The Big Bang: An update to the prefix system for the ronna, giga, and tera prefixes of zetta (1021), zepto (1024), yotta (10

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 have found patterns that could be connected to higher rates of disease and death.

The world will generate a lot of data in the next 16 years, with an average of around a yotabyte of data per year. The governor of the metric system agreed on a new term to describe the outrageously big and small. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 1027 and 1030, and ronto and quecto signify 10−27 and 10−30. Earth is about one ronnagram in mass, and an electron is about one quantogram. Ronna, giga, and tera didn’t sound good, but once did, says a metrologist. This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when zetta (1021), zepto (10−21), yotta (1024) and yocto (10−24) were added.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03829-8

How scientific science can improve climate policy: Elizabeth Holmes, Anat Alon-Beck and Gina Rippon, a brain expert on climate change

ElizabethHolmes was found guilty of fraud against her investors in her blood-testing company and was sentenced to 11 years and 1 month in prison. The claims of more than 200 health tests on just a few drops of blood were overstated. Anat Alon-Beck says that she pushed the envelope a little too far. You faked it till you made it, but it was too much fake.

It takes mentoring and a professional network to give women fair access to careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. There is a community of people who are non-Binary, and that is very important to them. They have that community to lean on and their computer-science expertise when they feel like they can’t continue in the field. 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. Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Climate Change collaborated on a special dedicated to behavioural science being better incorporated into climate policy. “We are at the beginning of a new era of behavioural climate research,” says the accompanying editorial.

Neuroscience researcher Gina Rippon says the misuse of brain research is called neurotic. There’s a way brain images are manipulated by self-help guru, relationship counsellors and even single-sex education. In her book she argues that our brains are not fixed as males or females at birth, but that our brains are constantly changing and influenced by our gendered world in which we live. Rippon shares what it was like to write and promote her first popular-science book and how she dealt with the backlash.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03829-8

Using a plutonium-powered power plant to power space missions in the Far-Area of the Solar System and the eugenics of the solar system

Countries in the global south who found themselves at the end of the queue for COVID-19 vaccines have banded together to create a radical plan to produce mRNA vaccines locally. If successful, they could help to stop the spread of infections before they start and end the dependency on wealthy nations.

A radioactive isotope from nuclear power plants’ spent fuel will power lengthy space missions. The most expensive drug in the world is the first gene therapy for haemophilia.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Hemgenix, the first gene therapy for the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia B. This drug is the most expensive drug in the world and it could save the US health-care system millions annually by eliminating the need for regular injections of factor IX. Edward Tuddenham, who helped design Hemgenix, says people with haemophilia who could benefit can forget about it in day-to-day life.

Nuclear waste could power space missions to the far reaches of the Solar System — places that are too dark for solar panels. Scientists are making batteries that contain americium-241, a radioactive isotope that can be taken from power plant spent fuel. The project is funded by the European Space Agency, which hopes to wean itself off plutonium-powered equipment sourced from international partners.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04394-w

The scientific community can’t do without a fossil hunter: The case of a dinosaur whose fossils are wiped out in springtime

A scientist who published evidence that the dinosaurs were wiped out in springtime has accused a colleague of fabricating data to support his own paper saying the same thing. Palaeontologist Melanie During published her work in Nature in February. 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. DePalma says they would not fabricate data or samples to fit the results.

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. The New Yorker reported on tanis fossils in February, but the paper did not include a peer-reviewed paper. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that DePalma holds the lease to the Tanis site, which sits on private land, and relatively few scientists have visited it.

“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. The first step in addressing documented biases faced by scientists of the LGBTQ+ community is to collect official statistics. Such data determine which groups are eligible for federal resources, including diversity fellowships and funding.

In addition to being an astrophysics student at the university, Flowers is also involved in a program that 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. “As an adhesive, we use the putty that swimmers put in their ears, and for calculations, we use pencils and graph paper,” she explains. “I’ve had students tell me that taking the course has changed their life by providing them with the opportunities that come with having a degree,” Flowers says.

The amount of raw metal, plastic and Silicon it takes to build a laptop computer that scales a few kilograms. A Nature editorial calls for a complete rethink of how we encourage production and use of resources. 5 min read.

A 15th United Nations biodiversity conference will start today in Canada. “Biodiversity is hoping for its Paris moment,” says a Nature editorial, referring to the momentous 2015 Paris climate agreement, which set a crucial goal to seek to limit warming to 1.5–2 °C above pre-industrial levels. At the time, the opening ceremony of the Paris conference held the record for the largest number of world leaders ever to attend a United Nations event in a single day — more than 150. The editorial said that world leaders should show their support in Montreal so that national negotiators could reach a strong deal.

Emergent Quantum Wormholes: a Holographic Dual to the Curve of Exotic Systems and Cosmological Constraints on Human Health

Physicists have used a quantum computer to generate an entity known as an emergent wormhole. It’s possible to link quantum systems even if they are separated by long distances. The authors generated a highly entangled quantum state between the two halves of a quantum computer, creating an alternative description, known as a holographic dual, in the form of an emergent wormhole stretched between two exterior regions. They then simulated a message traversing this wormhole. Such exotic physics is part of efforts to reconcile quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity. 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 have been relaxed, and people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who have mild or no symptoms are, for the first time, allowed to isolate at home instead of in centrally managed facilities. But researchers worry that the swift transition — without enough time to ramp up vaccinations — 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.

