The duration and value of a grant are not likely to alter the research strategies of recipients in the United States.Credit: DigitalVision/Getty Offering professors more money or time isn’t likely to dramatically change how they do their research, a survey of US-based academics has found. The survey, described in a preprint article posted on arXiv … Read more
“Words are like harpoons,” UK physicist and astronomer Fred Hoyle told an interviewer in 1995. “Once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.” Hoyle, then 80 years old, was referring to the term Big Bang, which he had coined on 28 March 1949 to describe the origin of the Universe. Today, it … Read more
Electrons in stacked sheets of staggered graphene collectively act as though they have fractional charges at ultra-low temperatures.Credit: Ramon Andrade 3DCiencia/Science Photo Library Minneapolis, Minnesota Last May, a team led by physicists at the University of Washington in Seattle observed something peculiar. When the scientists ran an electrical current across two atom-thin sheets of molybdenum … Read more
A pig kidney is unpacked for transplant into 62-year-old Richard Slayman of Massachusetts.Credit: Massachusetts General Hospital Early success in the first transplant of a pig kidney into a living person has raised researchers’ hopes for larger clinical trials involving pig organs. Such trials could bring ‘xenotransplantation’, the use of animal organs in human recipients, into … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. The Perseverance rover drills a rock core from the edge of the ancient river delta in Jezero Crater on Mars.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA is facing some tough questions amid budget woes: where should its Mars rover Perseverance … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Surgeons at Xijing Hospital in Xi’an, China, performed the first transplantation of a non-human liver into a human body.Credit: Xijing Hospital, Air Force Medical University in Xi’an China Surgeons in China say they have transplanted a … Read more
The front of the Simons Observatory’s Large Aperture Telescope Receiver, the largest receiver for observing the cosmic microwave background built so far.Credit: Mark Devlin/University of Pennsylvania Cosmologists are preparing to cast their sharpest-ever eyes on the early Universe. From an altitude of 5,300 metres on Cerro Toco, in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Simons Observatory … Read more
Giving birth shifts a person’s DNA markings back toward a more youthful state, but this trend is less noticeable in new birth parents with obesity.Credit: Chicago Tribune/Getty Aches and pains aren’t all that pregnancy shares with ageing. Brewing a baby leads to changes in the distribution of certain chemical markers on a pregnant person’s DNA … Read more
More than two billion people worldwide lack access to reliable, safe drinking water. Challenges around managing water resources are complex and wide-ranging. They are interlinked with those affecting land and food systems and are exacerbated by the climate crisis. Four scholars propose ways to prompt progress in water governance — and highlight just how crucial … Read more
The use of at-home diagnostic tests soared during the omicron wave of the coronavirus.Credit: Tang Ming Tung/Getty During the COVID-19 health emergency, two strategies for detecting coronavirus infections were commonly adopted around the world. Part of Nature Outlook: Medical diagnostics Initially, in countries equipped with the necessary laboratory infrastructure, nasal swabs were analysed by polymerase … Read more