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how WebAssembly is changing scientific computing

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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 test: the statistical language R. “We had no control, really, over what devices those students were using,” says Stagg.

Stagg and his colleagues set up a server so that students could log in, input their code and automatically test it. But with 150 students trying to connect at the same time, the homegrown system ground to a halt. “Things were a little shaky,” he recalls: “It was very, very slow.”

Frustrated, Stagg spent the Christmas holidays devising a solution. R code runs in a piece of software called an interpreter. Instead of having students install the interpreter on their own computers, or execute their code on a remote server, he would have the interpreter run in the students’ web browsers. To do that, Stagg used a tool that is rapidly gaining popularity in scientific computing: WebAssembly.

Code written in any of a few dozen languages, including C, C++ or Rust, can be compiled into the WebAssembly (or Wasm) instruction format, allowing it to run in a software-based environment inside a browser. No external servers are required. All modern browsers support WebAssembly, so code that works on one computer should produce the same result on any other. Best of all, no installation is needed, so scientists who are not authorized to install software — or lack the know-how or desire to do so — can use it.

WebAssembly allows developers to recycle their finely tuned code, so they don’t have to rewrite it in the language of the web: JavaScript. Google Earth, a 3D representation of Earth from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is built on WebAssembly. So are the web version of Adobe Photoshop and the design tool Figma. Stagg, who is based in Newcastle but is now a senior software engineer at Posit, a software company in Boston, Massachusetts, solved his exam server issues by porting the R interpreter to WebAssembly in the webR package.

Daniel Ji, an undergraduate computer-science student in Niema Moshiri’s laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, used WebAssembly to build browser interfaces for many of his group’s epidemiological resources, including one that identifies evolutionary relationships between viral genomes1. Moshiri has used those tools to run analyses on smartphones, game systems and low-powered Chromebook laptops. “You might be able to have people run these tools without even needing a standard desktop or laptop computer,” Moshiri says. “They could actually maybe run it on some low-energy or portable device.”

That being said, porting an application to WebAssembly can be a complicated process full of trial and error — and one that’s right for only select applications.

Reusability and restrictions

Robert Aboukhalil’s journey with WebAssembly began with an application that he created in 2017 for quality control of raw DNA-sequencing data. The necessary algorithms already existed in a tool called Seqtk, but they weren’t written in JavaScript. So Aboukhalil, a software engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in Redwood City, California, rewrote them — but his implementations were relatively slow. Retooling his application to use WebAssembly improved performance 20-fold. “It was awesome, because it gave me more features that I didn’t have to write myself. And it happened to make the whole website a lot faster.”

C and C++ code can be ported to WebAssembly using the free Emscripten compiler; Rust programmers can use ‘wasm-pack’, an add-on to Rust’s package-manager and compilation utility, ‘cargo’. Python and R code cannot be compiled into WebAssembly, but there are WebAssembly ports of their interpreters called Pyodide and webR, which can run scripting code in these languages.

Quarto, a publishing system that allows researchers to embed and execute R, Python and Javascript code in documents and slide decks, is compatible with WebAssembly, too, using the quarto-webr extension (see our example at go.nature.com/4c1ex). WebAssembly can also be used in Observable computational notebooks, which have uses in data science and visualization and run JavaScript natively. There’s even a version of Jupyter, another computational-notebook platform, called JupyterLite that is built on WebAssembly.

Aboukhalil has ported more than 30 common computational-biology utilities to WebAssembly. His collection of ‘recipes’ — that is, code changes — that allow the underlying code to be compiled is available at biowasm.com. “Compiling things to WebAssembly, unfortunately, isn’t straightforward,” Aboukhalil explains. “You often have to modify the original code to get around things that WebAssembly doesn’t support.”

For instance, modern operating systems can handle 64-bit numbers. WebAssembly, however, is limited to 32 bits, and can access only 232 bytes (4 gigabytes) of memory. Furthermore, it cannot directly access a computer’s file system or its open network connections. And it’s not multithreaded; many algorithms depend on this form of parallelization, which allows different parts of a computation to be performed simultaneously. “A lot of older code won’t compile into WebAssembly, because it assumes that it can do things that can’t be done,” Stagg says.

Compounding these challenges, scientific software sits atop a tower of interconnected libraries, all of which must be ported to WebAssembly for the code to run. Jeroen Ooms, a software engineer in Utrecht, the Netherlands, has ported roughly 85% of the R-universe project’s 23,000 open-source R libraries to WebAssembly. But only about half of those actually work, he says, because some underlying libraries have not yet been converted.

Then, there’s the process of web development. Bioinformaticians don’t typically write code in JavaScript, but it is needed to create the web pages in which those tools will run. They also have to manually handle tasks such as shuttling data between the two language systems and freeing any memory they use – tasks that are handled automatically in pure JavaScript.

As a result, WebAssembly is often used to build relatively simple tools or applied to computationally intensive pieces of larger web applications. As a postdoc, bioinformatician Luiz Irber, then at the University of California, Davis, used WebAssembly to make a Rust language tool called Branchwater broadly accessible. Branchwater converts sequence data into numerical representations called hashes, which are used to search databases of microbial DNA sequences. Rather than having users install a conversion tool or upload their data to remote servers, Irber’s WebAssembly implementation allows researchers to convert their files locally.

