As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put … Read more
John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua’s friendship kept US–China climate negotiations rolling even when the two countries disagreed on other matters.Credit: Fadel Dawod/Getty Researchers are regarding the parallel retirements of the US and Chinese climate envoys with apprehension, saying that the change could rattle the current co-operative spirit between the world’s two biggest carbon emitters. John … Read more
President Biden visits the US National Institutes of Health, which under his proposed budget would receive roughly the same amount of funding in the 2025 fiscal year as in the 2023 fiscal year.Credit: Chris Kleponis/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty US President Joe Biden today proposed modest increases in federal spending on science and innovation for the 2025 … Read more
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 at least 11,000 years, according to charcoal preserved in the sediment of a sinkhole. The study was published on 11 March in Nature Geoscience1. The … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. The worm-like caecilian Siphonops annulatus is the first amphibian described to produce ‘milk’ for offspring hatched outside its body.Credit: Carlos Jared A species of amphibian is the first observed to nourish its young with a milk-like … Read more
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has become a workhorse of the private satellite launch vehicle market.Credit: Associated Press/Alamy Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space A. C. Grayling Oneworld Publications (2024) The Moon seems to be back on everyone’s radar. NASA’s Artemis mission is expected to shuttle humans back to the lunar … Read more
T cells (blue; artificially coloured) attack a cancer cell (red).Credit: BSIP Lecaque/Science Photo Library More than 35 years after it was invented, a therapy that uses immune cells extracted from a person’s own tumour is finally hitting the clinic. At least 20 people with advanced melanoma have embarked on treatment with what are called tumour-infiltrating … Read more
Long-term use of antiretroviral drugs can cause abnormal fat accumulation in people with HIV.Credit: Jose Calvo/SPL People with HIV are the latest group to benefit from the new generation of anti-obesity drugs. If early data about the treatments’ effects are confirmed, the drugs could become key to controlling the metabolic problems often caused by anti-HIV … Read more
In late 2021, midway through the COVID-19 pandemic, George Stagg was preparing to give exams to his mathematics and statistics students at the University of Newcastle, UK. Some would use laptops, others would opt for tablets or mobile phones. Not all of them could even use the programming language that was the subject of the … Read more
Christina Goudreau Collison signs the term ‘steric hindrance’ while teaching the hydroboration reaction in her organic chemistry class at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.Credit: Olivia Schlichtkrull Sign language in science The lack of scientific terms and vocabulary in many of the world’s sign languages can make science education and research careers inaccessible … Read more