Wearable electronics have a sweat problem. Most electronic materials aren’t permeable, and if a device isn’t breathable, sweat can start to build up on the skin. That’s uncomfortable for the user, and not great for the device which could lose signal quality, or just fall off.
Read the paper here: A three-dimensional liquid diode for soft, integrated permeable electronics
Breathable electronics do exist, but the technology is in its infancy. Now though a team of researchers have developed a new breathable platform that could be easily integrated with cutting edge electronics.
• Timekeeping is determined by ultraprecise devices called atomic clocks, but it is also aligned with Earth’s rotation, mainly for historical reasons.
• Because the planet’s rate of rotation fluctuates, this alignment is maintained with the occasional addition of ‘leap seconds’ to the official time standard.
• Now, Earth’s rotation seems to have accelerated, outpacing the time standard, and raising the possibility that an unprecedented ‘negative’ leap second might soon be required — a daunting prospect in a world reliant on consistent timekeeping.
In 1967, the internationally accepted definition of the second changed. The time measurement standard had been linked to Earth’s rotation, but instead became determined by a quantum transition between two states of a caesium atom. The change was motivated by accuracy: caesium atomic clocks keep time on the basis of the ultrastable frequency of the photons exchanged in the quantum transition. This seemed like a safer bet than Earth’s movements, which weren’t as regular as was first assumed.
Read the paper: A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming
But sailors still relied on the Sun and stars to navigate, and they wanted a time standard that remained tied in some way to Earth’s rotation. It was therefore decided that the new international reference, known as coordinated universal time (utc), would be set by atomic clocks, but kept apace with the rotational angle of Earth, which is known as universal time (ut1). Since 1972, utc has been adjusted to meet this goal by adding a leap second whenever the discrepancy between the two standards approaches one second.
Atomic clocks have enabled the development of great technologies, such as satellite navigation and, in an age of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), celestial navigation is much less relevant than it was in 1972. GNSS satellites themselves have onboard atomic clocks that regulate their timekeeping, and the insertion of a leap second generates risk of failures. Perhaps more importantly, the addition of leap seconds can have drastic effects on computer infrastructure in the increasingly connected modern world (see go.nature.com/44y88yp).
For these reasons, after more than 20 years of discussion, metrologists proposed that utc be kept in line with Earth’s rotation, but that the tolerance for adding an adjustment be increased to a value larger than one second2. This proposal, which delays the need to make any adjustment for at least another century, was adopted by the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in 2022.
The CGPM resolution stipulates that the maximum difference between the two times (denoted ut1 − utc) will be increased in or before 2035, and that the details of the new maximum and how it is to be implemented will be decided at the next CGPM meeting in 2026 (see go.nature.com/3vqddy2). Most delegates urge a quick implementation of the new rules, although others ask for more time to adapt their systems. The radiocommunication sector of the International Telecommunication Union — the organization that regulates the transmission of time signals — endorsed the CGPM decisions at the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023.
utc is currently computed using data from about 450 atomic clocks, which are maintained in more than 80 institutions around the world. It is disseminated in real time by these time laboratories, by means such as radio or telephone signals, the Internet or optical fibre protocols, and also through GNSS signals. Since 1972, irregularities in Earth’s movement have called for 27 leap seconds to be added — at irregular intervals and with a maximum of only 6 months’ notice each time. The irony is that metrologists now face the challenge of removing a leap second from utc for the first time, because Earth’s rotation is gradually getting faster than the time standard set by atomic clocks (Fig. 1).
Figure 1 | Synchronizing the international time with Earth’s rotation. Agnew1 calculated the difference between international atomic time (tai), which is measured using ultraprecise quantum devices known as atomic clocks, and universal time (ut1), which is determined by Earth’s rotation. tai, with the addition of occasional ‘leap seconds’, defines coordinated universal time (utc), which is kept in alignment with ut1. Earth’s current rate of rotation suggests that the first negative leap seconds might soon be necessary owing to a combination of geophysical effects. Agnew’s calculation shows that accelerated melting of the polar ice caps has delayed the need for these adjustments. (Adapted from Fig. 2d of ref. 1.)
A negative leap second has never been added or tested, so the problems it could create are without precedent. Metrologists around the world are following the unfolding discussion attentively, with the view to avoiding any unnecessary risks. What would be necessary, as in good metrological practice, is to calculate the uncertainty associated with predictions of Earth’s rotation. This information would allow researchers to evaluate the probability that a negative leap second will be required — and assess the related risks — so that they can anticipate any such change before 2035. Unfortunately, this task remains formidable (ref. 3 and go.nature.com/4armrvz), so Agnew’s suggestion that the change could be delayed is welcome news indeed.
JERRY X. MITROVICA: In search of lost time
Earth’s rotation is an imperfect timekeeper. This imperfection is imperceptible to humans, but the exquisite accuracy of atomic clocks makes it clear that the time taken for the planet to make one full turn varies from day to day.
On a millennial timescale, changes in Earth’s rotation reflect the combined effect of three geophysical processes4. First, friction between ocean water and the sea floor — both in shallow seas and in the deep ocean — has progressively slowed Earth’s rotation. This effect is known as tidal dissipation. Second, since the last ice age ended, Earth has undergone shape adjustments that have increased its rotation rate. These ongoing changes have brought the planet back to a shape that is more spherical than the flattened form it took when massive ice sheets existed in its polar regions. Finally, the coupling between Earth’s iron core and its outer rocky mantle and crust means that any change in the angular momentum of the core must be balanced by a change of equal magnitude and opposite sign in the mantle and crust.
