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
An independent team could replicate select experiments in a paper before publication, to help catch errors and poor methodology.Credit: SolStock/Getty Could the replication crisis in scientific literature be addressed by having scientists independently attempt to reproduce their peers’ key experiments during the publication process? And would teams be incentivized to do so by having the … Read more
Journeys of Black Mathematicians: Forging Resilience Zala Films Directed by George Csicsery What does a mathematician look like? Standing in front of a room of Black children aged six to twelve, research mathematician Zerotti Woods — who posed the question — is not far off their description. Woods, who is based at Johns Hopkins University … Read more
In hindsight, it seems prophetic that the title of a Nature paper published on 1 March 1974 ended with a question mark: “Black hole explosions?” Stephen Hawking’s landmark idea about what is now known as Hawking radiation1 has just turned 50. The more physicists have tried to test his theory over the past half-century, the … Read more
Musician Prince on stage in Detroit, Michigan, during his 1984 Purple Rain tour.Credit: Ross Marino/Getty Working scientist profiles This article is part of an occasional Nature series in which we profile scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests. In 1983, Susan Rogers got a call that would change her life. She was working as … Read more
Trapped atomic ions are among the most advanced technologies for realizing quantum computation and quantum simulation, based on a combination of high-fidelity quantum gates1,2,3 and long coherence times7. These have been used to realize small-scale quantum algorithms and quantum error correction protocols. However, scaling the system size to support orders-of-magnitude more qubits8,9 seems highly challenging10,11,12,13. … Read more