Featured
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Outlook |
A journey into the causes and effects of depression
A raft of insights provide hope for improved treatments.
- Herb Brody
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Outlook |
Psychedelic drugs take on depression
Mind-altering drugs might provide relief for those who don’t respond to conventional therapies — but does the hype outweigh the hope?
- Cassandra Willyard
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Outlook |
Research round-up: depression
How artificial intelligence detects lowered mood, why depression is linked to heart-disease risk, and other highlights.
- Elizabeth Svoboda
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Outlook |
The hormonal keys to depression
Science is only now uncovering the complex interaction between hormones, neurosteroids and mood disorders.
- Bianca Nogrady
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Outlook |
Tackling the mental-health crisis in young people
Despite growing awareness that children and teenagers can get depressed, substantial gaps remain in diagnosis and treatment.
- Emily Sohn
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Research Highlight |
A restful way to feel more generous: get more sleep
Three sets of data connect lack of sleep with a reduced willingness to help others.
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Nature Podcast |
Do protons have intrinsic charm? New evidence suggests yes
A machine learning approach examines decades of data in the hunt for the proton’s charm, and the latest from the Nature Briefing.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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News |
Why thinking hard makes us feel tired
Difficult tasks can lead to build-up of a signalling molecule in the brain, triggering fatigue.
- Heidi Ledford
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News & Views |
From the archive: early science in Florence and fingerprint forgery
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News |
DeepMind AI learns simple physics like a baby
Neural network could be a step towards programs for studying how human infants learn.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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News |
Guatemala’s COVID vaccine roll-out failed: here’s what researchers know
Missteps in connecting with Indigenous communities factored into the nation’s low vaccination rate.
- Luke Taylor
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Research Briefing |
Online mindset training protects adolescents from stress
Adolescence is an intensely stressful life stage. We developed a brief online training module to help young people to understand stress and to respond to it constructively. The module improved their psychological and physiological responses to stress and boosted academic performance.
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Article
| Open AccessA synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress
An online training module that synergistically targets two different mindsets can reduce stress levels in adolescents in the context of social-evaluative stressors—stressful experiences in which individuals fear that others are judging them negatively.
- David S. Yeager
- , Christopher J. Bryan
- & Jeremy P. Jamieson
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Outlook |
Sniffing out smell’s effects on human behaviour
Olfaction could influence how people respond to threats or select a partner. To investigate, researchers need to design experiments that can capture its effects.
- Michael Eisenstein
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Comment |
Not all inequalities are alike
Better data and new statistical techniques could enable researchers to measure the form of inequality that seems most harmful to society — inequality of opportunity.
- Francisco H. G. Ferreira
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Outlook |
Unpicking the link between smell and memories
The ability of aromas to bring back highly specific memories is becoming better understood, and could be used to boost and heal our brains.
- Roxanne Khamsi
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Correspondence |
Misinformation: broaden definition to curb its societal influence
- Cecilie Steenbuch Traberg
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News & Views |
Give physicians’ views to improve COVID vaccine uptake
Informing people once about physicians’ views on COVID-19 vaccination improves vaccination rates by 4 percentage points after 9 months. This finding suggests that light-touch educative nudges can have lasting positive effects.
- Nina Mažar
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Nature Podcast |
Robot exercises shoulder cells for better tissue transplants
A robot shoulder that stretches tendon tissue, and identifying misperceptions that can lead to vaccine hesitancy.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Article
| Open AccessCommunicating doctors’ consensus persistently increases COVID-19 vaccinations
Correcting public misperceptions about the views of doctors on the COVID-19 vaccines can have lasting impacts on public uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines.
- Vojtěch Bartoš
- , Michal Bauer
- & Julie Chytilová
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News Feature |
COVID derailed learning for 1.6 billion students. Here’s how schools can help them catch up
The pandemic is the largest disruption to education in history. But research has identified ways to help children make up lost ground. Will they work in classrooms around the world?
- Helen Pearson
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Article |
People construct simplified mental representations to plan
Strategically perceiving and conceiving problems facilitates the effective use of limited cognitive resources.
- Mark K. Ho
- , David Abel
- & Thomas L. Griffiths
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Research Highlight |
Mobile-phone data reveal the acts of war that make people flee
Afghan phone records show that high-casualty events trigger the most internal displacement.
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Nature Video |
Why video calls are bad for brainstorming
Creative thinking suffers online but it’s not all bad news for working from home.
- Shamini Bundell
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News & Views |
Virtual collaboration hinders a key component of creativity
Experiments and fieldwork show that teams working together online produce fewer ideas than those collaborating in person — a first step towards answering the question of which modes of communication are generally best for creativity.
- Emőke-Ágnes Horvát
- & Brian Uzzi
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Research Briefing |
Addressing social, psychological and economic barriers helps people out of extreme poverty
Policies that aim to reduce poverty often prioritize economic interventions. We show that a programme that addresses not only financial but also psychological and social barriers is effective at helping extremely poor households in Niger. Our results point to a cost-effective approach for alleviating extreme poverty that can be scaled up using government systems.
