News & Comment

As conventions in scholarly publishing evolve, it is appropriate to reassess the options that we provide to our authors. In this spirit, Nature Physics will soon stop accepting submissions in our Letter format.

Progress in research would be impossible without state-of-the art instruments, but their contributions are often underappreciated.

Juris Meija takes a look at the tumultuous past of the atomic unit of mass from its beginnings as an idea to its most recent revisions in a hotel bar.

Although science affects humankind’s knowledge, its practice has largely been restricted to a small group of people. The advance of citizen science challenges this idea.

A task group recommends values for many constants in fundamental theories of physics and chemistry. Eite Tiesinga and Peter Mohr tell some of the constants’ stories.

Scientists have long preferred the simplest possible explanation of their data. More recently, a worrying trend to favour unnecessarily complex interpretations has taken hold.

The merits of conventional particle accelerators range from fundamental science to applications like radiotherapy. Plasma-based accelerators are getting up to speed and may overtake conventional ones in the near future.

The coexistence of qualitative and quantitative scales characterizes advances in earthquake measurements. Although often confused, intensity and magnitude refer to very different things, as Leonardo Benini explains.

The analysis of the KATRIN Collaboration’s latest measurement campaign constrains the mass of the elusive neutrino with unprecedented sensitivity.

As in-person conferences begin to make a return, we look forward to the opportunity to reconnect.

The establishment of a global metric system of units as agreed upon in the Metre Convention relies on international as well as national institutes and organizations, of which Stefanie Reichert gives an overview.