What We're Reading

The flyby of Ultima Thule has already cleared up one mystery: why the light reflecting off the snowman-shaped object does not fluctuate, as might be expected from an irregular spinning body. The reason: the rotation axis is pointed at the spacecraft.

University scientists aspire to gain the esteem of their peers but are also terrified of earning their scorn. Such feelings drive U.S. scholarship and make it the envy of the world, argues David Labaree of Stanford University in this essay.

Scientists at UC San Francisco have developed an innovative tool to peer into the secret life of brain cells.

This Nature editorial discusses the value in studying the genome of the legendary Galapagos giant tortoise, which holds clues about longevity.

Sophisticated algorithms can now, for instance, identify a data scientist even if that job title is not listed in the person's profile. Employers may soon have access to a new universe of prospective workers.

“My goal is to solve biological problems,” says Olga Troyanskaya, deputy director of #genomics at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Biology. Read a profile of Olga and her work in this month's Nature Methods.

Everyone knows your pupils dilate when you see something interesting, right? Not so fast: A modern day do-over of a mid-20th century pupillometry experiment raises the question, what should we make of a failed replication?

Techniques that render tissues as clear as glass and swell them to several times their original size are giving unprecedented access to the inner workings of biological systems.

Success, it seems, has a more tenuous link to skill and effort than one might think, according to an analysis by a physicist and network scientist in this book review.

An odd device known as an optical Ising machine could route airplanes, schedule football games and tackle other traveling-salesman type problems.