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A Nature briefing describes newly documented snake behavior in which certain species propel themselves away from threats using a cartwheel-like motion rather than conventional slithering. The item appears as part of Nature's regular news briefing chat format rather than a standalone research report.
Nature Futures' fiction section has released a new short story, 'ESC (DC)²,' following a hacker who hitchhikes through rural Iceland toward a decommissioned facility called Skýborg while preparing a covert intrusion. The narrative blends tradecraft jargon with a tense, atmospheric journey across snowy terrain near Egilsstaðir. The piece ends mid-scene as the protagonist approaches a cluster of black structures guarded by armed figures.
A books-in-brief feature covers four new titles: Margaret Willes's 'Nature's Apothecary' on 100 medicinal plants illustrated from a 1597 herbal; William Tullett's 'Sniff', a history of smell from ancient religion to industrial-era cities; Jim Al-Khalili's 'On Time', which argues time's arrow is physically real; and Stuart Firestein's 'It Could Be Otherwise'.
Nature, in partnership with the Estée Lauder Companies, has announced the winners of its annual Inspiring Women in Science Awards. Materials physicist Alexandra Paterson of the University of Kentucky won the Scientific Achievement award for her work on flexible, printable plastic mixed-conductor semiconductors, while Taghried Abdelmagid won the Science Outreach award for her efforts promoting girls' and women's science education.
The requested Nature.com page titled 'Whence dragons?' could not be retrieved; instead, the site returned a standard notice about limited CSS support for outdated browsers. No article content, data, or findings were available for review.
An editorial in Nature urges Chinese regulators and researchers to make public the underlying evidence supporting new non-animal testing methods being adopted in the country. The piece argues that transparency is needed for international scientists and regulators to evaluate and trust these alternative methods.
A letter published in Nature argues that laboratory and institutional safety alerts often fail to reach PhD students who are visiting from other institutions. The piece calls for clearer communication channels so that temporary or guest researchers are not left out of safety notifications.
A large international research collaboration compared three common ways of measuring a person's capacity for cognitive reappraisal—self-report trait questionnaires, task-based emotional ratings, and amygdala activity during brain scans—and found the measures don't align with one another. The findings were published in Nature, a rare instance of a high-profile journal accepting a study reporting null results.
A team led by Dirk Witthaut at Forschungszentrum Jülich, working with the University of Cologne and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, has identified the cause of a recurring 60-second dip in European power grid frequency first noticed by grid operator Tennet Germany. The researchers found the pattern stems from large-scale battery storage systems that check their state of charge every minute, a behavior they confirmed occurs globally, not just in Europe. The findings are published in Nature Energy.
Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with a professor at the Technical University of Denmark, built and tested a three-dimensional thermal cloak that hides objects from infrared cameras regardless of which direction heat approaches from. The device reroutes heat around a concealed object rather than blocking it, producing a surface temperature pattern that makes the object invisible to thermal imaging while keeping its internal temperature stable. The work, led by professor Shelly Zhang with researchers Weichen Li and Yibo Wang, appears in Nature Communications.
A Nature Briefing Chat discusses emerging scientific efforts to study and potentially extend the lifespans of companion animals, mirroring human longevity research. The discussion covers how researchers are applying aging biology, previously focused on humans and lab animals, to pets such as dogs and cats.
A new scientific analysis finds that even extremely massive primordial black holes cannot account for the universe's dark matter. Researchers examined the theory that dark matter could consist of black holes formed shortly after the Big Bang and concluded the evidence does not support it as an explanation.