Antibodies (pink) bind to influenza virus proteins (yellow) (artist’s conception).Credit: Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library Researchers have used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help them make completely new antibodies for the first time. The proof-of-principle work, reported this week in a preprint on bioRxiv1, raises the possibility of bringing AI-guided protein design to the therapeutic antibody … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Avian flu has been detected sub-Antarctic king penguins.Credit: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Some researchers in Antarctica are halting work after the global spread of deadly H5N1 avian influenza finally reached the continent. Bird flu … Read more
When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate … Read more
It’s every researcher’s worst nightmare. A careless click on an e-mail and years of laboratory data are instantaneously encrypted by hackers. Or a piece of legacy lab equipment is compromised through its ancient, zero-security connection to the Internet. The machine might have been a godsend for running experiments from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, but … Read more
Illustration by Ada Zielińska In 2022, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri, a graduate student in artificial intelligence (AI) at Stanford University in California, found something alarming in image-generating AI programs. When she prompted a popular tool for ‘a photo of an American man and his house’, it generated an image of a pale-skinned person in front of … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Hard at work building China’s Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO). JUNO hopes to be detecting neutrinos by the end of 2024.Credit: Qiu Xinsheng/VCG via Getty If all goes to plan, the US$376 million Jiangmen Underground Neutrino … Read more
Organizations around the world are starting to share information on past cases of sexual harassment, but academic institutions have yet to embrace the practice.Credit: Pawel Libera/LightRocket via Getty Because most universities keep the findings of misconduct investigations confidential, sexual-harassment perpetrators are often able to move to other institutions without having to disclose why they left … Read more
People with long COVID often struggle to get sufficient support in the workplace; researchers are no exception.Credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/Shutterstock Abby Koppes got COVID-19 in March 2020, just as the world was waking up to the unprecedented scale on which the virus was spreading. Her symptoms weren’t bad at first. She spent the early lockdown … Read more
How doomed are we? It’s a question I have been asked as a climate scientist many times over the years, sometimes with “doomed” replaced by less printable synonyms. I struggle to answer it every time. It’s not a scientific question, because the terms are not well defined. What does it mean to be “doomed”? And … Read more
Liver tissue from a person with extra fat in the organ.Credit: IKELOS GmbH/Dr. Christopher B. Jackson/Science Photo Library For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug to treat an obesity-linked liver disease that is on the rise around the globe and is becoming a leading driver of liver failure … Read more