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…

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…

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…

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…

Abstract The GPT-4 large language model (LLM) and ChatGPT chatbot have emerged as accessible and capable tools for generating English-language text in a variety of formats. GPT-4 has previously performed well when applied to questions from multiple standardized examinations. However, further evaluation of trustworthiness and accuracy of GPT-4 responses across various knowledge domains is essential…

The film Dune: Part Two might feature human actors Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, but the biggest stars — at least literally — are the sandworms. The sandworms are central to the desert ecosystem of the fictional planet Arrakis, the film’s main setting, and to the culture of its inhabitants, the Fremen. Sandworms live underground and…

The worm-like caecilian Siphonops annulatus is the first amphibian described to produce ‘milk’ for offspring hatched outside its body.Credit: Carlos Jared An egg-laying amphibian found in Brazil nourishes its newly hatched young with a fatty, milk-like substance, according to a study published today in Science1. Lactation is considered a key characteristic of mammals. But a…

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…