Technology articles from across Nature Portfolio

One reader proposes an alternative to the word ‘television’, and another is enthralled by a meteor, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Challenging the prevailing narratives of a ‘rural cloud’, 97.5% of data centers in the USA are situated in cities. Data center siting is driven by local infrastructure and fossil-fuel industrial legacy, which poses substantial challenges to urban livability.

Two demonstrations of silicon-based quantum processors tackle the engineering challenges of building scalable quantum computers.

This study maps U.S. public institutions for cleantech commercialization, showing how their functions have evolved during the recent turn toward green industrial policy.

Investigating how publics think about the environmental, economic, and geopolitical tradeoffs that data centers entail, results show that public opposition depends on pre-existing political cleavages as well as concerns about digital sovereignty.

Open practices have grown in popularity across domains, such as open science and open-source software. However, these domains have remained siloed. Meluso et al. develop a common definition and implementation guidance to support the use of open practices across diverse fields.

Accounting for heterogeneous truck usage patterns, battery electric trucks outperform diesel trucks in total cost of ownership for most heavy-duty road freight activity in key European markets by 2030.

Data centers predominantly occupy urban areas, influenced by local power capacity, information technology employment and broadband quality. This study highlights the impact of infrastructure and industrial legacy on their spatial distribution and sustainability implications.

Robots are increasingly required to work closely with different people in diverse tasks. The success of such human–robot collaboration will hinge on shared alignment across capabilities, tasks and timing — and communication will be key to achieving this.

Publicly available AI models and local infrastructure can reduce AI’s environmental footprint while giving researchers greater control over the tools they use.

The device’s simple design could rival much more complex alternatives in biophysics research — and could even be used to search for dark matter.

Databases and submission systems are often inflexible. Can’t publishers do more on author names?

One reader proposes an alternative to the word ‘television’, and another is enthralled by a meteor, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.