By monitoring where she spent her time, Megan Rogers could improve her working hours and track her achievements.Credit: Getty Starting a tenure-track faculty position can be daunting, with several seemingly equally important responsibilities competing for time. These include establishing a laboratory, launching research studies, writing grant applications, publishing papers and preparing and teaching courses. You … Read more
Kaiping, China Seven hundred metres below the rolling green landscape of Kaiping, southeast China, construction workers are furiously finishing a 35-metre-diameter orb-shaped detector that aims to observe ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos in exquisite detail. If all goes to plan, the US$376 million Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) will be ready to start detecting … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. Northern Australian elder George Milpurrurr shows the next generation how to do a cultural burn.Credit: Penny Tweedie/Alamy Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for thousands of years. Researchers analysed charcoal … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every week? Sign up here. Sora is one of several AI tools that generates video from text promptsCredit: OpenAI The release of OpenAI’s sophisticated video-generating tool Sora has been met with a mix of trepidation and excitement. Some observers worry that … Read more
Plastic wrappers are known to leach some chemicals into food.Credit: Carl Court/Getty After a year of trawling through scientific reports and national regulatory databases, scientists funded by the Norwegian Research Council have compiled a list of more than 16,000 ‘plastic chemicals’ — compounds found in plastics or thought to be used in them, including raw … Read more
Credit: Taj Francis Last year, the Nature Index was broadened to include author affiliations from articles in more than 60 medical journals. The expansion, which covers all major disciplines and specialities in clinical medicine and surgery, offers new insights into global publishing trends in the health sciences. This is the first supplement to explore some … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. The most dimorphic species was the northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris), where males had a mean mass 3.2 times that of females (Michele and Tom Grimm/Alamy) An analysis of more than 400 mammal species is overturning … Read more
After 15 years of discussion, geologists last week decided that the Anthropocene — generally understood to be the age of irreversible human impacts on the planet — will not become an official epoch in Earth’s geological timeline. The rejected proposal would have codified the end of the current Holocene epoch, which has been in place … Read more
Surgeons operate to remove ‘black fungus’ from a person’s lung.Credit: Prakash Singh/AFP via Getty Lire en français In mid-2021, a deadly fungal disease called mucormycosis began surging in India’s crowded hospitals. Often referred to as ‘black fungus’, and caused by various common mould species, mucormycosis typically invades structures in the face and brain. But during … Read more
A vaccination clinic in Kafugumbah village, northwest Sierra Leone.Credit: Conor O’Donovan/Concern Worldwide Deploying mobile COVID-19 vaccination clinics in rural areas of Sierra Leone increased vaccination rates sharply, according to an ambitious experiment involving 150 villages1. The effort is an outlier: many more studies examine vaccine hesitancy and misinformation than focus on vaccine access. “The investigators … Read more