In hindsight, it seems prophetic that the title of a Nature paper published on 1 March 1974 ended with a question mark: “Black hole explosions?” Stephen Hawking’s landmark idea about what is now known as Hawking radiation1 has just turned 50. The more physicists have tried to test his theory over the past half-century, the … Read more
Musician Prince on stage in Detroit, Michigan, during his 1984 Purple Rain tour.Credit: Ross Marino/Getty Working scientist profiles This article is part of an occasional Nature series in which we profile scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests. In 1983, Susan Rogers got a call that would change her life. She was working as … Read more
Trapped atomic ions are among the most advanced technologies for realizing quantum computation and quantum simulation, based on a combination of high-fidelity quantum gates1,2,3 and long coherence times7. These have been used to realize small-scale quantum algorithms and quantum error correction protocols. However, scaling the system size to support orders-of-magnitude more qubits8,9 seems highly challenging10,11,12,13. … Read more
A glioblastoma (green and blue, artificially coloured) grows in the frontal lobe of a person’s brain.Credit: Pr Michel Brauner, ISM/Science Photo Library Two preliminary studies suggest that next-generation engineered immune cells show promise against one of the most feared forms of cancer. A pair of papers published on 13 March, one in Nature Medicine1 and … Read more
Particles on the scale of hundreds of micrometres to nanometres are ubiquitous key components in many advanced applications including biomedical devices1,2, drug-delivery systems3,4,5,15, microelectronics12 and energy storage systems16,17, and exhibit inherent material applicability in microfluidics6,7, granular systems8,9 and abrasives14. Approaches to particle fabrication inherently have trade-offs among speed, scalability, geometric control, uniformity and material properties. … Read more
Avi Loeb and his team say that metallic balls found near Papua New Guinea could be of extraterrestrial origin.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection The Woodlands, Texas A sensational claim made last year that an ‘alien’ meteorite hit Earth near Papua New Guinea in 2014 got its first in-person airing with the broader scientific community on … Read more
Credit: Taj Francis For decades, computing power followed Moore’s law, advancing at a predictable pace. The number of components on an integrated circuit doubled roughly every two years. In 2012, researchers coined the term Eroom’s law (Moore spelled backwards) to describe the contrasting path of drug development1. Over the previous 60 years, the number of … Read more
The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum infecting a red blood cell.Credit: Dennis Kunkel Microscopy/Science Photo Library Researchers have sequenced the mitochondrial genome of the deadliest form of malaria from an ancient Roman skeleton. They say the results could help to untangle the history of the disease in Europe. It’s difficult to find signs of malaria in … Read more
Of the many young people whom Cathy Eng has treated for cancer, the person who stood out the most was a young woman with a 65-year-old’s disease. The 16-year-old had flown from China to Texas to receive treatment for a gastrointestinal cancer that typically occurs in older adults. Her parents had sold their house to … Read more
Being a parent is often seen as a career obstacle, but it can actually make you a better scientist, says nutrition epidemiologist Lindsey Smith Taillie.Credit: Paul Taillie More than once in the past few years, in a variety of informal settings, I’ve overheard senior scientists recommend hiring people without children over those who are parents. … Read more