During the past three weeks, NASA has flown to the Moon and back in a test of a new spaceship. It is the biggest challenge since launch because it will have to survive a fiery re-entries through Earth’s atmosphere and then plunge down into the sea in December. In the process, it will test a re-entry manoeuvre that has never been used by a spacecraft 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

AlphaCode: Detecting Predators, Nerves and Prey in Herding Sheepdogs with an Artificial Intelligence Tool

A study that combined the behavioural data from 47,000 dogs with 4,000 dogs’ genetic sequences has identified genes that make them nervous and predatory. The researchers scrapped the conventional breed categories — which had been found to be a poor predictor for behaviour — and sorted dogs into ten genetic lineages. Herding sheepdogs had genes that had been related to the mothers instinct to protect their pups.

An artificial-intelligence (AI) tool called AlphaCode can beat some people at competitive programming. The system, created by Google company DeepMind, was trained on human answers from software-writing competitions. AlphaCode cannot replace software engineers because there is no simple way to specify the needs of the people who will use the end product.

Last week, we read that the city of San Francisco, California, is considering allowing its police force to use robots 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 severity of a situation in real time. It can be used to incapacitate.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04413-w

Science Story of Yusaku Maezawa: From the Space Mission to the Moon to the International Space Station in 2021. An Interview with K.A. Robinson

New regulations for tattoo inks in the European Union ban the use of some 4,200 chemicals known to be harmful to human health. Scientists are studying what’s in ink and how it interacts with skin tissue over time. New ways of delivering them and even tattooable biosensors are being developed by others.

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. There were mastodons running around, reindeers, geese, hares and marine animals, which suggested a warmer environment, as Geneticist Eske Willerslev explains in the Nature Podcast. Someday, scientists will be able to look back further in time by using more advanced technology, he thinks.

Musician Steve Aoki, YouTube science communicator Tim Dodd and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington are among the amateur crew that have been selected for a whimsical Moon mission by online fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa, who took a jaunt to the International Space Station in 2021. (Space News | 4 min read)

The people are behind the science stories. The space telescope is looking at seven Earth-sized planets, and a satellite that will track the world’s water.

There are lots of fascinating people behind the big research stories of the year. One of them is a climate scientist from Kyiv, named Svitana Krakovska who became both a climate action campaigner and a supporter of the Ukrainian people. She said the war against Ukraine and the climate change were connected, and they both depended on fossil fuels. Ko Barrett praises Krakovska for speaking up, even though she is a scientist. Nobody who is standing where she is can tell the same story.

Measurements of Earth’s oceans, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs from TRAPPIST-1, COVID-19 and other Earth-sized planets

The atmosphere of seven Earth-sized planets circling the star TRAPPIST-1 has been turned into one of the most exciting targets in space by the James Webb Space Telescope. The planets lie in its ‘goldilocks’ zone, where temperatures are right for liquid water — and possibly life — to exist. The first results from two of the planets show that neither has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. That could mean that they have denser atmospheres that are made of molecules such as carbon dioxide or methane, or no atmosphere at all.

A joint US and French satellite launching today will measure Earth’s seas, rivers and lakes in ground-breaking detail. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite has the capacity to change how we understand climate change and global water supply. Every 10 or 11 days, the satellite will track the water heights, extent and elevation of more than 6 million lakes and reservoirs. It will also estimate river flow rates with unprecedented accuracy and give scientists their first 3D view of ocean eddies.

The increased capacity built to track COVID-19 is being used to study other infectious diseases across Asia and Africa. Before the Pandemic, samples would often be sent abroad and take weeks to months to be tested. Next-Generation equipment is used to respond to local public-health emergencies such asEbola, thanks to funding that came from COVID-19. Researchers warn that if the funding that paid for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing dries up, the new machines will sit idle.

It’s thought that COVID-19 killed over 15 million people, which is 2.7 times more than the official toll. The huge discrepancy shows that too many deaths around the world still go unrecorded, argues a Nature editorial. The figure comes from a World Health Organization-supported analysis of ‘excess mortality’ — deaths that exceed expected levels. Other analyses give different estimates, and we’ll probably never know the true number of people who died of the disease.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04484-9

Critics of Pradip Krishen’s policies on rewilding and the use of ancestry to perpetuate the myth that race is a biological category

Pradip Krishen fell in love with trees in midlife. One of the leaders of a group called the Ecological Restoration Alliance of India, he is a leading advocate for rewilding. Rather than quick-fix tree-planting projects — some of which are nothing more than a media stunts and have little long-term success — their restoration aims focus on the specifics of local ecosystems and the livelihoods of their people. But that approach is at odds with the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which push for rapid development that sometimes sweeps aside scientists’ warnings and Indigenous people’s resistance.

Some of their practices can be used to perpetuate the myth that race is a biological category. The reckoning was is partly prompted by the horror of seeing their peer-reviewed work misused in the manifesto of the shooter who murdered ten people in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, in May. African ancestry or European ancestry are two categories that are used in the science of continental categories. Critics say these are problematic as well as race groupings because they do not capture the important variations in the human species. Genetic solutions to public health and social problems could be distraction from their real drivers: socio- economic factors, and historical and contemporary racism.