Bioinformatician Aaron Lun and software engineer Jayaram Kancherla at Genentech in South San Francisco, California, used WebAssembly to implement kana, a browser-based analysis platform for single-cell RNA-sequencing data sets. The goal, Lun and Kancherla say, was to allow researchers to explore their data without a bioinformatician’s help. About 200 users now use kana each month.

The porting process took “six months, maybe a year’s worth of weekends”, Lun says, and was complicated by the fact that they were starting from C++ libraries glued together with R code. But that was nothing compared with the challenge of crafting a smooth, friendly user experience. “I can see why web developers get paid so much,” he laughs.

Powering up

Developers who need more computing power can supercharge their tools through a related project, WebGPU, which provides access to users’ graphics cards.

Will Usher, a scientific-visualization engineer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and his team used WebGPU and WebAssembly to implement a data-visualization algorithm called ‘Marching Cubes’, with which they manipulated terabyte-scale data sets in a browser2. Computer scientist Johanna Beyer’s team at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a visualization tool for gigabyte-sized whole-slide microscopy data, using an algorithm called ‘Residency Octree’3. And developers at UK firm Oxford Nanopore Technologies built Bonito, a drag-and-drop basecalling tool that translates raw signals into nucleotide sequences, for the company’s sequencing platform.

Chris Seymour, Oxford Nanopore’s vice-president of platform development, says the company’s aim was to make its tools accessible to scientists who lack the skills to install software or are barred from doing so. Installation can be “a barrier to entry for certain users”, he explains. But WebAssembly is “a zero-install solution”: “They just hit the URL, and they’re good to go.”

There are other benefits, too. Data are never transferred to external servers, alleviating privacy concerns. And because the browser isolates the environment in which WebAssembly code can be executed, it is unlikely to harm the user’s system.

Perhaps most importantly, WebAssembly allows researchers to explore software and data with minimal friction, thus enabling development of educational applications. Aboukhalil has created a series of tutorials at sandbox.bio, with which users can test-drive bioinformatics tools in an in-browser text console. Statistician Eric Nantz at pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, is part of a pilot project to use webR to share clinical-trial data with the US Food and Drug Administration — a process that would otherwise require each scientist to install custom computational dashboards. Using WebAssembly, he says, “will minimize, from the reviewer’s perspective, many of the steps that they had to take to get the application running on their machines”.

WebAssembly, says Niema, “bridges that gap that we have in bioinformatics, where bio people are the users, computer-science people are the developers, and how do we translate [between them]?”

Still, brace yourself for complications. “WebAssembly is a great technology, but it’s also a niche technology,” Aboukhalil says. “There’s a small subset of applications where it makes sense to [use it], but when it does make sense it can be very powerful. It’s just a matter of figuring out which use cases those are.”

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sign language brings benefits to the organic chemistry classroom

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Dr. Christina Goudreau Collison teaches and signs at a whiteboard

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 for deaf people and those with hearing loss. Meet the scientists, sign-language specialists and students working to add scientific terms and concepts to sign languages. In the last of four articles showcasing their efforts, organic chemist Christina Goudreau Collison at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, which is also home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), describes how working with Deaf students to create clear signs for organic chemistry terms boosted the students’ academic outcomes and how sign-language could help other students with non-conventional learning needs.

This is my 20th year teaching undergraduate students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York. I’ve always had somewhere between one and ten Deaf students in my classroom, but they’ve been in a sea of hearing students. The university provides sign-language interpreters for courses, but I recognized how exhausting it was for Deaf students to keep up in my classes with the time lag that comes with interpreting. Sometimes it felt like I could almost see them thinking, “I’m just going to figure this out later. I’ll try to read the book.” They were clearly not getting the same classroom experience as the hearing students.

I attributed the Deaf students’ academic struggles to the painstaking need to fingerspell the organic chemistry terms that lacked proper signs. Their performance was noticeably lower than that of their hearing peers. And we rarely had Deaf students conducting independent research in our laboratories. I thought, “What can be done about that?” I have always gestured with my hands and body a lot when teaching, and I used to make up little terms to prompt the interpreter, calling different reactions or transition states of molecules names such as the ‘spaceship model’, the ‘bridge’, or the ‘cha-cha’. I would categorize these terms to help the students, but also to let the interpreter know that I was using a sign or doing one of my dances, so that they could just point to me.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, when my colleague Jennifer Swartzenberg, a senior lecturer in chemistry who is fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and a former student of mine, told me that there were no signs for many scientific terms that I began to understand the depth of the problem. Working with Jenn, who was vocal with me about things that I could change in my teaching, along with a particularly big Deaf class that was keen to work with me, really helped. A lot of them said: “What you do with your hands is really helpful. Let’s make it work even better.”

Word building

We identified several challenges that our Deaf students were experiencing during the organic chemistry course. One issue is that interpreters don’t know the science. Most of them don’t even have a scientific background, let alone knowledge of general chemistry or organic chemistry. Another issue is the absence of chemistry vocabulary in ASL, which means that long names of reactions, such as the Grignard reaction or the Diels–Alder reaction, need to be fingerspelled.