The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
Although the individual contribution of each process is somewhat uncertain, their sum is known precisely: it has led to an increase in Earth’s rotation period of 6 millionths of a second per year4. This slowing might seem trivially small, but its effect is responsible for a phenomenon known as clock error. This error describes a discrepancy in the timing of eclipses: events recorded by ancient astronomers seem to have occurred at times that differ from those predicted by assuming that Earth’s rotation rate has remained unchanged since ancient times. Clock error increases with the age of the eclipse and reaches around 4 hours for eclipses that were observed 2,500 years ago5.
The effects of tidal dissipation and shape adjustments have not changed appreciably since the advent of modern atomic timekeeping, but the impact of core–mantle coupling on Earth’s rotation varies on multiple timescales as a result of the fluid nature of the outer core. And herein lies the probable cause of timekeeping’s most recent dilemma: leap seconds have been required with much lower frequency since 2000 than in the previous 30 years, which indicates that Earth’s rotation rate is accelerating. Given the stability of tidal dissipation and shape-adjustment effects over this period, the main culprit must be core–mantle coupling. However, Agnew’s findings suggest that there is another factor at play.
Agnew analysed changes in Earth’s rotation and in its gravity field — changes in the latter arising through the redistribution of mass on Earth’s surface. His analysis demonstrates persuasively that core–mantle coupling has led to accelerated rotation, but that there has also been a pronounced deceleration owing to the onset of major melting of polar ice sheets that began near the end of the twentieth century. This human-induced process is slowing rotation by moving melted ice mass from the poles to lower latitudes.
Core–mantle coupling alone could have necessitated a negative leap second in about two years’ time. According to Agnew’s calculations, changes in polar ice mass have delayed this eventuality by another three years, to 2029. But no realistic projection of future ice-mass changes will thwart the need for a negative leap second beyond the next decade. Unless international timekeeping guidelines change soon, the myriad technological foundations of human society must be updated in preparation for this unprecedented event, and for the disappearance of 23:59:59 on a single day in the not-too-distant future.
She was taller than me. Prettier and with better muscle tone. Shinier hair and perfect skin and teeth. Which was odd because she claimed she was me — from the future.
“Mmmmf!” I said.
“Sorry about the gag. Let me loosen it.”
“What the hell!? You’re here to kill me — won’t that kill you, too?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, it didn’t. I’m here, aren’t I?”
I scoffed. “I might not be a time-travelling assassin supermodel —”
“Yet,” she interjected with a smile.
“— but even I know that’s impossible. It’s a time whatchamacallit … a paradox!”
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
She leant forward with a gleam in her eyes like I was 101 puppies, and she was in the market for a winter coat. “Yes, exactly! I need a paradox, a large one. Killing myself is the biggest event I can put into motion at such short notice.”
I struggled against the plastic straps that bound my hands behind my kitchen-table chair. “That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Sorry, I don’t have the time to explain the general theory of paradoxity or walk you through my calculations.”
“Calculations about what?” I asked — as long as I kept her talking, she wasn’t murdering me.
“About how much energy the death will release. Don’t worry — it will have been enough.”
“Energy for what?”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “Let me make it simple: what’s the biggest paradox you’ve heard of?”
“I don’t know — everything I say is a lie?”
“No, that just means you don’t understand set theory. The greatest one is existence itself: why is there something instead of nothing? It gave rise to everything, and — together with other, smaller paradoxes — keeps everything going.
“Uh huh,” I said, humouring my future self.
“But those bastards from the CCCCCC — the Chronological Continuum Consistency Coordinated Consortium Confederacy — are obsessed with timescape integrity. They’ve pushed my team back everywhen, undoing our efforts to make the timeline a better place to live in. They will even make sure World War Three — which we’d managed to avoid, you’re welcome — will begin right on time next Tuesday. I need to finish them once and for all. They’re out of control. They’ll go too far back; undo the Paradox of Life itself —”
“Life’s a paradox?”
“Duh!” — I hadn’t realized how obnoxious it is when I do that — “Why else would dumb, entropic matter organize itself into something that can laugh, love and fart?”
I looked around and saw an old family picture. “Why kill me? Wouldn’t killing somebody like … not mum or dad, um … would grandma Georgina work? We never liked her.”
“No, we didn’t. Remember the haircut incident in third grade?” She chuckled softly. “But no, sorry, it must be me, or it won’t have enough juice. A tight timeloop like this should release ten-to-the-twelfth-power chronojoules. The CCCCCC bastards will never see it coming!”
I grasped for something, anything to distract her. “Aren’t you supposed to be older? Why do you look better than me?”
She looked down at her body. “It’s a back-echo of the energy release. It rearranges nearby systems into their optimal state. And this,” she waved at herself, “is more optimal than, well, that.” She pointed at me.
“Thanks so much for taking the time to insult me before killing me.”
“No problem.” She looked at some glowing numbers on her wrist. “This will have been fun but time has run out of time — we have to do this now.”
She pulled out a knife and slipped behind me.
“Stop!” I said, but she didn’t. I felt something shift and fell forward. There was a flash of something much brighter than ordinary light could ever be.
My hands weren’t tied behind me any more. I leapt up, trying to remember the three weeks of taekwondo I’d taken back in high school — and hoping she didn’t. I turned and saw a hotter version of myself lying on the floor with a gash on the side of her throat. Blood was spreading out on the white carpet my ex-boyfriend had picked out. Good, I never liked it, or him — wait, why was I still breathing?
I looked down — my body had changed. I looked like her now. I felt the energy and knowledge move through me. I knew what I had to do — fight those bastards from the CCCCCC and win.
There was just one thing I didn’t understand. I knelt beside her. “This doesn’t make any sense. I thought you had to kill me?”
She looked up with a small, weak smile. I leant in to hear her say, “If it made sense, it wouldn’t be a paradox, would it?”
The story behind the story
Rodrigo Culagovski reveals the inspiration behindThe real time-travel paradox was the friends we made along the way.
My offspring and I love to watch superhero team TV series. They usually feature some — or a lot — of time travel, and are full of plot holes and paradoxes, to the point where we joke that time-travel paradoxes are their real super power.
I’m also a member of Codex, an SFF writers community. We hold flash-fiction contests twice a year. Last year, one of the prompts was “Road trip! Where are you going and who are you bringing with?” I didn’t use it as is, but it got me thinking of my favourite snowclone, “The Real X Was the Friends We Made Along the Way”.
Vaccines are usually used to prevent infectious diseases. A therapeutic cancer vaccine is different. Rather than teaching the immune system to recognize pathogens in advance of an infection, these vaccines use identifying proteins produced by cancer cells, known as antigens, to provoke a powerful immune response to existing tumours.
A variety of approaches
The first step is to deliver antigens to immune cells called dendritic cells. These present antigens to other immune cells, and stimulate a response. In the past decade, several approaches have emerged1. One delivers antigens that are shared by many people with the same type of cancer (2). Others, including those that make use of messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, are highly personalized to the unique neoantigens produced by an individual’s tumour (3). Other personalized approaches involve injecting dendritic cells that are pre-loaded with cancer antigens (1), or generating antigens inside the body and promoting their uptake by dendritic cells in situ (4).
Infographic: Alisdair Macdonald
Mounting a response
Unlike preventive vaccines, which focus mainly on activating antibody-producing B cells, a therapeutic cancer vaccine must generate a strong T-cell response. Dendritic cells loaded with tumour antigens bind and activate CD8+ cytotoxic T cells, which can then mount an attack on the tumour2.
Infographic: Alisdair Macdonald
Promising results
Numerous therapeutic cancer vaccines, on the basis of a variety of approaches, are showing encouraging results in trials.
Pancreatic cancer: In a phase I trial of a personalized mRNA vaccine, half of the participants developed T cells targeted to cancer neoantigens6. Recurrence-free survival in this group was longer compared with those who did not respond.
Infographic: Alisdair Macdonald
Melanoma: A phase II trial of a personalized mRNA vaccine showed a 44% decrease in the risk of post-surgical recurrence or death7. A phase III trial is under way, with final results expected in 2029.
Infographic: Alisdair Macdonald
Lymphoma: A phase I/II trial of an in situ vaccine that combined radiotherapy with signalling molecules that mobilize and activate dendritic cells showed evidence of tumour regression in 8 of 11 people who were treated8.
Infographic: Alisdair Macdonald
Obstacles ahead
The future development and the clinical uptake of therapeutic cancer vaccines will be shaped by several factors.
Infographic: Alisdair Macdonald
Unwieldy trials. Testing multiple combinations of agents makes clinical trials more complex. Another complicating factor is timing when to give a vaccine relative to other interventions, such as surgery.
Immunity monitoring. Tracking acquired immunity is important for assessing vaccine efficacy. For cancer vaccines, new T-cell monitoring techniques are needed.
Scalability. Personalized cancer vaccines could pose logistical challenges. Streamlining production will be essential to keep costs down and availability high.
Harmless lab pranks, such as spraying objects with unexpected scents or adding googly eyes, can lift spirits and encourage research-group bonding.Credit: Juj Winn/Getty
On 1 April 2022, John Prensner, then a postdoctoral researcher in cancer biology, received a surprising letter. Typed on official-looking letterhead paper, the message outlined plans for a Smithsonian Institution exhibit dedicated to the Human Genome Project, which in 2001 produced the first draft sequence of the human genome. Through professional connections, the writer said, they had learnt that Prensner held a piece of that history on his lab bench at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts: a PTC-200 machine used for PCR reactions during the pioneering work.
The machine had been inherited from a colleague at the nearby Whitehead Institute, where much of the project’s research was done, and was a favourite of Prensner’s because it was so simple to operate. He used the PTC-200 exclusively, and by then it was nearly as old as he was. When it finally stopped working, Prensner took the machine apart to try to fix it. But it never woke again, collecting dust until the letter arrived. “I wouldn’t get rid of it because I loved it so much, so I was excited that it might get a second life,” he says. “Until I turned the letter over.”
On the back, the letter stated that the Smithsonian was also interested in antiquated sound technology, including Prensner’s barely functioning 1995 boom box. Tipped off by the halo of labmates lurking surreptitiously around him, he soon realized that the whole thing was probably a prank. “Fortunately, the lab had a very positive atmosphere, so there weren’t any ill feelings,” Prensner says, adding that when he left in 2023 to start his lab at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, he trashed the PCR machine, but kept the boom box and letter.
Say what? The principal investigators who pass down wisdom through humour
Practical jokes such as this play out in labs every day, and many live on as group lore, stretching across generations of students and staff. Pranks, it turns out, are about much more than a laugh, and can serve important purposes — as tools for community-building, creative outlets in an otherwise intense working environment and as a means of passing on guidance. And although jokes can take nearly any form, there are underlying rules that define if and when pranking is appropriate. (Lab safety comes first: no researchers or experiments were harmed by these pranks.)
“The basis of a good prank is that you have to like and respect the person you’re pranking,” says Jess McLaughlin, who once hid tiny plastic horses they had found in a box on the kerb all throughout their lab when they were doing a genomics postdoc at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. “You’re not there to cause someone distress — you’re doing it with the person rather than to them.”
A prankster’s playbook
Some scientists, including McLaughlin, approach pranking opportunistically — striking when the Universe provides. Others pursue it with intention. Monica Tomaszewski , a programme manager at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, recalls glueing down teachers’ chalk at school, but her pranking talents truly blossomed during her PhD at the same university. There, she discovered that her adviser, who is now retired, had a similar sense of humour. Because he was Canadian, Tomaszewski planned a prank to make his office smell like maple syrup. She bought candle-scenting solution, and each spring, applied it to his radiator, where he kept a collection of some 70 cacti.
What happens in our brains when we’re trying to be funny
“His office would smell like syrup for a few weeks, and he had no idea why,” Tomaszewski says. But one day, he quietly shared his suspicions with her — that his cacti were going into heat and releasing pheromones. “It was such a ridiculous sentence, because cacti don’t have a mating cycle, and he is a very intelligent biologist,” she says. Tomaszewski nearly gave away the prank then and there, but ultimately kept it up — even passing the scenting solution to lab colleagues when she moved on — before finally confessing over lunch one day several years later.
This idea of ‘pranking up’ — targeting people in positions of authority — is one of the many unspoken rules of practical jokes, alongside pranking laterally by targeting friends and peers. But to a fault, researchers who spoke to Nature say that pulling pranks on people over whom you hold power is poor form.
Social cues also determine whether pranking is appropriate. Jennifer Phillips, a research associate in genetics at the University of Oregon in Eugene, says that it often comes down to whether it’s “the right time, in the right place, with the right people”. Not all labs embrace a culture of pranking, and group dynamics are constantly in flux as people come and go. But when Phillips joined the university for her PhD in 1998, “the lab was made up of a unique group of people who really put fun in the centre of the table”, she says.
An ongoing prank involved the timers used to track experiments. Good etiquette dictates that people quickly silence beeping alarms to avoid disturbing others, but that didn’t always happen. A first infraction might earn you some gentle ribbing, but that quickly escalated to snack bribes to recover hidden timers, rude words etched into offending timers and, in the worst cases, timers embedded in agarose gel. Phillips says there were few instances in which people didn’t catch on quickly.
Pranks helped to create a more egalitarian environment, she says. “Having fun made it easier to approach each other if someone had a question,” she says, noting that that was especially true for her, as a new student. “And the flip side is that we would also have intense lab meetings, where people would really go hammer and tongs on your data. The collegial lab culture made those criticisms seem more constructive and less personal.”
Why laughter in the lab can help your science
Indeed, among the researchers who spoke to Nature, leveraging humour to strengthen social bonds was a common reason why people prank. For example, Tomaszewski and her labmates were cleaning out lab stocks one day in 2006, when they found a bottle of calcium chloride solution that was one month shy of its 21st birthday. Rather than toss it, the group held a birthday party to celebrate. “We put one of those little triangular birthday hats on it,” she says, and they later adjourned to a local bar called Filthy McNasty’s to toast the bottle’s coming-of-age.
Although targeting junior or new people with pranks is discouraged, it’s perfectly reasonable to bring them in on the joke as co-conspirators. Back in 2015, independent palaeontologist Lisa Buckley pulled the summer rotation students into a long-standing prank war between herself and her husband, fellow palaeontologist Richard McCrea.
Buckley saw the move as a form of teamwork that strengthened otherwise temporary bonds. She and the students printed out cat pictures and crafted dozens of tiny pom-pom cats, which they scattered throughout McCrea’s office at the Peace Region Paleontology Research Centre in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, where the couple worked as curators. In retaliation for these ‘cat wars’, McCrea launched ‘the spidering’ — when Buckley returned from a week of field work, she found her office completely engulfed in fake webs and hundreds of fake spiders, including a giant one over her desk and another dangling underneath. Both Buckley and McCrea discovered cats and spiders among their possessions for years afterwards — squashed between pages in books or hidden in boxes — even after they’d each left for new positions. Buckley says there are probably more still hidden in the lab, along with an Annoyatron noisemaker she left in the ceiling that periodically emitted a cricket chirp.
“I pity the person that has to inhabit any of those offices,” she says.
The purpose of play
Pranking does take time and energy, but some scientists stress that it’s worth the small dent in productivity because of the positive benefits of humour and play — including offsetting the intensity of academic careers. Increasingly, early-career researchers face a demoralizing duo of stagnating wages and poor job prospects. Pranking, researchers say, serves as a pressure-release valve that keeps people invested in the work they’re doing. “Doing something silly with your lab, whether that’s pulling a prank or going out to karaoke, lets you remember that there’s joy in the work,” Tomaszewski says.
A dead millipede in Rachel Thayer’s former lab building inspired passers-by to create a memorial scene, complete with other dearly departed lab specimens.Credit: Rachel Thayer
Rachel Thayer, now a postdoc in evolutionary biology at UC Davis, had a similar experience in 2018 while she was a PhD student at UC Berkeley. For weeks, a dead millipede lay in the stairwell that Thayer used to access her lab, until one day, a funerary scene popped up around it — complete with a headstone, a priest and some shrubbery. Other students quickly added to the display, often using dearly departed model organisms from their work. Thayer contributed a butterfly from her research on the evolution of structural colour, which rested alongside fruit flies and pill bugs. “It changed trudging up and down the stairs into an inside joke,” she says, adding that it was “a light-hearted, silently shared moment in an otherwise boring and repetitive part of the day”.
