Dr Zhimei Sun – professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Beihang University – talks to Nature Computational Science about her career trajectory, her research on computational materials science and materials informatics, as well as her advice to young women scientists in these fields. Download PDF What has your career trajectory been like? What made…

Nature’s 2024 photo competition is now live, providing a chance to celebrate the diverse, interesting, challenging, striking and colourful work that scientists do around the world. Now in its fifth iteration, the competition is open to anyone who isn’t a professional photographer. It’s looking for images that showcase the work that scientists do — anywhere…

How to better support women in science across Latin America and beyond. Your browser does not support the audio element. Download MP3 See transcript In her role as Vice Rector for research partnerships and collaboration at the University of the Valley in Guatemala City, Monica Stein works to strengthen science and technology ecosystems in the…

Determining what guest can effectively bind in a host, or the reverse, is a central challenge in chemistry. To address this, an electron-density-based transformer method of generating and optimizing host–guest binders is proposed, applied to two different host systems and validated by experiment. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access…

As an academic who studies social policy and race, I was not surprised to learn of the resignation of Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was the first Black woman to have the role. I was not shocked by the news that Antoinette Candia-Bailey, an administrator at Lincoln University of…

President Xi Jinping at the opening of the second session of the 14th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.Credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty China’s spending on science and technology is set to rise this year, despite the country’s sluggish economic growth. The government will spend 371 billion yuan (US$52 billion) on science and technology in 2024 — a…

Nine kilometres beneath the sea off the coast of Japan, there are fields of yellow flowers that stretch for hundreds of miles. They are not real flowers – not even plants at all but animals called crinoids, related to sea urchins and starfish, which anchor themselves to the deep seabed and feed off plankton filtered by…

Tools such as Sora can generate convincing video footage from text prompts.Credit: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Artificial intelligence (AI) tools that translate text descriptions into images and video are advancing rapidly. Just as many researchers are using ChatGPT to transform the process of scientific writing, others are using AI image generators such as Midjourney, Stable…

Megan Majocha, a tumour-biology researcher in the laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says Deaf researchers shouldn’t have to spend time developing sign language for their science.Credit: NIH Sign language in science The lack of scientific terms and vocabulary in many of the world’s sign languages can make science education…

Three months after Javier Milei took office as the new president of Argentina, scientists there say that their profession is in crisis. As Milei cuts government spending to bring down the country’s deficit and to lower inflation — now more than 250% annually — academics say that some areas of research are at risk. And…