The challenge in 10 stunning pictures
The metric system of prefixes that tells us what happens next if we live in the 1930s or 2030s: A study by the Cell Epigenome
The cells of people who were conceived during the Great Depression show signs of ageing faster than they should. The changes were measured in the cells’ epigenome, the chemical tags attached to DNA that determine how and when genes are expressed. Researchers believe that the pattern they uncovered could be connected to higher death and disease rates.
By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 1024 bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. The governors of the metric system agree on new prefixes to describe outrageously big and small after the data boom. Ronna, Querta and ronto represent 1070 and 1030, respectively. Earth is a little over one ronnagram and an electron is about one decitogram. The metrologist says that giga and Tera have also sounded strange. The prefix system has not been updated since 1991, when additions such as Zetta ( ) and yocto were made.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03829-8
Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, Nature Climate Change: The era of behavioural climate change and the impact of brain misuse on women’s careers
Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to 11 years and 1 month in prison after being found guilty of fraud against investors in her blood-testing company, Theranos. Theranos claimed it could run more than 200 health tests on just a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick — but the claims were exaggerated. Legal scholar Anat Alon-Beck says that she pushed the envelope a little too far. It was too much fake when you faked it until you made it.
Giving women fair access to careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) requires mentorship and a professional network — so-called social capital. The chief executive of the non-profit organization Girls Who Code said that the community is important for girls. “When they’re feeling as though they can’t persist in the field, they have that community to lean on, coupled with their computer-science expertise.” Four leaders of groups dedicated to women in technology share their stories and tips for better allyship.
Climate change is rooted in human behaviour, and behavioural change will be key to achieving solutions. A joint special from Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Climate Change focuses on how to better incorporate behavioural science into tangible improvements in climate policy. “We are at the beginning of a new era of behavioural climate research,” says the accompanying editorial.
Neuroscientist Gina Rippon describes shoddy science reporting and the misuse of brain research as “neurotrash”. She points to how brain images are manipulated by self-help guru, relationship counsellors and even those promoting single-sex education. The furore surrounding her book, which argued that our brains are not fixed as males or females at birth, but rather are plastic and changeable throughout our lives, was caused by her. What it was like to write and promote a popular-science book, and how she dealt with the backlash, is what the author talks about in her talk.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03829-8
What the 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference tells us about the origin of COVID-19 and how it could change the debate on the lab leak theory
Many countries in the global south found themselves at the end of the queue for COVID-19 vaccines, so they banded together to find a way to produce their own vaccine. If successful, they could end a dangerous dependency on wealthy nations and help to stop pandemics before they start.
Remarkable images depict what the United Nations Biodiversity Conference is about. Plus, severe COVID could cause markers of old age in the brain and what happens when your neural implant’s maker goes bust
This baby green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) has become tangled in plastic during its journey across Samandağ Beach, Turkey. Luckily, volunteers patrol this beach to usher hatchlings to the ocean. Conservation efforts, including bans on collecting eggs and hunting adults, have led to remarkable increases in some turtle populations. Restoring ecology and protecting its integrity are both challenges, and the problem of turtles trampling the valuable seagrass habitat is a reminder of that. The 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference, COP15, opens tomorrow in Montreal and Nature has selected 10 stunning images that illustrate what is at stake.
NPR spoke to a University of Arizona professor to find out what the data tell us about the origin of the disease and how the data may change the debate on the lab leak theory. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length.
Severe COVID-19 has been linked to changes in the brain similar to those seen in old age. Scientists studied brain samples from people who had severe illness and died. Inflammation and stress genes in the frontal cortex — a brain region essential for cognition — were more active in infected people than in uninfected people, and genes linked to forming connections between brain cells were less active. Proteomics researcher Daniel Martins-de-Souza says the work is preliminary but could ultimately help people who have lingering cognitive difficulties after COVID-19.
Breaking the vicious cycle of low productivity due to overwork and exhaustion: A PhD student Maya Gosztyla discusses how time management strategies can help to break that cycle
Fires and droughts in the western United States are getting worse — and they’re combining with industrial sources to threaten air quality and people’s health. During the wildfires of September 2020, the air quality in part of Oregon was so bad that it exceeded the ability of the standard air quality index (AQI) to measure it. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality estimated that it would have reached an unheard-of 642 if the AQI had reached 500. Wildfires are increasing across the world, but the trends in the western United States stand out because they mark a sharp change in air-pollution levels in a place with some of the strongest environmental regulations in the world.
When a company goes under, they can leave people with implants that can be difficult to remove, and that can cause problems when looking at future implants. It can get people to face their pain and disability, because they thought it was behind them. The patients are terribly suffering, says Robert Levy. It isn’t good for patients, bad for the field and unethical to make them the victims of bad business practices.
Nature Outlook: robotics and artificial intelligence is an editorially independent Nature supplement that was supported by the FII Institute.
PhD student Maya Gosztyla explains how time-management strategies can help to break the vicious cycle of low productivity due to overwork and exhaustion. She recommends tracking goals on three timescales: big-picture planning; reflecting, forecasting and prioritizing for each academic term; and assigning weekly tasks. She says this makes it harder to decline commitments that do not fit into the schedule or contribute to goals.
Americium-241 – a Radioactive Isotope from Power Plant Fuel for Space Missions and the Future of the Solar System
A radioactive isotope from nuclear power plants’ spent fuel will power lengthy space missions. The most expensive drug is the first Gene therapy for haemophilia.
The US Food and Drug Administration approved Hemgenix for the first gene therapy for a blood-clotting disorder, making it the most expensive drug in the world. For 15% of people with haemophilia who could benefit, “you can pretty much forget about it in day-to-day life” according to Edward Tuddenham, who helped to design the Hemgenix vaccine.
The Solar System’s far reaches could be powered by nuclear waste, because there are places that are too dark for solar panels. Scientists are developing batteries containing americium-241, a radioactive isotope that can be extracted from power plants’ spent fuel. The European Space Agency funded the project, which hopes to use equipment from international partners.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04394-w
The Discovery and Interpretation of a Paleontologist’s Discrimination About the Natural History of the Predator-Hunter Robert DePalma
A scientist who published evidence that the dinosaurs were wiped out in springtime has accused a colleague of faking data to support his paper. Palaeontologist Melanie Her work was published in nature. She says that fellow fossil-hunter Robert DePalma, who published a study a couple of months earlier in Scientific Reports that scientists called “nearly identical”, wanted to scoop her. We would never make fabricated data or samples to fit this or another team’s results,” says DePalma.
It’s the latest debate to arise from work at Tanis, a remarkable site in North Dakota, which some scientists think captured the first hours following the crash of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. Tanis fossils have been boggling — and sometimes aggravating — scientists since 2019, when they were controversially first reported in The New Yorker rather than in a peer-reviewed paper. DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and relatively few Scientists have visited it, adding fuel to the fire.
“The scientific community can’t improve a situation that it refuses to measure,” says neuroscientist Jon Freeman about the fact that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) still isn’t collecting statistics on sexual orientation and gender identity. Collecting official statistics is the first step to addressing documented disparities faced by LGBTQ+ scientists in their careers, argues Freeman. Such data determine which groups are eligible for federal resources, including diversity fellowships and funding.
As part of a programme at Princeton University in New Jersey, astrophysics PhD student Erin Flowers teaches science to incarcerated people. Developing one of the United States’ first physics laboratory courses inside a prison proved particularly tricky because magnets, computers and sticky tape are all prohibited. She says they use pencils and graph paper for calculation and that they use the putty that swimmers put in their ears. According to Flowers, students say taking the course has changed their lives by giving them the opportunities that come with a degree.
The approximate amount of raw metal, plastic and silicon it takes to produce a laptop computer that weighs a few kilograms. An editorial from Nature says we need a rethink of how we promote the use of resources. (5 min read)
One-quarter of all plant and animal species are threatened with extinction owing to factors such as climate change and pollution. More than 190 countries are currently talking about a treaty to protect 30% of Earth’s land and sea by the year 2030. How to finance conserved has still not been solved. Poorer nations don’t see the aid fund for low- and middle-income countries as a priority.
