The Beauty Of Falling: A Life In Pursuit Of Gravity Claudia de Rham Princeton Univ. Press (2024) Swiss cosmologist Claudia de Rham is best known for co-developing a theory of gravity that tweaks Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It could help to explain why, for the past several billion years, the Universe has been … Read more
Scientists have used microorganisms to produce beneficial chemicals for decades. By providing the microbes with enzymes and metabolic pathways, researchers can coax cells to churn out everything from food additives to biofuels. One advantage of biomanufacturing is ecological: the processes are generally more environmentally friendly than are chemical manufacturing methods. But it’s expensive, mainly because … Read more
Reddit’s many ‘subreddit’ communities offer channels for discussing science and are of interest to social-media scholars.Credit: Amy Lombard/New York Times/Redux/eyevine It has been almost 18 months since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now known as X. Since the tech mogul took ownership, in October 2022, the number of daily active users of the platform’s mobile app … Read more
It was in just the second article of more than 1,000 that Otto Kalliokoski was screening that he spotted what he calls a “Photoshop masterpiece”. The paper showed images from western blots — a technique used to analyse protein composition — for two samples. But Kalliokoski, an animal behaviourist at the University of Copenhagen, found … Read more
Social-media platforms aren’t always social.Credit: Getty The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Jonathan Haidt Allen Lane (2024) Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a … Read more
This six-legged animal isn’t an insect: it’s a mouse with two extra limbs where its genitals should be. Research on this genetically engineered rodent, which was published on 20 March in Nature Communications1, has revealed a way in which changes in DNA’s 3D structure can affect how embryos develop. Developmental biologist Moisés Mallo, at the … Read more
Postdoctoral fellow Kamini Govender developed her own strategies to deal with a low-vision disability and gain work–life balance.Credit: University of the Free State, South Africa During her PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in eThekwini, South Africa, Kamini Govender helped to develop a greener method for human-insulin biosynthesis in bacteria — one … Read more
One side of the planet LHS 3844b (artist’s impression) is thought to be in perpetual daylight.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) Imagine if it were always night-time in the Western Hemisphere and always daytime in the Eastern Hemisphere, and the only way for Londoners to see the Sun was to fly to somewhere like Tokyo. In a … Read more
Sam Bankman-Fried, former chief executive of the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of fraud and money laundering last year. Meanwhile, the broader fallout from the collapse of FTX continues — and has ramifications on research that his organizations funded. Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX in 2019. Before … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Even before recent complaints about X’s declining quality, posting a paper on the social media platform did not translate to a boost in citations.Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Posting about a paper on X (formerly Twitter) seems to … Read more