News Feature in 2014

More than a billion people lack electricity, but now microgrids are powering up rural areas.

Predators are supposed to exert strong control over ecosystems, but nature doesn’t always play by the rules.

Chemists are reinventing rechargeable cells to drive down costs and boost capacity.

The roots of inheritance may extend beyond the genome, but the mechanisms remain a puzzle.

Researchers are finding that online, crowd-sourced collaboration can speed up their work — if they choose the right problem.

A powerful method for deducing microbial relationships has been edging its way into civil and criminal investigations. But courts should proceed with caution.

Before it shattered near the Sun, Comet ISON became a scientific celebrity. Now researchers are trying to piece together its lessons.

The US Supreme Court years ago ruled against applying the death penalty to people unable to understand the legal process. Now it must grapple with the science of how intellectual disability is measured.

Evidence is mounting that medication for ADHD doesn't make a lasting difference to schoolwork or achievement.

P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume.

A hard-won political victory for primate research is at risk of unravelling in pockets of Europe.

Winter sports face an uncertain future as the planet warms.

From aiding drug design to analysing soil samples on Mars, crystallography has helped to propel much of modern science over the past 100 years.

100 years of crystallography.

Powerful X-ray lasers are getting to the heart of matter.

Ultra-pure synthetic diamonds offer advances in fields from quantum computing to cancer diagnostics.

Sixteen years into the mysterious ‘global-warming hiatus’, scientists are piecing together an explanation.

The supermassive black holes that lie at the centre of every large galaxy are full of mysteries. But astronomers are finally getting a clear look.

Ten years ago, Woo Suk Hwang rose to the top of his field before fraud and dodgy bioethical practices derailed his career. Can a scientific pariah redeem himself?

Using massive amounts of data to recognize photos and speech, deep-learning computers are taking a big step towards true artificial intelligence.