The world must rethink plans for ageing oil and gas platforms

The world must rethink plans for ageing oil and gas platforms

One of world’s largest oil platforms, the North Sea’s Gullfaks C, sits on immense foundations, constructed from 246,000 cubic metres of reinforced concrete, penetrating 22 metres into the sea bed and smothering about 16,000 square metres of sea floor. The platform’s installation in 1989 was a feat of engineering. Now, Gullfaks C has exceeded its … Read more

Will these reprogrammed elephant cells ever make a mammoth?

Will these reprogrammed elephant cells ever make a mammoth?

Woolly mammoths’ closest living relatives are Asian elephants, which could be genetically engineered to have mammoth-like traits.Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Alamy Scientists have finally managed to put elephant skin cells into an embryonic state. The breakthrough — announced today by the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, Texas — is an early technical … Read more

A rapidly time-varying equatorial jet in Jupiter’s deep interior

A rapidly time-varying equatorial jet in Jupiter’s deep interior

In Fig. 1, we superimpose a steady, axisymmetric, zonal flow profile on a background map of the magnetic field2 derived from Juno magnetic field observations11 from the spacecraft’s first 33 orbits. The flow is dominated by an equatorial jet, which induces intense secular variation in the vicinity of the Great Blue Spot (the region of … Read more

Integrated optical frequency division for microwave and mmWave generation

Integrated optical frequency division for microwave and mmWave generation

Microwave and mmWave with high spectral purity are critical for a wide range of applications1,2,3, including metrology, navigation and spectroscopy. Owing to the superior fractional frequency stability of reference-cavity stabilized lasers when compared to electrical oscillators14, the most stable microwave sources are now achieved in optical systems by using optical frequency division4,5,6,7 (OFD). Essential to … Read more

Bumblebees show behaviour previously thought to be unique to humans

Bumblebees show behaviour previously thought to be unique to humans

Scientists have long accepted the existence of animal culture, be that tool use in New Caledonian crows, or Japanese macaques washing sweet potatoes. Read the paper here: Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone But one thing thought to distinguish human culture is our ability to do things too complex to work out … Read more

Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone

Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone

Culture in animals can be broadly conceptualized as the sum of a population’s behavioural traditions, which, in turn, are defined as behaviours that are transmitted through social learning and that persist in a population over time4. Although culture was once thought to be exclusive to humans and a key explanation of our own evolutionary success, … Read more

Why scientists trust AI too much — and what to do about it

Why scientists trust AI too much — and what to do about it

AI-run labs have arrived — such as this one in Suzhou, China.Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Scientists of all stripes are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) — from developing ‘self-driving’ laboratories, in which robots and algorithms work together to devise and conduct experiments, to replacing human participants in social-science experiments with bots1. Many downsides of AI systems have … Read more

Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Plastics are just about everywhere — food packaging, tyres, clothes, water pipes. And they shed microscopic particles that end up in the environment and can be ingested or inhaled by people. Now the first data of their kind show a link between these microplastics and human health. A study of more than 200 people undergoing … Read more

China has a list of suspect journals and it’s just been updated

China has a list of suspect journals and it’s just been updated

The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.Credit: Yang Qing/Imago via Alamy China has updated its list of journals that are deemed to be untrustworthy, predatory or not serving the Chinese research community’s interests. Called the Early Warning Journal List, the latest edition, published last month, includes 24 journals from about … Read more