What did help — and this is where it gets controversial — was taking away the names of the reactions and categorizing every reaction into its transition state. So, instead of memorizing what felt like 300 named reactions, the students and interpreters needed to learn only 10 transition states. And every reaction is either one or a combination of those states. I don’t totally discard named reactions. They’re in the book, but I don’t test the students on them.

From there, a group of us, including several Deaf students, started creating a sign-language lexicon specific to organic chemistry. We made videos of the signs so they could be used for interpreter training, as well as teaching the next class of students. We also had the signs added to the ASLCORE website, a free sign-language vocabulary resource curated by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), which is based at the RIT. The Deaf students and I have argued over some signs, but it’s their language, so they have final say. I’m the person who makes suggestions for scientific content.

It’s important to note that these are not official ASL terms. They are part of a sign-language lexicon for organic chemistry. It’s a very specific context, so we took some liberties. For example, the sign I use for ‘tetrahedral’, the 3D geometry of a carbon atom’s bonds in certain molecules, is like this: my hands are held flat with my thumbs pointed out, one hand is positioned in the x plane and one in the y plane. The hands then ‘click’ together to convey the 3D shape. This is so easy to do, and everyone in my class knows what it means. Everyone accepts it, and the Deaf students don’t even laugh at it, despite the fact that in ASL the sign has a sexual connotation. But, I’m not going to use that sign in a conversation about tetrahedral groups outside my classroom.

As we incorporated the signed vocabulary and the ASLCORE videos into the course, we found that students who relied solely on an interpreter started to outperform hearing students on the course. And this was consistent in a study1 we conducted from 2016 to 2019. Once our course culture changed to include more signing, the Deaf students not only improved in the classroom but also began to seek out research opportunities more often than they did previously.

We also started using sign language more for everyone, not just the Deaf students. I teach all my students signs for the most common answers to organic chemistry questions. When I ask the class, “Why do we get this product from this reaction?”, I ask the students to sign the answer back to me instead of saying it. It’s nice, because instead of someone shouting out the answer before the Deaf students can sign it and wait for the interpreter to voice their response, everyone signs it at the same time. It eliminates the interpreting time lag.

Broader benefits

We’ve created this organic chemistry lexicon with the Deaf community in mind, but we are starting to see its universal design advantages. What’s good for a Deaf person might also benefit someone else — similar to the way that a ramp into a restaurant that might have been built for people who use wheelchairs is also helpful for a person with a pram.

In a current study, we are tracking the progress of students who speak English as a second language and those who are neurodivergent. If there’s a visual sign that anchors the meaning of a scientific term, then it might help these students to keep up as the lectures move forwards.

This project has benefited more than just the Deaf community. I’ve heard from some of the Deaf students that they are proud that their language is helping others as well. Sign language has a beautiful way of saying a lot in very compact gestures.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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meet the Oscar-winning movie’s specialist advisers

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Cillian Murphy in a scene from the Universal Pictures film Oppenheimer.

Cillian Murphy picked up the best actor award for his portrayal of Oppenheimer.Credit: Landmark Media/Alamy

Oppenheimer won big at last night’s Oscars, scooping 7 awards out of 13 nominations, including best picture. The film has been lauded for its accurate portrayal of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, and its examination of both the human and scientific toll of the Manhattan Project, the research programme that developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

To ensure the film was as accurate as possible, director Christopher Nolan turned to several science advisers for information on Oppenheimer and his life, and the project itself, which culminated in the Trinity Bomb nuclear test on 16 July 1945 and the subsequent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, bringing the Second World War to a close at immense human cost.

Nature spoke to three of those advisers for some behind-the-scenes insight into the film’s creation.

Robbert Dijkgraaf, a theoretical physicist and currently the Dutch minister for education, was the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 2012 to 2022, a job Oppenheimer had also held, from 1947 to 1966. Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is a close friend of Nolan’s and had worked with him on a number of previous projects, including the depiction of the gargantuan black hole in the film Interstellar (2014). And David Saltzberg, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, worked as a scientific consultant for other productions, such as The Big Bang Theory, before applying his expertise to Oppenheimer.

What was your involvement in Oppenheimer?

Dijkgraaf: In 2021, Nolan wanted to come and visit, to see the place where Oppenheimer had lived and worked for almost 20 years. I also lived in that house and, for 10 years, worked in the same office that Oppenheimer once used. We had a long discussion about Oppenheimer, but also about physics, which I loved.

Thorne: I spoke with Cillian Murphy about his portrayal of Oppenheimer for the movie. I knew Oppenheimer when I was a graduate student at Princeton, from 1962 to 1965, and a postdoc from 1965 to 1966, so there was some discussion about Oppenheimer as a person.

Saltzberg: I was called in to help out with the production in scenes that were filmed in Los Angeles. I worked mostly with the prop manager. That involved things like deciding what was on the chalkboards, or what equations Oppenheimer handed to Einstein to show whether the atmosphere would catch fire.

Tell us about some of your interactions with the director and cast

Dijkgraaf: Nolan visited Princeton twice to tour the premises. I remember we walked from the house to the institute. It’s this beautiful walk with nice trees. I remember telling him it’s the perfect commute, because Einstein and [Austrian physicist] Kurt Gödel always walked along that path. In the movie, Lewis Strauss meets Oppenheimer and he points out the house and says “it’s the perfect commute”. I thought, ‘wait a moment — this is a very familiar scene!’

