Nobel prizewinners almost never work in isolation. They might be the driving force behind their award-winning discoveries, but a whole host of collaborators, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students helped to realize their vision in the laboratory. Where do those scientists end up? What is it like for them to be part of a celebrated piece…

Planetary scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan, who died in 1996, influenced some of NASA’s planetary missions.Credit: Science History Images/Alamy Early in 1993, a manuscript landed in the Nature offices announcing the results of an unusual — even audacious — experiment. The investigators, led by planetary scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan, had searched for evidence of…

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. A new drug can alleviate loss of smell and taste caused by COVID-19.Credit: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty COVID drug helps bring back sense of smell Clinical-trial data suggest that an antiviral pill called ensitrelvir is among…

A pair of cormorants thought to have died from H5N1 bird flu, found washed up on a beach in Chile earlier this year.Credit: Martin Bernetti/AFP via Getty Researchers studying the evolution of the bird flu virus over the past 18 years have shown how the strain currently circulating worldwide, an extremely deadly form of the…

Inspired by the classic lock-and-key model and advances in equivariant deep network design, we present a structure-based drug design model, SurfGen, which uses two types of equivariant graph neural networks to learn on protein surfaces and geometric structures to directly design small-molecule drugs. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access…