In the hills of eastern Tennessee, a record-breaking machine called Frontier is providing scientists with unprecedented opportunities to study everything from atoms to galaxies. The supercomputer known as Frontier covers an area larger than two basketball courts. Credit: Nick McGinn
Scientists are beginning to crack the fiendishly complex code that helps us to sense odours. Illustration by Adrià Voltà The smell in the laboratory was new. It was, in the language of the business, tenacious: for more than a week,
The large language model does everything from reading the literature to writing and reviewing its own papers, but it has a limited range of applicability so far. Credit: Moor Studio/Getty Could science be fully automated? A team of machine-learning researchers
Nature talks with infectious disease specialists about whether vaccines will curb this outbreak and more. Monkeypox virus particles (shown in this coloured electron micrograph) can spread through close contact with people and animals.Credit: NIAID/Science Photo Library When the World Health Organization
Hundreds of medical algorithms have been approved on basis of limited clinical data. Scientists are debating who should test these tools and how best to do it. Illustration by Sandro Rybak When Devin Singh was a paediatric resident, he attended
Chemical analysis of coral skeletons reveals unprecedented warming trend that could spell disaster for the iconic reef. Marine heatwaves are increasingly bleaching corals in the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia.Credit: Jurgen Freund/Nature Picture Library/Science Photo Library Earlier this year,
The World Health Organization has updated its list of most dangerous viruses and bacteria. The monkeypox virus has been added to the WHO’s list of priority pathogens.Credit: Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty The number of pathogens that could trigger the next
The ultra-high-energy neutrino was spotted by deep-sea detectors and could point to a massive cosmic event. Five ARCA detectors on board a ship, ready for deployment.Credit: KM3NeT Collaboration An observatory still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea
The US$5 billion facility would be cheaper, bigger and faster to build than a similar one proposed by European scientists. Computer simulation of an electron-positron collision. The blue lines represent part of the detector. The variously coloured lines are the
Bacterial defensive systems scramble the standard workflow of life. A bacterial enzyme turns biology on its head by reading RNA (artist’s illustration) into DNA that forms new genes.Credit: Artur Plawgo/Science Photo Library Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes