Featured
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News |
Private Moon launch a success! But will the craft land safely on the lunar surface?
Anxiety is high as the company Intuitive Machines takes its first crack at a touchdown.
- Alexandra Witze
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News Explainer |
How to test a Moon landing from Earth
The world is racing to land on the Moon. How do space agencies and commercial companies test their landers ahead of time?
- Jatan Mehta
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News |
Israel is flooding Gaza’s tunnel network: scientists assess the risks
The plan to target Hamas involves filling parts of a 500-kilometre-long network of underground tunnels. Researchers warn this could affect Gaza’s water supplies.
- Josie Glausiusz
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News & Views |
Flexible fibres take fabrics into the information age
A technique for embedding fibres with semiconductor devices produces defect-free strands that are hundreds of metres long. Garments woven with these threads offer a tantalizing glimpse of the wearable electronics of the future.
- Xiaoting Jia
- & Alex Parrott
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Article
| Open AccessHigh-quality semiconductor fibres via mechanical design
A mechanical design is developed for the fabrication of ultralong, fracture-free and perturbation-free semiconductor fibres to address the increasing demand for flexible and wearable optoelectronics.
- Zhixun Wang
- , Zhe Wang
- & Lei Wei
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News |
Near death experience — Japan’s Moon lander makes a comeback
After nine days in a state of suspension, the upside-down Moon lander has received enough sunlight to start operating again.
- Gemma Conroy
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Where I Work |
How I make stretchy electronics for medicine
Mahmoud Tavakoli works on wearable electronic devices that are less invasive than standard equipment.
- Patricia Maia Noronha
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News |
Japan’s successful Moon landing was the most precise ever
Landing within 100 metres of its target zone, the craft has pioneered a new image-based automatic navigation system. But its mission might be cut short.
- Ling Xin
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News & Views |
A 2D route to 3D computer chips
Ultrathin materials have long been touted as a solution to the problems faced by the ever-growing semiconductor industry. Evidence that 3D chips can be built from 2D semiconductors suggests that the hype was justified.
- Tania Roy
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News |
Mission failure feared for private US Moon lander — what’s next?
Astrobotic, the firm that launched the Peregrine spacecraft, says it will learn from any missteps and look ahead to its next attempt.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Private US Moon mission launches — will it open a new era for science?
Astrobotic could be the first commercial firm to successfully deliver research equipment to the lunar surface, if it sticks the landing.
- Alexandra Witze
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News & Views |
Tailoring graphene for electronics beyond silicon
The integration of non-silicon semiconductors into systems on chips is needed for advanced power and sensing technologies. A semiconducting graphene ‘buffer’ layer grown on silicon carbide is a step on this path.
- Francesca Iacopi
- & Andrea C. Ferrari
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News & Views |
From the archive: a towering legacy, and unseasonal wasps
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views Forum |
2D materials ratchet up biorealism in computing
A transistor made from atomically thin materials mimics the way in which connections between neurons are strengthened by activity. Two perspectives reveal why physicists and neuroscientists share equal enthusiasm for this feat of engineering.
- Frank H. L. Koppens
- , James B. Aimone
- & Frances S. Chance
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Article |
Moiré synaptic transistor with room-temperature neuromorphic functionality
We report the experimental realization and room-temperature operation of a low-power (20 pW) moiré synaptic transistor based on an asymmetric bilayer graphene/hexagonal boron nitride moiré heterostructure.
- Xiaodong Yan
- , Zhiren Zheng
- & Mark C. Hersam
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Article |
Stable blue phosphorescent organic LEDs that use polariton-enhanced Purcell effects
Polariton-enhanced Purcell effects can be used to reduce the triplet density in blue phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes, thereby extending their operational lifetimes by decreasing the annihilation of high-energy, long-lived blue triplets.
- Haonan Zhao
- , Claire E. Arneson
- & Stephen R. Forrest
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Nature Video |
The rubber that stops cracks in their tracks
Highly entangled polymers allow it to resist cracks from cyclical stress 10 times better than before.
- Dan Fox
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Article |
Water-responsive supercontractile polymer films for bioelectronic interfaces
Water-responsive supercontractile polymer films composed of poly(ethylene oxide) and poly(ethylene glycol)-α-cyclodextrin inclusion complex contract by more than 50% of their original length within seconds after wetting and become soft and stretchable hydrogel thin films that can be used in bioelectronic interfaces.
- Junqi Yi
- , Guijin Zou
- & Xiaodong Chen
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Article |
Multiscale stress deconcentration amplifies fatigue resistance of rubber
A rubber in which highly entangled long polymers strongly adhere with rigid particles deconcentrates stress across multiple scales, amplifying the fatigue threshold.
- Jason Steck
- , Junsoo Kim
- & Zhigang Suo
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Outlook |
This cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and rescue
From drivable bionic animals to machines made from muscle, biohybrid robots are on their way to a variety of uses.
- Liam Drew
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News |
Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue
The ‘anthrobots’ were able to repair a scratch in a layer of neurons in the lab.
- Matthew Hutson
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Nature Video |
Super hot plasma made easy with stabilising fibres
Carbon fibre blocks could make it easier to create uniform high temperature plasma for manufacturing and research.
- Shamini Bundell
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News |
How does it feel to have an octopus arm? This robo-tentacle lets people find out
Mimicking the snatch and grab of an octopus snaring its prey required a new way of thinking about robotics.
- Bianca Nogrady
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News & Views |
From the archive: a juice extractor in an insect’s gut, and amateur radio telephony
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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Research Highlight |
Leonardo’s construction design takes shape centuries later
Researchers make a 3D-printed beam based on the Renaissance polymath’s idea for a masonry structure.
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Nature Video |
The 3D printer that crafts complex robotic organs in a single run
Combining machine vision with contactless error correction allows for even more advanced multi-material printing.
- Dan Fox
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News & Views |
Multi-material 3D printing guided by machine vision
A 3D printer uses machine vision to solve a problem that has plagued 3D inkjet printers, increasing the range of materials that can be used, and enabling the rapid production of complex objects such as a robot hand.
- Yong Lin Kong
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Article
| Open AccessVision-controlled jetting for composite systems and robots
We have developed an automated and high-throughput, three-dimensional, vision-controlled inkjet deposition process that enables the high-resolution, contactless printing of a range of materials with varying elastic moduli to create complex structures and robots.
- Thomas J. K. Buchner
- , Simon Rogler
- & Robert K. Katzschmann
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Nature Video |
The robot chemist helping to pave the way to settlements on Mars
An AI-assisted robot, could use Martian rock to autonomously generate oxygen on the red planet
- Noah Baker
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Career Feature |
The future is quantum: universities look to train engineers for an emerging industry
With quantum technologies heading for the mainstream, undergraduate courses are preparing the workforce of the future.
- Sophia Chen
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Research Highlight |
A robot performs heart surgery with a strong but delicate touch
Device can wield tools inside one of the heart’s chambers while bracing itself against a stabilizer fitted into a major cardiac vein.
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News & Views |
Hydrogel implant rehabilitates muscles through electrical stimulation
An electrically conductive hydrogel injected into an injured muscle can help the muscle to regenerate and reconnect with the nervous system. This effective soft prosthesis has enabled rats to walk soon after muscular injury.
- Milica Radisic
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Article |
Injectable tissue prosthesis for instantaneous closed-loop rehabilitation
An injectable hydrogel for use as a scaffold to aid tissue repair is described, the material of which is conductive so that it can be used both for electrophysiological measurement and electrostimulation in closed-loop robot-assisted rehabilitation.
- Subin Jin
- , Heewon Choi
- & Mikyung Shin
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Article
| Open AccessAll-analog photoelectronic chip for high-speed vision tasks
An all-analog chip combining electronic and light computing achieves systemic energy efficiency of more than three orders of magnitude and a computing speed of more than one order of magnitude compared with state-of-the-art computing processors.
