Nature
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Tracking gulls to prevent a bird flu pandemic
“In this photo, I’m monitoring gulls near Sandgerði, a small fishing village in southwest Iceland. This area is a volcanic peninsula, and although there’s a lot of precipitation, most of the water passes through the rocks and flows underground to the sea. So the places where fresh water is available, such as the lake in Sandgerði, attract a lot of…
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Trekking across Nepal to bridge its gender gap in the sciences
Babita Paudel travels Nepal to collect soil samples in high-altitude regions such as Annapurna and to run workshops for female scientists’ professional development.Credit: Rajaram Khang Changemakers This Nature Q&A series celebrates people who fight racism in science and who champion inclusion. It also highlights initiatives that could be applied to other scientific workplaces. During her PhD at the Korea Polar…
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Woman in cancer remission for record 19 years after CAR-T immune treatment
A CAR-T cell (orange) has attacks a cancer cell (green), which is starting to contract.Credit: Eye Of Science/Science Photo Library The girl was four years old when she arrived at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston to receive a highly experimental therapy for nerve-cell cancer. Standard treatments had been unable to hold the cancer back. It had spread to her bones,…
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How to end outrage and detoxify politics: share stories, not statistics
Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground Kurt Gray Pantheon (2025) Social psychologist Kurt Gray’s timely book Outraged begins with a dramatic swerve he made on a motorway — a teenage driving mishap, a chase and an escape from the clutches of road rage. That frightening early life experience sparked Gray’s academic exploration…
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how NSF is scouring research grants for violations of Trump’s orders
The National Science Foundation, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, funds about 25% of basic US academic research.Credit: JHVEPhoto/Alamy The US National Science Foundation (NSF), a major funder of basic academic research, announced yesterday that it has reopened a website that distributes money from research grants to scientists. The move comes after a week of confusion and frustration for NSF-funded researchers in…
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How a boy from the Bronx unearthed the workings of the Universe
Physicist Steven Weinberg became known as a grandmaster of quantum field theory.Credit: Tamir Kalifa/The New York Times/Redux/eyevine Steven Weinberg: A Life in Physics Steven Weinberg Cambridge Univ. Press (2024). ‘Big Steve,’ his students called him. Steven Weinberg was not physically imposing, but was an intellectually dominant and much-revered figure in the scientific community and on the public stage. One of…
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theoretical chemist who first simulated proteins using molecular dynamics
Credit: Cyril Frésillon/CNRS Photothèque Martin Karplus was a theoretical chemist who set out to explore the fundamentals of his subject, but always with an eye to the broadest possible applications in the real world. He seized the potential of computers to simulate the interactions between molecules at scales represented by both classical physics and quantum mechanics. His simulations of complex…
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Pictograms, comics and other illustrations: Books in brief
What the Body Knows John Trowsdale Yale Univ. Press (2024) To understand the body, “we might picture the heart as a pump, the brain as a kind of computer, the lungs as bellows, the kidney as filters”. But what about the immune system — asks immunologist John Trowsdale in his engaging analysis. It has no straightforward analogy, operating simultaneously as…
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‘WithdrarXiv’ database of 14,000 retracted preprints launches
Thousands of preprints have been withdrawn from the arXiv preprint server because of factual or methodological errors.Credit: Ralf Geithe/Getty Researchers have launched a database of more than 14,000 studies that have been withdrawn from the preprint server arXiv since its launch in 1991. As well as shedding light on why those preprints were pulled from arXiv, the data set —…
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Of your own device
Walls. Thick, dark, stone walls. Ben couldn’t recall how long he’d been here. There was nothing to help him keep track of time. He ran his hands over the walls again. No chinks, no loose stones, no cracks. No way to make a passage out, even to the next cell. The walls pressed down on him, stopping just short of…
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