Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Nature (journal)”
The headline reads, “The Rapid Rise of a Research Nation: China’s economic boom is mirrored by its similarly meteoric rise in high quality science.” This was not a headline in People’s Daily or China Daily but in the most prestigious of Western scientific publications, Nature. The 38 pages, which follow that headline in a special Supplement to the journal Nature, tell us that China is now second …
An interesting question is, what are you waiting for? Global warming is the biggest problem we’ve ever faced as a civilisation — certainly you want to act to slow it down, but perhaps you’ve been waiting for just the right moment. The moment when, oh, marine biologists across the Pacific begin weeping in their scuba masks as they dive on reefs …
Global warming is shifting the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis, a new NASA study finds. Melting ice sheets — especially in Greenland — are changing the distribution of weight on Earth. And that has caused both the North Pole and the wobble, which is called polar motion, to change course, according to a study published Friday in …
Increased meat in ancient hominin diets, beginning about 3 million years ago, meant that guts (large and small intestines) could become shorter because they could extract more expeditious calories in shorter lengths. This change in diet was directly responsible for the steady development of bigger brains beginning at this time. But what other factors might have helped the natural selection for shorter …
Treatment and prevention of life-threatening infections could be improved by research that reveals how bacteria are kept in check. Researchers have discovered how the immune system stops bacteria in our gut from leaking into the blood stream and causing body-wide inflammation, such as sepsis. The study also helps to explain why we do not suffer more infections, despite the vast …
When you cut and burn a tropical forest, you’re left with a barren plain of cracked red mud, incapable of supporting life – the opposite of the teeming, hyperdiverse array of life that was destroyed. Once the trees are gone, the nutrients wash away and the soil degrades into a dense, brick-like layer so hardened that plant roots can’t get …
Clouds play a bigger role in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet than was previously assumed. Compared to clear skies, clouds enhance the meltwater runoff by a third. Those are the findings of an international study that was coordinated by KU Leuven and published in Nature Communications. Greenland’s ice sheet is the second largest ice mass in the world …
There’s no question about it. A new epoch—the Anthropocene—has begun. So says an international group of geoscientists, in a paper published Friday in the journal Science. They point to waste disposal, fossil fuel combustion, increased fertilizer use, the testing and dropping of nuclear weapons, deforestation, and more as evidence that human activity has pushed the Earth into the new age …
Scientists have found an abrupt change about 6,000 years ago in how terrestrial plant and animal species coexisted, right about the time human populations were ballooning and agriculture was spreading around the world. The findings suggest that human activity had reached a tipping point where hunting and farming were impacting the natural world in irreversible ways — changes that have …
A team of researchers from Stony Brook University, led by Yusuf Hannun, MD, the Joel Strum Kenny Professor in Cancer Research and Director of the Stony Brook University Cancer Center, have found quantitative evidence proving that extrinsic risk factors, such as environmental exposures and behaviors weigh heavily on the development of a vast majority (approximately 70 to 90 percent) of …