I was struck that Nolan was really, really interested in what it means to be a physicist.

I also remember he really appreciated the pond at the institute. Quite a few of the scenes in the movie are shot near the pond — it’s a favourite place for many people there. It’s a place to think and contemplate.

Saltzberg: I sometimes had to explain the physics of a line of dialogue to the actors, enough that they knew the emotional truth of the line and why they were saying it. There was one particular line in the script which was incredibly complicated, about off-diagonal matrix elements and quantum mechanics. Even when I read it I had trouble understanding exactly what it was saying. Cillian really wanted me to explain it to him. We got there, I think, but it was difficult.

A similar thing happened with Josh Hartnett, who played [American nuclear physicist] Ernest Lawrence. Every time he had a spare moment, he would come and talk to me about physics. It was uncanny because he was already in makeup and costume. I never met Lawrence, but I’ve seen plenty of pictures, and it was just eerie. He looked like Lawrence walking around the room.

What did you make of the science in the movie?

Saltzberg: It was wonderfully accurate. It’s really amazing. Christopher Nolan clearly understood the science.

There’s a scene in which Oppenheimer is writing on the chalkboard explaining that nuclear fission is impossible, when Lawrence walks in and says “well, [American physicist Luis Walter] Alvarez just did it next door”. So I had some equations put on the board that Oppenheimer might have had that proved fission is impossible. Most of the audience wouldn’t recognize that, but it made me feel good.

Dijkgraaf: It was really well done. I loved that the movie consistently looks through the eyes of Oppenheimer. The physics discussions were very good — the right equations were on the blackboards!

What was Oppenheimer like as a person?

Thorne: He was just a superb mentor, extremely effective. He had enormous breadth and an extremely quick mind. He had this amazing ability to grasp things very quickly and see connections, which was a major factor in his success as the leader of the atomic bomb project.

Dijkgraaf: He was both a scientific leader and a government adviser. At that time, Einstein, who was quite crucial in starting up the atomic bomb project, really turned into a father of the peace movement. A character who wasn’t in the movie, [Hungarian-American mathematician] John von Neumann, wanted to bomb the Soviet Union, so he was completely on the opposite side. Oppenheimer was trying to walk the reasonable path between those two extremes, and he was punished for it. So I often feel his character generates these mixed feelings. It’s a fascinating example for anyone who wants to be a scientist and play a role in public debate.

Is it satisfying to see a science-based film get such recognition at the Oscars?

Thorne: It’s wonderful it’s got this level of attention. It’s a film that has messages that are tremendously important for the era we’re in. Hopefully it raises the awareness of the danger of nuclear weapons and the crucial issue of arms control.

Dijkgraaf: We often complain there’s no content in popular culture. For me, the biggest surprise was that this difficult movie about a difficult topic and a difficult man, shot in a difficult way, became a hit around the world. I feel that’s very encouraging. The hidden life of physicists has become a part of popular culture, and rightly so.

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This geologist communicates science from the ski slopes

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A woman in pink helmet, blue coat and yellow trousers skiing downhill with trees in the background.

Karin Kirk skiing.Credit: Chris Kerr

Karin Kirk is a freelance science journalist who has built a career on icy ground. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, a corner of the northwestern United States known for its snow-capped mountains and vast wilderness areas. There, she balances her work as a science writer and climate educator with her job as a skiing instructor and ridge guide — a professional with the expertise to guide skiers through trails beyond the ski lifts, accessible only by hiking.

Kirk tells Nature how she finds a balance between her two interrelated careers.

How did you get started on your multidimensional career path?

I was teaching undergraduates at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York — one of my first jobs after graduating in geology from Montana State University in Bozeman — and there was a nearby ski area that had night skiing. I found I could teach geology during the day and teach skiing at night. Ever since then, I’ve never let go of either of those pieces of my career. It’s an ongoing struggle,but my motivation to keep the right balance between work and life has been really strong. If someone right now offered me the ultimate dream writing job, but it was full time and it meant I couldn’t ski or go out and do all these other things I do, I don’t think I would accept it.

I feel really fortunate. Building a career is hard for everyone, but it’s harder for people in minority groups, first-generation university students and people who cannot afford to take big financial risks like going freelance. I am incredibly lucky that my husband and I could float for a bit and live on a reduced income when I started freelancing.

What challenges have you faced in maintaining that balance?

In science, I’ve had colleagues who really don’t know what to make of the fact that I have serious professional commitments that are not to do with research. Not everyone appreciates that, and some people see me as uncommitted. It was a theme more when I was in academia, because people are very used to the total dedication to that path.

Probably the hardest thing for me was getting started as a freelance science writer once I left academia. Going out on one’s own is exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. You have moments of triumph. But then you have a lot of setbacks and moments that make you doubt yourself. Those first few years were a battle.

How did you navigate the leap into the unpredictable world of freelancing?

At first, I expanded my ski teaching, which helped financially and restored my energy and optimism when I needed it most.

The overall solution that worked for me was to find outlets for which I could be a regular writer, rather than chasing one-off assignments. After a couple of years I developed a nice rotation of writing about climate change, geology and skiing. Switching between topics kept me fresh and productive, and it was enough to pay the bills. Building relationships with editors also gave me space to explore ideas without having to prove myself with each new article, plus the pay was predictable so I could meter out my time accordingly. That’s when I felt like I’d found my groove, and everything became fun rather than scary.

