nature collections - Nature's Summer Reads

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Summer means different things to different people. It can be a time to broaden horizons by travelling to new places; a time to catch up on news and ideas that have swept past this year; and of course, a time to read. Here, Nature offers the opportunity to do all these things, with a collection of the best and most popular stories published in the magazine’s award-winning News Features section in 2015. The stories include something for all tastes. One feature, on page 7, explores how advances in genetics and developmental biology have been challenging the idea that there is a clear distinction between the sexes, and finds that perhaps sex should be considered as more of a spectrum.

In medicine, the collection includes a story about a largely unrecognized, but pressing global health problem: the astonishing rise in short-sightedness that has been taking place over the past few decades, particularly in Asian countries, and how it might be curbed (page 18). Pluto was thrust into the spotlight this summer when New Horizons reached its quarry, some 4.8 billion kilometres from Earth. A profile in the collection (page 11) tells the story of two scientists, a brother and sister, who have been captivated by the planet since their youth. On page 33, a feature looks at experiments to uncover the nature of the wavefunction – the mysterious entity that lies at the heart of quantum weirdness –and page 41 captures the excitement in the science of 2D materials that has followed the discovery of graphene. Nature’s News Features editors have enjoyed publishing every one of these stories; we hope that your summer is
enriched by reading them.