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Nature Podcast |
How virtual meetings can limit creative ideas
The innovation cost of video calls, and a new type of cell division found in fish skin.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Benjamin Thompson
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Article |
Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation
Videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas, but videoconferencing groups are as effective as (or perhaps even more effective than) in-person groups at deciding which ideas to pursue.
- Melanie S. Brucks
- & Jonathan Levav
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Article
| Open AccessTackling psychosocial and capital constraints to alleviate poverty
Psychosocial measures improve the cost-effectiveness of multi-faceted interventions against extreme poverty.
- Thomas Bossuroy
- , Markus Goldstein
- & Kelsey A. Wright
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Matters Arising |
Evidence from a statewide vaccination RCT shows the limits of nudges
- Nathaniel Rabb
- , Megan Swindal
- & David Yokum
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Nature Podcast |
Winding roads could make you a better navigator
How where you grew up affects your navigational abilities, and understanding how coastal storm surges are changing.
- Shamini Bundell
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Article |
Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability
An analysis of spatial navigation in nearly 400,000 people shows, by measuring their performance in a video game, that individuals who grew up outside cities are better at navigation than those who grew up in cities.
- A. Coutrot
- , E. Manley
- & H. J. Spiers
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World View |
Study conspiracy theories with compassion
The societal forces that drive people to join a belief system matter more than the specifics of what they believe.
- Elżbieta Drążkiewicz
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News & Views Forum |
Constrained human genes under scrutiny
A higher number of damaging variations in certain genes is associated with an increased likelihood that a man will be childless. A geneticist and an anthropologist discuss what can — and can’t — be learnt from this finding.
- Loic Yengo
- & Heidi Colleran
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Article |
Reduced reproductive success is associated with selective constraint on human genes
Human genetic variants that impair genes that are intolerant of damaging genetic variation are associated with lower reproductive success that is probably mediated by genetically associated cognitive and behavioural traits, particularly in males.
- Eugene J. Gardner
- , Matthew D. C. Neville
- & Matthew E. Hurles
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Article
| Open AccessReproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals
Combined data from three large studies, with a total sample size of around 50,000 individuals, indicate that many previous studies linking the brain to complex phenotypes have been statistically underpowered, producing inflated and irreproducible effects.
- Scott Marek
- , Brenden Tervo-Clemmens
- & Nico U. F. Dosenbach
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Research Highlight |
Half a million nights’ sleep reveal 16 kinds of snoozer
Massive sleep database also uncovers four new types of insomnia.
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News & Views |
Letters and cards telling people about local police reduce crime
A combination of Internet-based and field experiments suggests that being given personal information about a stranger leads people to believe that they themselves are known to that person — and to change their behaviour accordingly.
- Elicia John
- & Shawn D. Bushway
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Nature Podcast |
COVID stimulus spending failed to deliver on climate promises
G20 COVID stimulus packages fail to deliver on emissions, how knowing something about a stranger could alter your behaviour, and scientists condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Article |
Knowledge about others reduces one’s own sense of anonymity
When people learn more about a stranger, they think a stranger knows more about them, and when tested in a field experiment, this shifted residents’ perceptions of police officers’ knowledge of illegal activity.
- Anuj K. Shah
- & Michael LaForest
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Research Highlight |
Short on sleep? Taking a trip could actually help
Travel is a sleep-balancing activity: the tired catch up, and the well-rested become less so.
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Research Briefing |
Ancient DNA illuminates how humans travelled and interacted in Stone Age Africa
Archaeologists have various hypotheses for how populations changed in Africa about 50,000 years ago, during the Later Stone Age transition. Now, the earliest available ancient-DNA sequences from sub-Saharan Africa reveal a complex Late Pleistocene population structure, pointing to large shifts in human movement and in patterns of social interaction.
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Research Briefing |
Social, political and technical feedback processes will drive future climate policies and emissions
Climate policies and greenhouse-gas emissions for the twenty-first century are modelled as the result of coupled feedback effects in the social, political and energy systems. Our models suggest that climate policies will increase in ambition and associated emissions reductions will probably accelerate, resulting in warming of 2 °C to 3 °C above 1880–1910 levels by 2100.
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Research Highlight |
Global survey finds scientists have more credibility than spiritual leaders
A lofty-sounding but vapid statement carried more weight with participants when they were told it came from a scientific source.
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Correspondence |
Emissions cuts take political and social innovation too
- Jonas De keersmaecker
- , Katharina Schmid
- & Sander van der Linden
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News Feature |
The COVID generation: how is the pandemic affecting kids’ brains?
Child-development researchers are asking whether the pandemic is shaping brains and behaviour.
- Melinda Wenner Moyer
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News & Views |
What surveys really say
Increasing the sample size of a survey is often thought to increase the accuracy of the results. However, an analysis of big surveys on the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines shows that larger sample sizes do not protect against bias.
- Frauke Kreuter