When do you feel most successful in your science-communication work?

My personal priority is to reach as wide an audience as I can and talk to people in all different circumstances. I am super happy when I see my work reach an audience way outside my peers and colleagues. For example, some of my writing and infographics around electric-vehicle efficiency, which were published by the news service Yale Climate Connections, got picked up by MotorTrend magazine and referenced in two articles. I’m not the person who’s going to go and pitch to an automotive magazine, but for them to find my work, write about it and then recommend my article to their readers was awesome. It connected with a way different audience than I expected.

A woman in a blue coat and gloves writing in a notebook while wrapped in a sleeping bag.

Karin takes notes after navigating glaciers in Greenland.Credit: Karin Kirk

In what ways is your work in geoscience complementary to your work as a skiing instructor and ridge guide?

As a guide here at Bridger Bowl Ridge, I love to talk about the geology of the mountain range and the intricacies of the rock. The summit is made of Mississippian-age Madison limestone (that’s around 325 million years old), the same rock I studied for my master’s thesis. It has brachiopod fossils and collapse breccias and fabulous chert lenses. At the crest of the range, the rocks have been uplifted to a near-vertical position, forming sheer walls of limestone that are a total rush to weave through on skis or a snowboard. My goal, as both a skiing instructor and a geoscience communicator, is to help people feel comfortable. Skiing is a scary sport. It’s important to see where a person is, understand what they’re feeling, and work with that. Fear can be paralysing. But when you feel comfortable, you can do amazing things. That’s where everything overlaps for me.

The other obvious overlap is climate change — the future is grim for the ski industry. But to me, that’s a very minor consequence of climate change: it doesn’t really matter, compared with other consequences. Skiing’s really fun, and it’s a way of life if you live near a ski area. But I’m more concerned for the water in the snowpack than my ability to play on the snowpack, and so is everybody here. Snow has a really special role in the hydrological cycle, because it stores water and releases it slowly. The way snow reflects sunlight is also integral to nature.

I think the best thing the ski industry can do, when we have guests up in these Alpine environments, is to be service educators. We need to say, “Skiing on snow is fun, but here are all the ways that snow is important in this ecosystem.”

What advice would you give scientists who want to communicate their work effectively?

We’re in a golden age of communication, but it can also be a media minefield. There’s this insatiable hunger for information, so the opportunities for science communication have never been greater. There are also so many venues for communicating science, whether you do it formally and you want to make a career out of it, or informally as part of another job. You can do it as a community leader — I’ve gone out and had hundreds of conversations about climate with voters, and I’ve been training others to do the same. If you can bring your science into your hobby, the way I’ve done with skiing and geoscience, you can use a shared passion to start conversations with people. My advice would be to try different lanes. Continue to iterate, and if you start to get some resonance with an audience, a topic or a method, then cultivate that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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How five crucial elections in 2024 could shape climate action for decades

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This year, voters in five of the world’s biggest carbon-emitting territories go to the polls. These regions — the United States, India, Indonesia, Russia and the European Union — represent one-third of the world’s population and about the same proportion of human-made carbon emissions.

How the political wind blows from these elections will be crucial in determining whether humanity can correct its current trajectory of dangerous climate warming (see ‘Monstrous emissions’). Current climate policies are likely to result in warming of about 2.7 °C by 2100, according to the group Climate Action Tracker, which monitors global climate commitments — well above the 1.5 °C goal laid out in the 2015 Paris climate accord. Long-term climate commitments could prevent another 0.6 °C of warming, but those depend on further action by governments, including many whose leaders are up for election in 2024. It could be a pivotal year.

MONSTROUS EMISSIONS: infographic showing emissions as a global share vs population for the five largest emitters that have elections in 2023.

Source: Global Carbon Budget 2023 (emissions); UN Population Division (population)

United States: Biden versus Trump

In August 2022, US President Joe Biden surprised the world with a legislative victory on climate spending that, by some recent estimates, is likely to lock in nearly US$1 trillion in investment until 2032. This includes direct spending as well as tax credits for everything from wind and solar power to electric transport, carbon sequestration and reskilling programmes for people who currently work in the fossil-fuel sector. One of the Biden administration’s main jobs now is to ensure that the money is invested wisely and keeps flowing if Biden is re-elected on 5 November.

Researchers have estimated that Biden’s flagship achievement, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, could double the pace of US climate progress by itself and reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 43–48% by 2035, relative to 2005 levels. That is short of the US commitment to cut emissions by 50% by 2030, also compared with 2005, but the administration is pushing forwards on other fronts, including issuing regulations to reduce emissions from vehicles and power plants. Overall, climate specialists say it’s a historic effort that could help the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter (behind China) to lead a clean-energy revolution.

“We’ve never seen a decarbonization effort like this,” says Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy in Washington DC. The Biden administration’s climate agenda has significant momentum, Kaufman says, and another four years would help the administration to lock in progress. “The question is, what happens if we lose this momentum?”

