The Best Articles in Nature

A major new report calls on humanity to tackle the biodiversity and climate crises simultaneously. Here's what that might look like.

«HUMANITY IS STRUGGLING to contain two compounding crises: skyrocketing global temperatures and plummeting biodiversity. But people tend to tackle each problem on its own»

This essay is a companion piece to an episode of Radiolab, titled The Interstitium. You don’t need to have heard it for this essay to make sense, but

The modelling of human-like behaviours is one of the challenges in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Inspired by experimental studies of cultural evolution, the authors propose a reinforcement…

My great-great-grandmother wasn't a chimp (she was a pig)

Consciousness science should move past a focus on complex mammalian brains to study the behaviour of ‘simpler’ animals

You and I operate as human capital: an input in the process of social reproduction, rather than its master or even its goal. Much of our life from childhood onward is dedicated to proving our value…

Evolution is in a perpetual cycle of churning out new pathogens. Luckily for us humans and many other animals, we have a very advanced immune system — known as the adaptive immune system — that allows…

A brief history of road ecology, the scientific discipline that is helping us understand our impact on the environment and how to diminish it

Not all heroes wear capes. Some are crabs.

If your eyes have ever been drawn to the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem, the texture of a pineapple, or the scales of a pinecone, then you have unknowingly witnessed brilliant examples of…

Michael Malay on the disappearances of freshwater pearl mussels from Scottish rivers and the Gaelic-speaking travellers and mussel-fishers

Rats are less pestilent and more lovable than we think. Can we learn to live with them?

Extreme microorganisms carpeting the Atacama Desert in Chile illuminate how life might have first taken hold on Earth’s surface.

The long read: When a microbe was found munching on a plastic bottle in a rubbish dump, it promised a recycling revolution. Now scientists are attempting to turbocharge those powers in a bid to solve…

«that for the host of seemingly intractable problems we are working on, microbes may have already begun to find a solution. All we need to do is look.»

The long read: Nobody normally gives a second thought to dust, but it is inescapable. And if we pay close attention, we can see the biggest things – time, death and life itself – within these tiny…

You may have heard America’s honeybees are dying. But what does that mean for the people on the front lines—and what could it mean for what ends up on your plate?