchical structure. A proposed model that accounts for such hierarchies reproduces differences in mobility behaviour across genders and levels of urbanization.
- Elsa Arcaute
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Article |
The scales of human mobility
A model shows that human mobility is organized within hierarchical containers that coincide with familiar scales and that a power-law distribution emerges when movements between different containers are combined.
- Laura Alessandretti
- , Ulf Aslak
- & Sune Lehmann
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Article |
The growth equation of cities
A theoretical model in the form of a stochastic differential equation is proposed that describes, more accurately than previous models, the population evolution of cities, revealing that rare but very large interurban migration is a dominant factor.
- Vincent Verbavatz
- & Marc Barthelemy
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Research Highlight |
Urban sprawl overspreads Earth at an unprecedented speed
Satellite imagery shows that although the global population is growing, urban areas are growing even faster.
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News & Views |
From the archive
How Nature reported the first attempt to fly across the whole of Africa in 1920, and the heat and perspiration produced by cows, in 1970.
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News & Views |
From the archive
How Nature reported an interview with Einstein from 1920, and fears that England was losing the race to reach the North Pole, from 1870.
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News & Views |
From the archive
How Nature reported the discovery of ancient human bones in Australia in 1970, and how the First World War revolutionized the production of maps of France.
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Career Q&A |
Fighting fire with science
Wildfires are becoming more and more frequent around the world, making expertise in the field a hot commodity.
- Stav Dimitropoulos
‘Black rain’ in Tehran: what are the health effects?