Biden’s likely main opponent in the November election, former president Donald Trump, remains hostile to government action on climate, and there is little doubt that he will do everything he can to promote fossil fuels if he wins. He is widely expected to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement — for a second time. The first withdrawal, which came into effect on 4 November 2020, a day after Trump lost his re-election bid, was quickly reversed by the incoming Biden administration. Trump has also said he would use his executive authority to weaken climate regulations and expand federal oil and gas programmes.

But it would be difficult for Trump to override the clean-energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act. Because those investments were laid out in a law, Congress would need to enact a new one to roll them back, says Samantha Gross, who heads the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington DC.

To have any chance of doing that, Republicans would need to retain control of the House of Representatives and win enough seats to take control of the Senate in the November elections. Even then, Gross says, it wouldn’t be easy. The law is already incentivizing businesses to invest and create jobs in communities across the country, and many are in Republican districts. “Once the economic benefits start flowing, the political calculus changes,” she says.

India: Modi’s climate balancing act

Climate change isn’t high on the agenda in India’s upcoming general elections. But it is crucial to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s global ambitions, say researchers.

Voting across the vast country will probably take place in April and May. If Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win a third five-year term, he will be preoccupied with his legacy as a climate leader, says Aseem Prakash, a political scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

India is the world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But the country is also home to 1.4 billion people, which is more than one-sixth of the world’s population. Its per-capita emissions are less than one-seventh those of the United States and one-quarter those of China.

In very low visibility a person walks down a road past a billboard in support of Narendra Modi ahead of the 2024 general election

In India’s upcoming election, climate action is not a campaign talking point for the two leading parties.Credit: Subhash Sharma/Polaris/eyevine

In 2021, at the COP26 global climate conference in Glasgow, UK, Modi committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2070. India has also agreed that, with foreign financial and technical assistance, non-fossil-fuel sources will make up about half of its electricity generation capacity by 2030.

The country has backed some of those promises with action. India’s wind and solar power capacity has almost doubled over the past 5 years, to 135 gigawatts. Together with hydropower, renewables now account for 42% of power generation capacity (although owing to the variability of many of the sources, they make up a lesser share of actual electricity production). “It’s a renewables miracle,” says Sangeeth Selvaraju, a sustainable finance analyst at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London.

Under a newly elected Modi, India’s climate policies will “continue in an aggressive manner”, says Suruchi Bhadwal, a climate scientist at The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. These include expansion of solar and wind infrastructure, and investment in green hydrogen development. Last month, Modi’s government presented its interim budget for the year from April, which includes subsidies for offshore wind energy and rooftop solar panels — “two nascent industries that need a real boost”, says Selvaraju.

But climate action is not a campaign talking point for the two leading parties, the BJP and the Indian National Congress, say researchers. Instead, the priority is energy security to meet burgeoning demand, which in the short term means more fossil-fuel consumption and a continued reliance on coal. Last year, energy demand peaked in September, and was 13% higher than during the previous year’s peak month of April. Coal still accounts for three-quarters of electricity generation — a reason why India has played a key part in resisting attempts to introduce language about phasing out fossil fuels in communiqués from the past few climate summits.

In September, India’s minister for power, Raj Kumar Singh, said the country might need to build new thermal power plants. “There will be more coal power plants in the next ten years,” says Nandini Das, a climate and energy economist at the policy institute Climate Analytics in Perth, Australia.

In the unlikely event that Modi loses, Selvaraju says he doesn’t expect a shift away from India’s dual push for renewables and coal, “simply because it’s not really in the hands of the politicians”. Unlike in the United States, India’s climate policies don’t flip-flop according to who is in power, says Dhruba Purkayastha, director for India at the non-profit research group Climate Policy Initiative, based in New Delhi.

But climate change should be on the agenda, says Das. From flooding to drought and heat stress, “India is a highly climate-vulnerable country.”

Indonesia: powered by nickel and coal

Indonesians went to the polls on 14 February to elect a new president and legislature. Votes are still being counted, but the majority of the almost 130 million Indonesians who voted look to have chosen a leader who promised continuity with the policies of Joko Widodo, the outgoing president. Prabowo Subianto, a former army general and minister of defence under Widodo, ran with Widodo’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his vice-presidential candidate.

“From the perspective of climate change, not much will change,” says Daniel Murdiyarso, a climate scientist and president of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences, who is based in Bogor, south of the capital Jakarta.

Electoral officers examine 2024 ballot papers at a flooded general election polling station in Indonesia

The result of Indonesia’s election is unlikely to affect its current climate policies, which reflect an economy that is heavily dependent on coal.Credit: Sulthony Hasanuddin/Antara Foto/Reuters

Researchers say that in the short term, that means more coal consumption and exports, slow progress on reducing deforestation and cheap but dirty nickel extraction. The country is the world’s leading producer of raw nickel, needed to fuel the growing global appetite for electric vehicles, batteries and stainless steel. “Business is probably going to trump any other concerns,” says political scientist Jemma Purdey at the Australia–Indonesia Centre at Monash University in Melbourne.

Even bigger business than nickel is coal. Indonesia is the world’s largest coal exporter, and 60% of its own electricity supply comes from the fossil fuel — a reliance that is locked in for several more decades owing to government support and relatively young power plants. Together with the difficulty of building an electricity grid across Indonesia’s many islands, this is why renewables have not boomed in the country as they have in India or China. “It’s got the resources, and it’s got the conditions to generate a lot of wind and solar power. But the infrastructure and institutional challenges are yet to be tackled for that to happen at scale,” says Selvaraju.

