Military spending is fuelling wars such as the one in Sudan, forcing people to flee.Credit: Luis Tato/AFP/Getty The fall of the regime of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, which brought widespread joy and optimism, was a rare and welcome development in what has mostly been another devastating year of violence and conflict around the world.…

Hiroshima M. G. Sheftall Dutton (2024) Born and educated in the United States, M. G. Sheftall settled in Japan in 1987 to teach modern Japanese cultural history at university. His detailed book on the 1945 US atomic bombing of Hiroshima skilfully integrates science and technology with the human aspects of this horrific event. It stands…

Findings from clinical trials are summarized in Cochrane’s systematic reviews, which guide medical treatment.Credit: Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty A huge collaboration has confirmed growing concerns that fake or flawed research is polluting medical systematic reviews, which summarize evidence from multiple clinical trials and shape treatment guidelines worldwide. The study is part of an effort…

Podcasts generated by artificial intelligence are shaking up how researchers interact with the literature and the public.Credit: Aleksei Gorodenkov/Alamy “My brain starts to die when I try to read a journal article,” says Jessica Sacher, a microbiologist at Stanford University in California. Papers are written to be technically comprehensive rather than understandable, she says. “I…

Weight-loss wonder drugs Following the runaway success of ‘miracle’ drug Wegovy (semaglutide) and other GLP-1 agonists, 2025 is likely to bring results and approvals for a new wave of treatments targeting obesity. The pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, will wrap up a phase III trial for its oral pill orforglipron, evaluating its long-term…

A climate finance protest at COP29 in Baku. Science activism is increasing.Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty People in some 70 countries took part in various national elections this year, a record number. And in March, Nature reported that results in at least five polls could either boost or block climate action (see Nature 627, 22–25; 2024). Overall,…

Credit: Salk Institute Joanne Chory was a pioneering biologist and geneticist whose work transformed modern molecular plant biology. Her early discoveries on how plants sense and respond to light, and how they regulate growth through steroid hormones, reshaped our understanding of plant development. Her vision for using plants to mitigate global warming through carbon sequestration…

Remote sensing, ESM, AI maps, aerial eDNA, soil mycobiome, soil carbon dynamics, ecophysiology, riparian forests, herbivores, insects, biodiversity Umeå, Uppsala and Ultuna, Sweden Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU

Life is uncertain. None of us know what is going to happen. We know little of what has happened in the past, or is happening now outside our immediate experience. Uncertainty has been called the ‘conscious awareness of ignorance’1 — be it of the weather tomorrow, the next Premier League champions, the climate in 2100…

Abstract The behavior of an organism is influenced by the complex interplay between its brain, body and environment. Existing data-driven models focus on either the brain or the body–environment. Here we present BAAIWorm, an integrative data-driven model of Caenorhabditis elegans, which consists of two submodels: the brain model and the body–environment model. The brain model…