- Yitong Chen
- , Maimaiti Nazhamaiti
- & Qionghai Dai
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News & Views |
The compact accelerator that keeps electrons on the straight and narrow
A silicon-based device uses laser light to accelerate electrons and simultaneously shape them into a narrow beam. The principle could be used to build microchip accelerators that do away with bulky conventional designs.
- Yelong Wei
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Article
| Open AccessState estimation of a physical system with unknown governing equations
A parametrization strategy for stochastic variational inference with Markov Gaussian processes is presented for state estimation of a physical system whose underlying dynamical equations are partially or completely unknown.
- Kevin Course
- & Prasanth B. Nair
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Article
| Open AccessBridging two insect flight modes in evolution, physiology and robophysics
Asynchronous flight in all major groups of insects likely arose from a single common ancestor with reversions to a synchronous flight mode enabled by shifts back and forth between different regimes in the same set of dynamic parameters.
- Jeff Gau
- , James Lynch
- & Simon Sponberg
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News |
These ancient whittled logs could be the earliest known wooden structure
Stacked timbers dated to roughly 476,000 years ago show that ancient hominins worked with wood.
- Ewen Callaway
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Article |
Multistable sheets with rewritable patterns for switchable shape-morphing
To demonstrate the power of multistability, a specific class of groovy metasheets is introduced as a new shape-morphing platform that allows repeated switching from the flat state to multiple, precisely selected and stable three-dimensional shapes.
- A. S. Meeussen
- & M. van Hecke
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News Explainer |
Why was the Morocco earthquake so deadly?
The quake, which has killed thousands, was unusually large for Morocco and struck a region where most buildings are not earthquake-resilient.
- Michael Marshall
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Article |
Turbulence suppression by cardiac-cycle-inspired driving of pipe flow
Turbulence can be reduced by more than 25% in ordinary pipe flow by unsteady, pulsatile driving specifically mimicking the cardiac cycle and extending this method to large Reynolds numbers.
- D. Scarselli
- , J. M. Lopez
- & B. Hof
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Nature Video |
AI finally beats humans at a real-life sport — drone racing
The new system combines simulation with onboard sensing and computation.
- Dan Fox
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Article
| Open AccessChampion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning
An autonomous system is described that combines deep reinforcement learning with onboard sensors collecting data from the physical world, enabling it to fly faster than human world champion drone pilots around a race track.
- Elia Kaufmann
- , Leonard Bauersfeld
- & Davide Scaramuzza
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News & Views |
Drone-racing champions outpaced by AI
An autonomous drone has competed against human drone-racing champions — and won. The victory can be attributed to savvy engineering and a type of artificial intelligence that learns mostly through trial and error.
- Guido C. H. E. de Croon
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Article
| Open AccessA microscale soft ionic power source modulates neuronal network activity
A study describes the development of a miniaturized hydrogel-based soft power source capable of modulating the activity of networks of neuronal cells without the need for metal electrodes.
- Yujia Zhang
- , Jorin Riexinger
- & Hagan Bayley
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News & Views |
Analog chip paves the way for sustainable AI
As the resources required by artificial intelligence increase unsustainably, an analog design provides an energy-efficient alternative to digital computer chips — and one that is ideally suited to neural-network computations.
- Hechen Wang
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News & Views |
Brain implants that enable speech pass performance milestones
Two brain–computer interfaces have been developed that bring unprecedented capabilities for translating brain signals into sentences — at speeds close to that of normal speech, and with vocabularies exceeding 1,000 words.
- Nick F. Ramsey
- & Nathan E. Crone
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Article
| Open AccessAn analog-AI chip for energy-efficient speech recognition and transcription
A low-power chip that runs AI models using analog rather than digital computation shows comparable accuracy on speech-recognition tasks but is more than 14 times as energy efficient.
- S. Ambrogio
- , P. Narayanan
- & G. W. Burr