Indonesia aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2060, “but has been fairly non-committal” with that target, says Dirk Tomsa, a political scientist at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. Despite a relatively young voting population, climate and environment were not key issues in these elections, says Ika Idris, who chairs the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub Indonesia Node, and is based in Jakarta. “During the campaign, none of the candidates really focused on that.”

Some popular initiatives that Subianto is likely to inherit include support for the development of a home-grown electric vehicle industry, as well as construction of a renewables-fuelled green city, Nusantara, which is set to become Indonesia’s new capital later this year. But even these were framed as economic development and not climate issues, says Idris.

In 2020, Widodo banned exports of raw nickel to strengthen domestic processing, which is highly carbon-intensive. Subianto’s win will probably see continued prioritization of nickel mining and processing to fuel the country’s economic development, at the cost of concerns about local environmental pollution and worker safety, say researchers.

Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropical rainforests, peatlands and mangroves. Under Subianto, researchers expect Indonesia to adhere to its international commitments to reducing deforestation — the rate of forest loss there has declined over the past five years — while also strengthening the palm-oil industry, which adds to pressure on rainforests and carbon-storing peatlands.

Russia: the smog of war

In March, Russian leader Vladimir Putin will begin a fifth term as president following an election, the result of which is not in doubt. Climate change will not feature in a campaign that Putin will use to claim endorsement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rally anti-Western sentiment.

The ongoing war and economic sanctions — imposed by the European Union and countries including the United States and United Kingdom — are likely to hinder future climate action in the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse-gas emitter, says Marianna Poberezhskaya, who studies Russian climate politics at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

“Major shocks like economic crises, and obviously the war, the worst of them all, makes the already quite weak climate position and policy in Russia even weaker,” says Poberezhskaya. This is despite the nation already experiencing severe wildfires and flooding owing to climate change in recent years.

Russia is aiming to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 70% compared with 1990 levels by 2030, and to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. The nation’s emissions are already around 30% below 1990 levels, with most of this reduction due to deindustrialization following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to Putin’s regime, these goals will be met through the expansion of forest carbon sinks, carbon capture and storage technologies and a continued reliance on nuclear power and hydropower.

The plan to cut emissions does not include a phase-out of fossil fuels, on which the Russian economy is highly dependent. “Russia is not itself going to reduce its fossil-fuel economy. If it goes down, it is because of other countries’ policies — Russia will clearly sell fossil fuel as long as someone buys it,” says Anna Korppoo, who studies Russian climate policy at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Fornebu, Norway. Proposed targets to expand tree-based carbon sinks are unlikely to be met, she says: these sinks are currently in decline and there are no national policies to reverse the trend.

The detrimental impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on Arctic climate science will also continue. Russia covers almost half the landmass of the Arctic, but in March 2022, immediately after the invasion, the seven other countries on the Arctic Council, which discusses sustainable development and environmental issues in the polar region, suspended cooperation with Russia. Russian data have been excluded from Arctic climate models and from research on the impacts of climate change on Arctic people and ecosystems, and Russia last month froze payments to the Arctic Council. “The loss of Siberian research stations may be detrimental to our ability to track global responses to climate change,” says Arctic ecosystem modeller Efrén López-Blanco at Aarhus University in Denmark.

As the war continues, climate change and its impact on human rights will continue to take a back seat, says Matthew Druckenmiller, vice-president of the International Arctic Science Committee. “This is sad to see; the majority of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are in Russia, and now they are removed from the equation.”

EU: A challenging shift to the right

The European Union likes to see itself as a world leader on climate action. In 2021, the bloc’s members agreed and passed laws to reduce net greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% from 1990 levels by 2030, and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. A proposal unveiled last month targets an even more ambitious 90% reduction by 2040. So far, Europe has reduced its emissions by 32.5% from 1990 levels.

Over 4 days from 6 to 9 June, European citizens from 27 countries will elect 720 politicians to the European Parliament for 5 years. Polling indicates a sharp move towards parties on the right that are less focused on climate action, a trend that could stymie Europe’s climate leadership and delay urgent measures, say experts.

Climate “is not a big issue for most far-right parties and it’s not a priority”, says Claire Dupont, a climate policy specialist at Ghent University in Belgium. They tend to focus on more nationalistic interests, she says. Polls indicate that the main parliamentary groupings — the centre-right European People’s Party and the centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats — will maintain their majority in the parliament, which scrutinizes other EU bodies and has the power to adopt and amend proposed legislation.

This election is only the beginning of the EU’s political process. The parliament ultimately elects the president of the European Commission, which sets out the EU’s strategy for the next five years and monitors policy implementation, says Dupont. The current president, Ursula von der Leyen, put the European Green Deal and its climate targets at the heart of the bloc’s strategy, and in February announced that she would seek a second term.

But bottom-up political pressures mean that Europe’s previous broad consensus on climate action is beginning to fray. “There’s not a lot of room to roll back decisions on climate,” says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. “But there is room to slow down progress or to give political flavours to actions that are going to be in place.” This has international ramifications, she warns. “It is the region that is the most proactive about tackling climate change, so if the leaders start slowing down on climate action, then the risk is that this is going to slip all around the world.”

