Nature reports: In December, computational biologists Casey Greene and Milton Pividori embarked on an unusual experiment: they asked an assistant who was not a scientist to help them improve three of their research papers. Their assiduous aide suggested revisions to sections of documents in seconds; each manuscript took about five minutes to review. In one… Read More »
Nature reports: Three years into the pandemic, the immune systems of the vast majority of humans have learnt to recognize SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination, infection or, in many cases, both. But just how quickly do these types of immunity fade? New evidence suggests that ‘hybrid’ immunity, the result of both vaccination and a bout of COVID-19,… Read More »
Nature reports: Thousands of kilometres beneath your feet, Earth’s interior might be doing something very weird. Many scientists think that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet — but sometime in the past decade, according to a study, it apparently stopped doing so. “We were quite surprised,” say Yi Yang and… Read More »
Nature reports: The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in… Read More »
The Guardian reports: As global heating escalates, the US government has set out a plan to further study the controversial and seemingly sci-fi notion of deflecting the sun’s rays before they hit Earth. But a growing group of scientists denounces any steps towards what is known as solar geoengineering. The White House has set into… Read More »
Andrea Wulf writes: In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German… Read More »
John Mecklin writes: This week’s headlines have been full of reports about a “major breakthrough” in nuclear fusion technology that, many of those reports misleadingly suggested, augurs a future of abundant clean energy produced by fusion nuclear power plants. To be sure, many of those reports lightly hedged their enthusiasm by noting that (as The… Read More »
Science News reports: Scientists have finally managed to bottle the sun. Researchers with the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., have ignited controlled nuclear fusion that resulted in the net production of energy. The long-awaited achievement, to be announced December 13 by U.S. Department of Energy officials, is the first time a lab has been… Read More »
Science News reports: For decades, chemicals that make life easier — your eggs slide out of the frying pan, stains don’t stick to your sofa, rain bounces off your jackets and boots — have been touted as game changers for our busy modern lives. “Better things for better living … through chemistry,” was the optimistic… Read More »
Gene Tracy writes: I have a memory, a vivid one, of watching my elderly grandfather wave goodbye to me from the steps of a hospital. This is almost certainly the memory of a dream. In my parent’s photo album of the time, we have snapshots of the extended family – aunts, uncles, and cousins who… Read More »
By Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica “A Secret Language of Chinese Officialdom” Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he… Read More »
Roger Highfield writes: As the planet lurches towards a climate emergency and its life support systems falter, the need for visionary thinkers with fresh insights and big ideas has never been more pressing. No wonder, then, that the world mourned the death earlier this year of James (‘Jim’) Lovelock, whose Gaia theory provided a new… Read More »
Peter J. Hore writes: Imagine you are a young Bar-tailed Godwit, a large, leggy shorebird with a long, probing bill hatched on the tundra of Alaska. As the days become shorter and the icy winter looms, you feel the urge to embark on one of the most impressive migrations on Earth: a nonstop transequatorial flight… Read More »
Ben Brubaker writes: Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly changing their behavior dramatically and perhaps irreversibly, with little warning and potentially catastrophic consequences. On long enough… Read More »
The Guardian reports: In a few weeks, Nasa controllers will deliberately crash their $330m Dart robot spacecraft into an asteroid. The half-tonne probe will be travelling at more than four miles a second when it strikes its target, Dimorphos, and will be destroyed. The aim of this kamikaze science mission is straightforward: space engineers want… Read More »
Jeffrey Marlow writes: Somewhere beneath the Adriatic Sea, a rogue block of the African tectonic plate is burrowing under southern Europe, stretching Italy eastward by a few millimetres each year. On October 26, 2016, the stress triggered an earthquake in the Apennine Mountains, one in a series of quakes which toppled buildings in Italian towns.… Read More »