Collection: Life in the lab
Indeed, researchers recall past pranks with fondness, particularly those who say they have since matured into boring, non-pranking adults. Daniel Bolnick, now an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, was a solid jokester earlier in his career. He once placed a life-like rubber hand in a colleague’s −80 °C freezer and, as a student, designed a poster at a conference claiming to provide scientific evidence of the butterfly effect — an aspect of chaos theory that describes how the flap of a butterfly’s wings can lead to a typhoon on the other side of the world. He watched as his co-prankster, Evan Preisser, now a community ecologist at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, presented the work under an assumed name. “Folks either got it or they didn’t,” Preisser says. “People in the latter group tried to educate us, and a few got agitated that they knew we were wrong but couldn’t prove it.”
Recalling these pranks, Bolnick says, feels cathartic, “because it does bring to mind times when I tapped into the creativity of science.” He adds that he might even feel compelled to start pranking again, albeit beginning with something gentle. As it happens, some of his former students are now faculty members in his department — and as staff of the same station, he thinks they are fair game. “That makes it easy — I know exactly who my first victims would be.”
Earlier this month, the editors at the linguistics journal Syntax publicly announced their resignations in response to changes to the manuscript-handling process imposed by its publisher, Wiley-Blackwell.
“We have come to the conclusion that our position as editors of the journal is no longer tenable,” wrote editors Klaus Abels and Suzanne Flynn in an open letter to authors and reviewers of the journal on 9 March. They added that measures designed to cut costs and tackle a backlog of papers — namely assigning copyediting tasks that were previously handled by Syntax’s independent editorial office to a production team without specialist knowledge of linguistics — meant the journal could “no longer meet the needs of our community”. Wiley-Blackwell did not respond to a request for comment from Nature’snews team.
The move is latest such event in what seems to be an emerging form of protest: the public resignation of academic editors.
Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges
So far this year, the editors of five journals have resigned together, according to an unofficial tally by the website Retraction Watch. This followed 12 such moves in 2023, a big increase over the preceding years (there were 2 such events in both 2021 and 2022). The tally starts in 2015, although earlier events have been recorded.
It isn’t clear whether mass resignations are set to become even more frequent, says Michael Clarke, a publishing consultant at management-consultant firm Clarke & Esposito in Washington DC. But he adds that they are getting a lot of attention. Many mass resignations, Clarke says, are in response to changes to business models in the publishing industry.
This was the case for editors and editorial board members of the journal Critical Public Health, published by Taylor & Francis, who resigned last July. The journal’s former co-editor-in-chief Judith Green, a sociologist at the University of Exeter, UK, says that the move was prompted partly by the publisher’s plans to make the journal open access. “It wasn’t that we were opposed to the principle of open access,” she says. Instead, the editors were deeply opposed to the article-processing-charge model, in which authors are charged fees to publish their papers open access. The team decided to resign only after a year of discussions with the publisher about alternative models failed to produce a compromise, Green says. A spokesperson for Taylor & Francis referred Nature to a statement issued at the time of the resignation, saying they publisher was disappointed by the resignations, but was looking forward to recruiting a new editorial team.
“The big theme [of mass resignations] is this tension of competing priorities,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. “You have publishers — most of them are for profit — that demand and require constant growth because that’s what the stock market requires. You have researchers — academics or editors, for the most part, who champion quality and maybe depth and time to review. Those are in opposition.”
More than a protest
Clarke says that he can see why editors who are dissatisfied might take matters into their own hands. “If an academic community wishes to control the business decisions of a journal, the best way to do that is to own the journal,” he says. “These mass resignations were all cases where the editors were working on journals owned by the publisher.”
“The resignation is not so much the point. The point is creating an alternative top-quality channel of scholarly communication,” says Abels, a linguistics researcher at University College London.
Open-access row prompts editorial board of Elsevier journal to resign
Groups of editors who resign sometimes go on to found new publications, over which they have more control. The former editors of Critical Public Health are in the process of setting up a new journal called The Journal of Critical Public Health, hosted by the international Critical Public Health Network in Edinburgh, UK. A similar outcome resulted from the mass resignation of editors at Elsevier journal NeuroImage last April, who have since set up another journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT press.
Stephen Smith, a biomedical engineer at the University of Oxford, UK, was editor-in-chief of NeuroImage, and now holds the same role at the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, which launched in last July. He is pleased with what came out of the mass resignation. “Things are going extremely well,” he says. “As of March 2024, we have received 700 submissions and published 125 papers.”
Abels and his colleagues plan to form a new journal, under a diamond open-access model in which there are no fees for authors or readers, hosted by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) at Birkbeck, University of London. He says that the editors were galvanized to resign by earlier resignations, but adds that those tempted to resign should look beyond using the move as a protest. They should focus instead on finding a home for a new journal and the academic community. Smith agrees: “I think of our move as being more than just ‘protest’, which implies that we academics lack the power to change the publication system directly.” Such change can be achieved, Smith says, by “starting new journals that are open, not-for-profit, and have high academic standards”.
Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti was interviewed by Nature’s Careers team in 2023.Credit: Massimo Di Vita/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty
How can Nature’s journalists reach out to the broadest possible set of scientists and research-associated professionals in our journalism? That’s the question at the heart of our three-year effort to track the diversity of the sources interviewed in the journal’s News, Features and Careers articles, and in audio and video content.
