The latest scientific social network is here — but unusually, there’s no room for human users. The Reddit-style site, called Agent4Science, allows purpose-built AI-powered agents to share, debate and discuss research papers.
Smartwatches provide data about how many calories you’ve burnt, how fit you are, how recovered you are after exercise, and whether you’re ready to exercise again.
But your smartwatch doesn’t measure most of these metrics directly. In other words, they’re not as accurate as you might think.
Monkeys fitted with a brain-computer interface (BCI) successfully navigated a variety of virtual worlds using only their thoughts. Researchers hope the experiments will pave the way for people with paralysis to explore virtual worlds or more intuitively control electric wheelchairs in this one.
A key Chinese research organization is set to boycott the prestigious NeurIPS conference, which is run by a US-based non-profit organization, after a row over a policy that initially seemed to exclude many Chinese researchers.
In an indication of how quickly scientists are embracing artificial intelligence, the number of publications in the natural sciences that mention AI grew by almost 30-fold from 2010 to 2025, according to an influential annual state-of-the-field report.
Most people think of cannabis as something that makes memories fuzzy. But new research suggests it can do something more surprising: make false memories feel real.
Something very bad is going to happen in the near future unless we change course. Researchers know what will cause it and roughly when it will happen, and have ideas to mitigate it. Yet policy-makers may not do enough to avert it in time.
A potentially valuable new tool for studying memorization is being presented at the 14th International Conference on Learning Representations, starting in Rio de Janeiro on 23 April.
Bixonimania didn’t exist before 15 March 2024, when two blog posts about it appeared on the website Medium. Then, on 26 April and 6 May that year, two preprints about the condition popped up on the academic social network SciProfiles (see doi.org/qzm5 and doi.org/qzm4).
Super-intelligent artificial intelligence rising up and wiping out humanity has been a common trope in science fiction for decades. Now, we live in a world where real AI seems to be advancing faster than ever. Does that mean you should start worrying about an AI apocalypse?
Conducting research is hard; confirming the results is, too. And artificial intelligence isn’t yet ready to help, a major new study finds.
Europe once led the world in productivity growth but now lags the United States —and the gap has widened significantly in recent years.
The Chart of the Week shows that behind this shortfall is the staggering difficulty that European firms face in scaling up.
A central paradox in the academic landscape is the rising volume of low-quality publications despite the profession’s ongoing and established fixation on publishing in elite journals.
Data centres built to power AIs produce so much heat that they can raise the surface temperature of the land around them by several degrees – creating so-called data centre heat islands that may already be affecting up to 340 million people.
The news last week that Mia Ballard’s “femgore” horror novel Shy Girl could be up to 78% AI-generated has forced literary agents and publishers alike to consider whether sharp eyes alone can detect AI-generated work.
In a recent Nature study, Clune and his colleagues unveiled the AI Scientist, an AI system that wrote a paper without human involvement that passed peer review for a workshop at the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a top-tier venue in the field of machine learning.
A major artificial-intelligence conference has rejected 497 papers — roughly 2% of submissions — whose authors violated AI-use policies in their peer reviews of other articles submitted to the meeting.
Around one million of Ulaanbaatar’s 1.6 million inhabitants reside in around 200,000 yurts — circular family tents, known locally as gers.
According to the Animal Humane Society, 1 in 3 pets go missing during their lifetimes. But as technology has progressed, so have resources for finding lost pets.
China is pledging to use ‘extraordinary measures’ to support the country's bid to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge technological fields, according to its 15th five-year plan.
Quantum computers are already here, but they make far too many errors. This is arguably the biggest obstacle to the technology really becoming useful, but recent breakthroughs suggest a solution may be on the horizon.
The Chinese government is ramping up its support for science, announcing plans to boost two key budgets at the country’s biggest political meeting called the Two Sessions.
Nearly half of biomedical scientists worry preprints could spread shoddy research and misinformation, according to a new survey that could help explain why the life sciences have taken up the publishing practice more slowly than some other fields.
In 2008, researchers reported the first ever synthetic genome of a living organism, which was produced by synthesizing the 580,000-nucleotide genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium.
Now, researchers have used AI to design whole genome sequences, including one inspired by the M. genitalium.
On 27 February 1996, Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri released the first ever Pokémon games for the Nintendo Game Boy. What started as a childhood passion for collecting insects grew into a giant franchise and global phenomenon with themes of science at its heart.
