The question of where eddies come from is immortalized in verse, and an earwig emerges remarkably unscathed from inside a vacuum tube, in this week’s peek at Nature’s archive.

Ribbon-based morphing structures form multistable shape morphologies, enabling the design of soft machines that merge simple fabrication with dynamic and versatile motion.

The country’s failure to break out of its near-two-decade economic lethargy is destabilising its politics – a common predicament across Europe. Calls for more state spending miss the point. The only ...