Journalism is a mirror of the community in which it exists — as communities and societies change, journalistic practice and content have to keep up, both to stay relevant and to reflect the needs and priorities of audiences accurately. That’s why, in April 2021, Nature’s journalism teams began recording three characteristics of diversity for their written, audio and video content: the pronouns of the people interviewed, their geographical location and their career stage.
Men dominate the senior rungs of science and, historically, scientists and institutions in North America and Europe have dominated scientific publishing. Both trends are starting to change, albeit at different speeds.
We published an initial set of statistics last February, covering the period from 1 April 2021 to 31 January 2023. Here, we provide an update for 1 February 2023 to 31 January 2024 (see ‘Diversity in Nature’s journalism’).
Our previous analysis of 1,241 written articles, podcasts and video content revealed that 59.6% of sources quoted or paraphrased used he/him pronouns; 76.6% were from North America or Europe; and 67.9% were established in their careers.
For the 862 journalistic pieces in the current analysis, Nature’s staff journalists and freelance writers interviewed 3,679 sources. Of these, 3,569 (97%) provided their pronouns. These broke down into 2,147 sources (60.2%) who used he/him pronouns, 1,401 (39.3%) who used she/her and 21 (0.6%) who had they/them or other pronouns. These ratios are broadly unchanged from our earlier data.
In total, 3,635 sources gave their geographical location. Of those, 2,865 (78.8%) were based in either North America or Europe, and 770 (21.2%) in the rest of the world. That represents a decrease in regional diversity compared with our previous analysis, which showed that 23.4% of sources were outside North America and Europe.
Nature publishes too few papers from women researchers — that must change
Finally, when it comes to career stage, 3,478 sources provided data. Of these, 2,158 (62%) identified as established in their careers — including sources, such as professors and those who hold tenure, and non-academic ones with senior roles. Some 18.8% of sources fell in the ‘early career’ category, including graduate students, postdocs and non-tenured faculty members, compared with 19.6% previously. Around 19.1% fell into the ‘other’ category, which includes people in non-academic environments, such as industry, campaign organizations and policy. This group’s share in Nature’s journalistic content has increased from 12.5%.
There are some caveats to our analysis. These data were gathered by Nature’s journalism teams in North America, Europe and the Asia–Pacific region. They do not include journalistic content commissioned by our other offices. Nor do they include content written by external authors, such as World Views and Careers columns. Furthermore, the results have not been tested for statistical significance.
Still, the results provide a good overview for a large proportion of Nature’s journalism. We realize that reporting our findings is only the first step towards improving the diversity of our sources. Nature’s journalism teams are currently expanding their networks and are also looking at best practice in media and publishing industries.
Diverse sources produce stronger journalism — and better represent today’s global scientific community. The shape and priorities of world science are changing, and we must adapt to reflect those changing realities.
Members of the US Supreme Court expressed skepticism today about arguments from a group of anti-abortion organizations and physicians seeking to restrict use of the abortion drug mifepristone in the United States. The group is challenging the US Food and Drug Administration’s decision to expand access to the medication.
The justices must decide whether the challengers are qualified to bring suit in the first place — in legal terms, whether the challengers have standing. If the answer is yes, then the court’s nine justices must decide whether the FDA’s actions to facilitate access to mifepristone are valid. A decision is expected in June.
Changes made by the agency over the past eight years allowed the drug to be used through 10 weeks of pregnancy, rather than the previous limit of 7 weeks. The changes also relaxed the requirement that the drug be dispensed in person, allowing it to be sent through the mail. If the court invalidates those actions, mifepristone access would be restricted nationwide. The Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the decision legalizing abortion nationally, in 2022.
US lawsuit threatens access to abortion drug: the science behind the case
Eva Temkin, a lawyer specializing in FDA regulatory issues at the law firm Paul Hastings, who is based in Washington DC, notes that the justices seemed particularly skeptical that the plaintiffs had standing. The court didn’t focus much on the appropriateness of the FDA’s actions, she says. “I am very hopeful that the Supreme Court was not immersed in those issues as much because they recognized how outrageous it would be to find the FDA scientific judgment here was not exercised appropriately.”
Reproductive health researchers say that the case has no scientific merit, because mifepristone has proved to be safe and effective. They also say that a ruling against the FDA would undermine the agency’s authority to regulate medicines. Mifepristone, which the FDA approved in 2000, is used in combination with the drug misoprostol to induce abortion. Endorsed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the pairing is the most commonly prescribed regimen for medication abortion in the United States, where 63% of abortions are carried out using pills.
A question of standing
During oral arguments today, justices questioned the anti-abortion group’s allegation that the physicians it represents could be harmed by the widespread access to mifepristone. Emergency room doctors, the group says, might have to treat people who experience complications as a result of a medication-induced abortion. Treating the aftereffects of a therapy to which they have ethical objections would cause emotional suffering and distress, the group says.
“I’m worried that there is a significant mismatch, in this case between the claimed injury and the remedy that’s being sought,” said justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at the hearing. “The obvious common-sense remedy would be to provide them with an exemption, that they don’t have to participate in this procedure,” she added. Existing federal and state laws already allow health care providers to refuse to perform abortion-related care, noted solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, who was representing the US government at the hearing.
“This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule,” said justice Neil Gorsuch.
But some justices expressed sympathy for the anti-abortion group’s arguments. “Maybe what (the FDA) did was perfectly lawful,” said justice Samuel Alito. “But shouldn’t somebody be able to challenge that in court?”
Retracted studies
The case started in 2022, when the anti-abortion group filed suit against the FDA claiming that the drug’s approval in 2000 — and subsequent decisions that facilitated access to the drug — had “potentially serious and life-threatening effects on women and girls.”
Influential abortion-pill studies retracted: the science behind the decision
In 2023, the judge overseeing the case, Matthew Kacsmaryk in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled in favour of the plaintiffs, invalidating mifepristone’s FDA approval. But the Supreme Court put the ruling on hold, which allowed mifepristone to remain on the market while the case was being appealed.
In his decision, Kacsmaryk relied on problematic studies to question mifepristone’s safety. Two papers1,2 he cited were retracted in February because of problems with study design and methodology and errors in data analysis, among other issues. The prevailing scientific literature3,4 contradicts the papers that Kacsmaryk cited.
Later that year, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that mifepristone should remain an approved drug but invalidated the FDA’s recent actions to make it more accessible. The Supreme Court’s stay on Kacsmaryk’s ruling meant that the Fifth Circuit decision didn’t take effect immediately.
Hanging in the balance
If the Supreme Court decides that the anti-abortion group has no standing, the case might be dismissed, Temkin says. If, however, the high court agrees with the Fifth Circuit judges, the resulting rollback in mifepristone accessibility would especially affect pregnant people who seek abortion care later in their pregnancy and those who have difficulty attending an in-person appointment with an abortion provider.
The decision could also have implications for drug development in general, Temkin says. The Fifth Circuit called for a cumbersome and unprecedented new standard for drug approval. If the Supreme Court follows that lead, “that would create delays, that would create inefficiencies and costs and would ultimately undermine patient access to scientifically appropriate medicines,” Temkin says.
Such a decision “would have nothing to do with science or medicine or protecting the health of pregnant people,” says Heidi Moseson, an epidemiologist at Ibis Reproductive Health, a global research organization that supports abortion rights, who is based in Oakland, California.
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
The front of the Simons Observatory’s Large Aperture Telescope Receiver, the largest receiver for observing the cosmic microwave background built so far.Credit: Mark Devlin/University of Pennsylvania
In a few weeks, a new observatory high in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert will be ready to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with unprecedented sensitivity. One of the goals of the Simons Observatory is to find fingerprints left in the CMB by gravitational waves that originated from the Big Bang itself. These would provide incontrovertible evidence for cosmic inflation, a brief moment when the expansion of the early universe is thought to have accelerated hugely. There is no guarantee that the inflation signature, if it exists, is strong enough for the Simons Observatory to detect, says cosmologist Suzanne Staggs, who is the observatory’s co-director. “But oh my gosh — if they were right there, it would be amazing.”
A 62-year-old man with end-stage renal failure has become the first living person to receive a pig kidney transplant. The kidney was taken from a miniature pig carrying a record 69 genomic edits, which were aimed at preventing rejection of the donated organ and reducing the risk that a virus lurking in the organ could infect the recipient. So far, the patient is recovering well and the pig kidney is producing urine and showing other signs of a working organ. This early success has raised researchers’ hopes for larger clinical trials involving pig organs. It follows from news last week that surgeons say they have transplanted a genetically modified pig liver into a person for the first time.
Studies in mice and humans suggest that being pregnant can increase a person’s ‘biological age’ by a couple of years — but giving birth reverses these changes. Biological age can be estimated from patterns of DNA methylation, which occurs when chemical methyl groups are added to DNA. The patterns reflect the stresses that a body accrues over time. The work supports the idea that “biological age is quite flexible; it’s a fluid parameter. It can go up and down”, says biomedical scientist Vadim Gladyshev.
China has launched a spacecraft to the Moon that will act as a communications link between Earth and the lunar far side.Queqiao-2, named after a folktale in which magpies form a bridge across the sky, will support China’s Chang’e-6 mission, set to launch in May. Chang’e-6 aims to become the first mission to collect samples from the far side of the Moon, which is permanently hidden from Earth. Queqiao-2 will also support future Chinese missions to the lunar south pole and will take over from its predecessor, Queqiao-1.
There is a type of test for infections such as COVID-19 that is almost as accurate as a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test — which has to be done by a laboratory — and as easy and quick as the rapid antigen tests many of us have used at home. They are ‘isothermal tests’ — so-called because they operate at a consistent temperature, eliminating the need for the repetitive heating and cooling cycles of PCR. They’re comparatively expensive and have stumbled over bureaucratic hurdles. Still, developers are pushing forward, targeting applications such as at-home testing for sexually transmitted infections.
This article is part of the editorially independent supplement Nature Outlook: Medical diagnostics, produced with financial support from Seegene.
A study that looked at home-grown food and community gardens in the United States and Europe unveiled a surprising conclusion: the carbon footprint of food from urban agriculture is six times greater than the conventional, commercial version. Allotmenteers recoiled from the result, but the authors — keen home-growers themselves — emphasize that their findings can help make urban efforts (which have worthwhile social benefits) more carbon-efficient. Upcycling refuse as infrastructure such as raised beds, using equipment for a long time, collecting rainwater for irrigation and practising optimal composting can all help. And for some carbon-intensive commercial products, such as tomatoes, growing locally is already on par with big farms.
