Being a parent is often seen as a career obstacle, but it can actually make you a better scientist, says nutrition epidemiologist Lindsey Smith Taillie.Credit: Paul Taillie More than once in the past few years, in a variety of informal settings, I’ve overheard senior scientists recommend hiring people without children over those who are parents. … Read more
Natural and previously designed proteins exhibit a wide range of helical geometries with local irregularities, kinks and deviations from linearity16 that make it difficult to achieve the properties illustrated in Fig. 1 that enable simple nanomaterial scaling (beyond the one dimension accessed by varying the number of repeats in a repeat protein or coiled coil). … Read more
As the leading country in health-sciences output in the Nature Index, the United States’ Share is almost 8,500, higher than the next 10 leading countries combined. As a result, US institutions feature prominently among the leading research organizations for the subject, with 30 of the top 50 being based there. The country’s dominance means that … Read more
The heart is the first organ to develop, but despite its importance, scientists know surprisingly little about exactly how its cells are arranged. Read the paper here: Spatially organized cellular communities form the developing human heart Now a team of researchers have combined RNA sequencing and cutting edge imaging technology to map the heart in … Read more
The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relationships. The index tracks contributions to research articles published in high-quality natural-science and health-science journals, chosen based on reputation by an independent group of researchers. The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level and, as … Read more
Credit: Stuart Bebb/Wolfson College Archives Anthony (Tony) Epstein, co-discoverer of the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), was the founding father of research into the part that viruses play in the development of human cancers. Today, seven types of viral infection — more than one of which can be prevented by vaccination — are known to cause specific … Read more
Tess and Gemma have been camped out on their tartan picnic blanket for days already and they plan on staying until the very end … of the concert or the world, whichever happens first. Smart money is on the latter. The way those lads are going at their bass lines and anthems up on stage, they’re … Read more
Some models are more likely to associate African American English with negative traits than Standard American English.Credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Large language models (LLMs), including those that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, make racist judgements on the on basis of users’ dialect, a preprint study has found1. Researchers found that some artificial intelligence (AI) … Read more
Diversity in science is instrumental in achieving major breakthroughs. Without further accelerating gender parity and other types of diversity — including focusing on the needs of those in and working towards leadership roles — we will continue to lose valuable ground. At a time when academia faces some of its greatest workforce gaps in history, … Read more
Many skills that PhD-holders acquire in the lab are useful in the corporate world.Credit: Getty When I finished my PhD in physical chemistry at the University of Bristol, UK, 11 years ago, I didn’t expect to become a director in financial consulting, advising businesses on how to secure investments. But that’s what happened, and to … Read more