Sales of forest land to corporations are dispossessing inhabitants and harming ecosystems

Marathon talks enabled Europe to break deadlock over global-warming deal with major greenhouse-gas emitters. Did it?

New research explains how a few genetic mutations may account for the evolution of complex “molecular machines.” 

The only known natural example of the material that won last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry comes from an ancient meteorite

Nature looks ahead to the key findings and events that may emerge in 2012

From neutrinos to stem cells: a round-up of the year in research and science policy

Nobody likes testing drugs on animals

An abundance of medium-sized worlds is challenging planet-formation models

There is a growing body of research showing that animals respond to the emotions of others

Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modellers. Most of the observed warming — at least 74 % — is almost certainly due to human activity, they write in Nature Geoscience

Every schoolchild knows the concept of zero – so why did it take so long to catch on? Follow its convoluted path from heresy to common sense

It was the largest planetary mission in the history of space exploration, bearing Russia’s hopes of recapturing Soviet-era glory in Solar System exploration. But instead of rocketing off on a mission to return soil from the Martian moon Phobos, Phobos-Grunt is stuck in Earth orbit. Barring a miraculous restarting of its engines, it will make a fiery fall to Earth, probably by the year’s end

At issue is whether to abolish the 'leap second' — the extra second added every year or so to keep UTC in step with Earth's slightly unpredictable orbit

It is still not known how woodpeckers protect their brain from impact injury. In order to investigate this, two synchronous high-speed video systems were used to observe the pecking process, and the force sensor was used to measure the peck force

This year's hunt for the Higgs boson is drawing to a close. On 30 October, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, will end its 2011 run of the proton–proton collisions that search for the elusive particle, thought to give other fundamental particles their mass

Bacteria are more likely to exchange genetic information with their neighbors than with their relatives, a new study shows

The chance discovery of a manuscript hidden among papers in an ancient family archive is shedding light on the life and career of Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare’s biggest rival

As word of a brutal pestilence raging across Europe reached London, its residents started digging. Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London, dedicated acres of land that had been purchased to bury the legions of Black Death victims who would overwhelm existing churchyard cemeteries. Six-and-a-half centuries later, it could give scientists the opportunity to dissect the disease that laid waste to Europe

If some twisted genius vaporized all 10 trillion cells in your body—along with the hair, the fingernails, and other tissue they create—it would not leave empty space behind. A body-shaped cloud made of bacteria, viruses, and other former stowaways would hover briefly in the air

By mining a database of the world's books, Erez Lieberman Aiden is attempting to automate much of humanities research. But is the field ready to be digitized?