Peggy Oti-Boateng, a Ghanaian biochemist, and Lise Korsten, a South African food-security researcher, are at the helm of the African Academy of Sciences at a critical time. They have a new strategic plan, with five areas of focus, and a desire to recruit scientists in the African diaspora as members. “We have lost a group of young academics who should have now been leaders on the continent, the professors of the future — and maybe we can partially bring them back,” says Korsten, the academy’s first female president.
Mariton Antonia Bornas is chief of the Volcano Monitoring and Eruption Prediction Division of PHIVOLCS in Quezon City.Credit: Dave Tacon for Nature
“We have a lot of natural disasters in the Philippines,” says Mariton Antonia Bornas, pictured here standing next to a monitoring station overlooking Taal volcano, which erupted in January 2020. As chief of the Volcano Monitoring and Eruption Prediction Division, her job is to provide early warning of potential eruptions and to monitor levels of harmful emissions. The hardest part of the job is “dealing with the non-science,” she says. “Responding to people online — even to psychics predicting an eruption — is part of my job and it doubles my work. I have to be a communicator, not just a scientist.” (Nature | 2 min read)
Quote of the day
Engineer Caleb Chung, who invented Furby — a big-eyed toy that gave the impression of being a sort of proto-chatbot — chimes in on people’s tendency to ascribe personalities to AI systems such as ChatGPT. (The New Yorker | 14 min read)
Credit: The Aldo Leopold Foundation and University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
Estella Bergere Leopold was a palaeobotanist whose studies of fossil pollen and spores helped to reconstruct past environments and link them to the present. Her investigations of the Cenozoic era (from 66 million years ago to the present) provided some of the first insights into the evolution of modern plant communities and the factors that governed their development, including the consequences of long-term climate change, mountain building and volcanism. Few researchers before her had traced the rise of present-day ecosystems through time, and her discoveries helped to connect the relatively well-studied ice-age influences on vegetation with deep-time geological processes.
Leopold, who has died aged 97, was an ardent conservationist who argued that nature should be cherished and protected. She thought that science should be used in defence of the planet; this is evident in her writings, lectures and political activism.
Leopold was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the youngest daughter of conservationist Aldo Leopold and his wife Estella Bergere Leopold. All five Leopold children became esteemed scientists and conservationists in their own right. Her childhood, particularly her time spent at the family cabin, called ‘the Shack’, in central Wisconsin spurred an early interest in ecology. Leopold graduated with a degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948 and a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. She moved to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to join a new graduate programme in conservation headed by Paul Sears, a pioneer in palynology (pollen analysis), and also to study with mathematical ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson and his former student Edward Deevey Jr. Her dissertation focused on the history of New England forests through the analysis of pollen and spores extracted from peat deposits, and palynology became her main research tool.
Current conservation policies risk accelerating biodiversity loss
After graduating from Yale in 1955, Leopold was one of the few women who joined the US Geological Survey in Lakewood, Colorado, as a scientist. By meticulously comparing fossil pollen and spores with modern ones, she reconstructed past floras — innovative and insightful findings at the time. Her early study of the Eniwetok and Bikini atolls in the Pacific Ocean revealed the existence of a tropical rainforest in the south Pacific during the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5 million years ago). She examined Cenozoic plant-fossil sites for evidence of the origins of modern flora. Leopold described the transition from ancient species to newer variants in the Rocky Mountains of western North America, which showed an earlier modernization trend in the middle of the continent than in coastal areas, as a result of greater cooling, seasonality and mountain uplift.
Her research in Colorado on the Florissant fossil beds — well-preserved sediments from a 34-million-year-old lake — spurred her to lead a conservation effort in the area. In 1969, the 2,428-hectare Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was established. Other successful actions included opposing oil-shale development in western Colorado, protesting dam building in the US Grand Canyon and stopping the shipping of highly radioactive materials through waterways that connected the Pacific Northwest region to the Pacific Ocean. Leopold also served on several conservation boards and was president of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, which she founded with her siblings to promote ethical land stewardship.
From 1976 to 1982, she directed the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle and maintained an active research programme there, studying the palaeoecology and palaeoflora of the western United States and comparable settings in China. She officially retired in 2000, but remained active in research until her death.
Leopold recognized the power of scientific credentials in environmental activism. Throughout her career, she promoted palaeobotany as a tool for land protection. She argued that the value of a place was partly the result of its ecological history and how environmental events shape it. One of those events is fire. Using ethnographic and palaeoecological studies, Leopold highlighted the importance of Native American burning practices before European settlement for maintaining the health of prairies and woodland; she actively supported deliberate fire management.
Address the growing urgency of fungal diseases in crops
In 1969, Estella was named conservationist of the year by the Colorado Wildlife Federation; she received the International Cosmos Prize for contributions to conservation in 2010. But those awards, and numerous others, scarcely do justice to the personal influence that she had on students. I met Estella at the US Geological Survey as an undergraduate student and was overjoyed when she accepted me for graduate studies at the University of Washington. Her unbridled enthusiasm for science and environmental protection was inspiring. Estella had what we students called a ‘1,000-volt look’ whenever an idea piqued her interest — to experience this was electrifying.
Estella will be remembered for her important contributions to ecology and for a life-long crusade to protect the land. More than most individuals, her scientific interests were inextricably linked to her environmental activism. She was keenly aware of her family heritage and, like her father, advocated simple outdoor living as a way to learn and appreciate nature. As a woman in a male-dominated field, she maintained a strong sense of humour and fearlessness throughout her career; yet, she also had immense grace and generosity. Estella leaves behind colleagues, former students and environmental activists who treasure her influence and their time with her.