How the Chinese government will tackle the zero-COVID ban in the light of recent anti-demolition demonstrations in Orion: a challenge for NASA
Physicists have been using a quantum computer to create wormholes. Even though systems are very far apart, they can still be linked by a concept known as entanglement. A hologram dual is a description of a quantum state created between two halves of a quantum computer by the authors. They did a simulation of a message travelling through this wormhole. Efforts are being made to reconcile quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity. (Nature | 5 min read)
The Chinese government will ease some of its strict zero-COVID policies following protests in several cities. Testing requirements and travel restrictions are relaxed, and the people with mild or no symptoms can go home instead of being in a centralized facility. Researchers worry that the transition without enough time to vaccine could overwhelm the health care system. “These measures will very likely lead to a messy and hasty transition process where local governments ditch all the zero-COVID measures without investing seriously in preparing for the transition,” says health-policy researcher Yanzhong Huang.
NASA has been testing its new spaceship over the past three weeks, which has included flights to the Moon and back. It is the biggest challenge since its launch to date, because it will have to survive a fiery re-entry through the atmosphere and splash down in the sea. It will test a re-entry procedure that has never been used by a craft that is intended to carry passengers. NASA needs to get Orion home safely to keep on track with its Artemis programme, which aims to eventually return humans to the Moon’s surface.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04413-w
Detecting Genetic Variants of Dogs with AlphaCode and Their Impact on Computer Programming Competitions: How San Francisco is looking at the use of robots to kill people
A study that combined behavioural data from 46,000 dogs with 4,000 dogs’ DNA sequences has pinpointed genetic variants linked to nervousness and predatory behaviour, such as chasing squirrels. The conventional breed categories were scrapped and the dogs sorted by genetics. Herding sheepdogs had genes that were linked to mothers instinct to protect their pups, for example.
AlphaCode can beat some people at competitive programming. DeepMind’s system was trained by human answers from software-writing competitions. There is no easy way to specify the needs of the people who are going to use end product, so AlphaCode can’t replace software engineers.
A week ago, we were informed that the city of San Francisco is looking into using machines to kill people. The 1,300 Briefing readers who responded to our poll overwhelmingly rejected implementing the idea in their areas.
“There are other options for the use of robots that are less severe,” suggested reader Berry Billingsley. They could be used to assess the situation in real time. It could be used to incapacitate by other non-lethal means.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04413-w
Moon at the LHC: The enigmatic decay of a massive particle may be caused by a scalar or meromorphic anomaly
New regulations for tattoo inks in the European Union ban the use of some 4,200 chemicals known to be harmful to human health. To inform future regulations, scientists are studying what’s in inks and how these chemicals interact with skin tissue over time. Others are developing new inks, ways of delivering them and even tattooable biosensors.
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a complex portrait of the cell across living beings and why doubt is the primary essence of knowing.
Two-million-year-old DNA recovered from permafrost has revealed that the Arctic desert of northern Greenland was once a lush forest ecosystem inhabited by surprisingly large animals. The horseshoe crab, mastodons, and reindeers were some of the animals that ran around, and they suggested a much warmer environment. Someday, he believes, scientists will be able to look further into the past by decoding older DNA.
The crew selected for a Moon mission is made up of musicians Steve Aoki and Tim Dodd, science communicators Tim Dodd and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington, as well as online fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa. (Space News | 4 min read)
Data that raised hopes of a new elementary particle has turned out to be a fluke. Plastic hurt sea urchins and what happens now it is in turmoil?
Hopes that an elementary particle could be created were brought about by an interesting anomaly in data gathered by the LHC. In 2014, LHC scientists at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, discovered that some massive particles decay more often into electron–positron pairs than into muon–antimuon pairs. This imbalance defied the standard model of physics, which predicts both pairs to occur with roughly the same frequency. The latest measurements and an investigation of confounding factors revealed that the discrepancy was partly the result of misidentifying other particles as electrons.
Scientists on Twitter are facing a difficult decision: should they stay or go? Comments on Oppenheimer’s restoration of atomic energy clearance
The tiny plastic pellets used as the raw material for most of the world cause fatal development problems in sea urchins. High concentrations of zinc, which leaches from the nurdles and contaminates the water, is likely to be the cause, say scientists. Eva Jimenez-Guri, a developmental Biologist, says that even if plastic is not being used to kill animals by ingestion or entanglement, it can also kill them by the chemicals in it.
The security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, who was responsible for the creation of the first atomic bomb, has been restored by the US energy secretary. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) decision ended Oppenheimer’s government career. “Historical evidence suggests that the decision to review Dr. Oppenheimer’s clearance had less to do with a bona fide concern for the security of restricted data and more to do with a desire on the part of the political leadership of the AEC to discredit Dr. Oppenheimer in public debates over nuclear weapons policy,” said Granholm in a statement.
Scientists on Twitter are facing a difficult decision: should they stay or go? Many are concerned that the management of the site will get more aggressive with new owners like Elon Musk. An estimated half a million researchers use the platform to communicate, debate, and connect with people. Some researchers have left for open-source alternative Mastodon. Others are compelled to provide their expertise for users of the social network.
“Leading NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has been the job I’ve loved most,” says Thomas Zurbuchen. Now, he has made the decision to step down after more than six years. Knowing when to leave is an important but underappreciated skill, he says. There are weaknesses for every leader. Over time, their weaknesses weigh more heavily on an organization and it becomes time for someone with fresh ideas to step in.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04563-x
Vaccination Security in the Age of Cosmic Rays: Evidence from the U.S., China, Russia and the European Union
The global vaccination rates are low. Many children missed out on immunizations because of the Pandemic, which disrupted health services and resulted in the cancellation of vaccine campaigns. And even before 2020, vaccination rates had been stagnating. There are safety concerns as well as distrust in public-health institutions that contributes to this. Many people don’t realize the importance of vaccinations for diseases that they aren’t concerned about, and a preliminary assessment finds that.
The trend of science being used for leverage in international politics was visible from China to the US, as well as Russia. An editorial in Nature says researchers from different countries working together to solve global problems can’t be stopped by political objectives.
Clinical psychologist Camilo Ortiz, who treats children for anxiety, is among the clinicians and researchers who say that kids need to experience independence and autonomy to develop good mental health. 9 min read by KQED.
And at this point, the U.S. intelligence community still has no consensus about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Four of the intelligence agencies have low confidence in the origin of the virus, while the DOE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation support a lab origin with moderate confidence.
The agency based their conclusion on classified evidence that isn’t available to the public. There is “low confidence” that means the information used in the analysis is questionable, fragmented or cannot be inferred from the information.
Photometric evidence of an animal-like surface that had a virus on its back room when a pandemic outbreak happened on Weibo
Michael Worobey, a evolutionary biologist, has been leading the search for the origins of the Pandemic. He has spent his career tracking down the origins of pandemics, including the origin of HIV and the 1918 flu.
“Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis,” Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, “and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either.”
We know now that a metal cage in a back room was one of the surfaces that the national public health authorities took samples from when the market shut down.
The data in the study shows a detailed look at the early days of the epidemic. A specific stall at a market where the coronaviruses might have been transmitted is pinpointed by genetic and photographic data. Within weeks, a genetic analysis estimates the time when one or two spillovers occurred. It calculates that the coronavirus jumped into people once in late November or early December and then again few weeks later.
A huge COVID outbreak happened at the market at the same time. Hundreds of people were likely infectious at the market. That outbreak is the first documented one of the pandemic, and it then spilled over into the community, as one of the Science papers shows.
It’s clear-cut these wild, live animals, including raccoon dogs and red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. The photos and videos were posted on Weibo because it was illegal to sell certain live animals. The photos were wiped down quickly. ACNN reporter contacted the person who took the photos. I was able to get in touch with this reporter, and they passed on those photos from the source. We don’t verify the photos completely.
There were five surfaces in that stall that had a virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. Scientists found a viruses on a feather/hair removal cart that is used to transport cages and a metal cage in a back room.
And at the end of our sleuth work, we checked the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we find that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don’t have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. The virus will quickly spread to other people outside of where it started.
And yet, from the clinical observations in Wuhan, around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. And the other cases, which aren’t linked through epidemiological data, have an even closer geographical association to the market. That’s what we show in the paper.
There are 11 million people in the city of Wuhan. The Huanan market is one of only a few places in the city where you can buy live animals that are susceptible to the disease.
Step back and think, “Where is the first cluster of a new respiratory infection going to appear in this city?” It could appear at a market. It could be in a school, a university, or a meat packing plant.
I would put the odds at 1 in 10,000. It’s interesting. We do have one analysis where we show essentially that the chance of having this pattern of cases [clustered around the market] is 1 in 10 million If the market isn’t the source of the virus. The evidence is considered to be strong in science.
The data on the Huanan market is more compelling than the data on the water pump which caused people to die. In the mid-19th century, John Snow was a doctor in London, and he helped found the field of outbreak investigations.
Sometimes you may be the only person on Earth who has this kind of important information. I felt like there were more cases than I anticipated, as I began to figure it out. It is not hyperbole to say that those types of moments bring a tear to your eye.
The acrolein incident in East Palestine, Ohio, reveals the public perception of scientific research in the wake of Donald Trump’s election
The author acknowledges that it is just one experiment and that it is not clear whether the reported effects will be long-lasting. But the study does question whether research journals should endorse electoral candidates if one implication is falling trust in science. This is an important question, and there are, sadly, no easy answers. The study shows the potential costs of making an endorsement. But inaction has costs, too. The journal decided that silence was not an option, considering the four years Trump spent in office.
This experiment builds on the literature on trust in research among people with different political allegiances. Confirmation bias is the idea that people on each side tend to favour evidence that supports their views while ignoring evidence that doesn’t, and the backfire (or rebound) effect, is the idea that evidence that challenges a view can ruin a view.
Evidence supports the idea that the disease first came to animals and then to humans. Researchers hunt for toxics after the Ohio train accident, and how to support scientists with social anxiety.
Independent scientists found irritant acrolein and similar compounds in the air at East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailed last month and spilled millions of litres of industrial chemicals. Residents with headaches and breathing difficulties question government reports that chemical levels are safe. Many of the team’s other measurements agree with official figures — but if the elevated acrolein levels persist, they could affect residents’ health.
Defusing the climate time bomb: A case study of Latin America’s biotechnology revolution and the social anxiety of science-economy decision-making
Global temperatures will reach 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels in the early 2030s, estimates a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that United Nations secretary-general António Guterres called a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time bomb”. To stop warming from crossing a dangerous threshold, industrialized nations will need to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net zero by the early 2050s. Cost-effective ways of doing this, such as solar and wind energy, already exist. Some scientists are skeptical because the technology still barely exists, and the report suggests that large-scale carbon dioxide removal will be needed.
In the early 2000s, scientists in Mexico and Brazil led the region’s biotechnology revolution. Buoyed by unprecedented amounts of funding, they sequenced the genomes of the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Rhizobium etli and the bacterial plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa. The community of scientists in South and Central America is at risk of being wiped off the map as investment in science stagnates and researchers go elsewhere to find more lucrative opportunities.
“Those of us who falter in conversation, avoid social events and look at the ceiling when we speak tend not to give good first impressions,” says ecologist Lydia Wong, who has had social anxiety since childhood. To help those with the condition, consider alternative ways to have informal meetings — during a walk or in a quiet room instead of in a café — and offering non-verbal ways to submit questions during conferences. “At times, my anxiety has left me feeling inadequate, misunderstood, isolated and uncertain about pursuing a career in academia. I don’t think my experiences are unusual due to the conversations I have with other students.
