The historic moments in modern science reported in Nature can now be explored online. The archive of the first 80 years (1869-1949) of the journal Nature, the world’s foremost weekly scientific journal, is now live. Every article published in Nature, back to volume 1, issue 1 is now available online.

Nature’ s archive reveals a wealth of treasures from the first years of the journal, including the first observation of X-rays (Wilhelm Röntgen, 1896), the discovery of the electron (J.J. Thomson, 1897), the first fossil evidence that humans originated in Africa (Raymond Dart, 1925), and the discovery of the neutron (James Chadwick, 1932).

Containing more than 4,000 issues and an estimated 180,000 articles, the 1869-1949 archive completes the digitization of Nature. The project has taken 5 years to complete, beginning with the launch of the 1987-1996 archive in 2003. There is a special web feature, The history of the journal Nature, featuring timelines, video interviews and profiles of all Nature ‘s (surprisingly few) Editors since the journal was founded.

In places, Nature’s early archive reads like science fiction, with its foretelling of science and technology we take for granted today. The forensic use of fingerprints in solving crime was suggested as early as 1880: “When bloody finger-marks or impressions on clay, glass &c., exist, they may lead to the scientific identification of criminals.” Scotland Yard introduced fingerprint identification in 1901, based on an 1892 book by Francis Galton. Motion-capture photograph pioneer Edward Muybridge suggested the development of the ‘photo finish’ in Nature in 1880. Lamenting the ’dead heat’ in horse racing, he asked why officials would not “avail themselves of the same resources of science” and employ up to 20 cameras to decide the rightful outcome of races. It would be more than 50 years before the ‘photo finish’ became widely used in sport.

Articles in the Nature archive 1869-1949 are available as PDFs of the original journal article, with HTML abstracts. Access is by site license for institutions, or articles can be purchased individually.

A selection of Nature’s “greatest hits”, including the article by Dart, and Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper that deciphers the structure of DNA, are featured in A century of Nature, some of which is free for a limited time.

Are you interested in finding out more about research in Mainland China and Hong Kong? Take a look at Nature China. Every week, the editors of Nature China survey the scientific literature to identify the best recently published papers from mainland China and Hong Kong, and provide a summary of the results.

Divided into subject areas, this portal allows you to stay up-to-date with the latest research appearing in various scientific publications in this region. Taking materials science as an example, here some recent highlights posted on Nature China:

• Carbon nanotubes: Becoming a brighter fighter

• Drug delivery: Wet or dry

• Magnetic nanoparticles: Artificial enzymes

• Super-hard conductors: Electric diamonds

Other subject areas are: biotechnology; cell and molecular biology; chemistry; clinical medicine; developmental biology; Earth and environment; ecology and evolution; genetics; neuroscience; space and astronomy; and physics. You can register for Nature China e-alerts at the website, and stay abreast of the latest research in your field from mainland China and Hong Kong. Help us identify the best Chinese papers by using the recommended paper section of the website. Click here to recommend a paper and find out what papers other users have recommended.

For those interested in specific groups of organisms, we have arranged the large-scale biology papers published at Nature Publishing Group into a “Tree of Life” organization at the Omics Gateway, so that you can browse among the organisms. Papers that focus on a single species can be found in the most exclusive organism page that includes that species: for example papers on humans will appear on the human page rather than the primates or mammals page. Papers that focus on, or are relevant to, multiple species can be found in the set of pages that encompass those species: for example a paper that compares the dog genome with the human genome will appear on both the human and mammal pages. Categories listed on the gateway and in the picture include animals; archaea; arthropods; bacteria; chordates; eukaryotes; firmicutes; fungi; green plants; human; mammals; metagenomics (genomics of microbial communities); nematodes; primates; proteobacteria; rodents and viruses.

As well as browsing organisms, you can also browse subjects at the Omics Gateway. Why “omics”? It is a suffix that has been added to many fields to denote studies undertaken on a large or genome-wide scale. While not everyone agrees with this change of terms, it is a short and inclusive term to use to help point you to our published papers in the area. For example although we may not yet be able to precisely define the metabolome, we can all appreciate that studies in this area should yield novel insight into the processes that drive cellular metabolism and detailed interactions between them. Papers here come from publications throughout Nature Publishing Group in one or more of the subject areas of: cancer genomics; chemical genomics; comparative, evolutionary and population genomics; epigenomics; genetics of gene expression; genome sequence and analysis; glycomics; metabolomics/nomics; pharmacogenomics; proteomics; systems biology; techniques and methods; and transcriptomics.