In particular, the EU’s nature-based climate goals, including biodiversity and soil protections, are running into trouble. Last month, the bloc shelved plans to cut pesticide use and diluted its green farming provisions after protests by farmers in several member states. The EU’s total carbon emissions have gone down, but emissions from its agricultural sector have declined only modestly in the past decade.

Another sticking point is carbon capture and storage technologies, which the EU will have to rely on if it is going to meet its most ambitious emissions targets. Right-leaning parties tend to favour these technological solutions over those that require behavioural change, but they have not been shown to work at scale. “The other carbon capture techniques of planting forests, upgrading our soils and nature-based solutions are already facing a lot of backlash,” says Dupont.

“The EU has successfully tackled the low-hanging fruit, like renewable energy and energy efficiency,” she says. “Can it actually go the next step in tackling the harder parts of the transition to carbon neutrality?”

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Megafires are here to stay — and blaming only climate change won’t help

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In February, megafires ripped through the Chilean central coastal hills, killing at least 132 people, injuring hundreds and destroying 7,000 homes. At the time of writing, more than 300 people remain missing.

These wildfires are not a one-off calamity. You only need watch the news to know that wildfires are becoming more frequent and more destructive. Last year, catastrophic fires in Hawaii, Canada and Greece took hundreds of lives and caused widespread destruction. The 2019–20 Black Summer was the most uncontrolled fire season ever recorded in Australia. California’s 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest ever in the state, and the most expensive natural disaster in the world that year. As a fire scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, I have lost track of how many times I have scrambled to analyse the deadly consequences of cataclysmic fires worldwide.

Countries need to take megafires more seriously and implement urgent programmes to mitigate the associated risks. That’s doesn’t just mean tackling the root causes of climate change. It means more-effective and consistent land- and fire-management policies, greater efforts to conserve native species and more education for local people on how to minimize risks.

Climate change is a major driver of wildfires. Rising temperatures have increased the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves and high-speed winds, which fuel longer and wilder fires. The past few years have given us a bitter taste of the future of fires on a warming planet. Hotspot regions might face a tenfold increase in fire risk under future global warming.

But it isn’t just global warming that should be blamed, argues a 2022 report by the United Nations Environment Programme (see go.nature.com/3uwv9np) that I helped to author. Climate and land-cover changes, including deforestation, urbanization, mining and use of land for agriculture and pasture, have all increased the likelihood of extreme wildfires over the past decades.

The 2024 Chilean wildfires resulted from a complex interplay between extreme weather conditions and human behaviour, as we found in an attribution study (see go.nature.com/3tjjscy). Since 2010, central-south Chile has seen more frequent and larger wildfires, as well as a prolonged drought within what was the nation’s warmest decade recorded since 1970.

But, as in many other countries, key factors in boosting megafires are poor land management and the growing proximity of flammable vegetation to populated urban and suburban areas. The wildland–urban interface covers only 5% of Chile’s land surface, but is home to 80% of the country’s population — and 60% of its wildfires.

Land-cover changes have homogenized the landscape, and have increased the likelihood of megafires by removing natural fire barriers — native plants — and increasing the number of informal settlements near forests. Pasture and agricultural areas are typical ignition sources. Either accidentally or through negligence or arson, humans were responsible for around 98% of the known causes of Chilean fires between 1985 and 2018.

Worldwide, land management is underused as a means of reducing fire vulnerabilities and exposure. Prescribed burns are not a new wildfire-prevention technique, but they have been marginalized owing to negative public perception. For this to change, the first step would be to implement proper fire-management regulations that are firmly built on the necessity of prescribed burns. Good regulations, appropriate funding and adequate crew training are essential. Climate change has substantially decreased the number of days that provide favourable conditions for prescribed burns.

Prevention and regulation are a must, because once a megafire begins, it is almost impossible to snuff out, even with sophisticated methods. Policies focusing on reactive responses — such as fire suppression — could result in the ‘firefighting trap’, a positive feedback loop in which fire suppression leads to there being more dry fuel in the landscape, which leads to worse fires, requiring more suppression. Breaking this loop requires effective and continuous science–policy interaction.

Another important concern is human behaviour. Governments must pass and enforce laws that discourage people from starting fires when danger is elevated. But laws count for little without cultural change. To change hearts and minds, local governments, non-governmental organizations and companies can foster community engagement in fire prevention through education campaigns, and the media can systematically disseminate information to raise awareness of the consequences of irresponsible practices. Furthermore, fire-management plans should be embedded in local knowledge, and include the needs and concerns of Indigenous communities and smallholder farms.

Megafires are a humanitarian crisis. As a fire scientist, I always end my talks with a call to action: to implement a resilient fire-management strategy. Decelerating global warming isn’t enough. Nations need a holistic approach to fire governance, adjusting prevention, regulation and planning according to each local and ecological context.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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Meningitis could be behind ‘mystery illness’ reports in Nigeria

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General view of a busy road at sunset.

The Nigerian health ministry has been told to investigate reports of deaths in the northeastern state of Gombe (pictured).Credit: Tolu Owoeye/Shutterstock

The World Health Organization has confirmed that reports of an ‘unknown’ disease allegedly responsible for 30 deaths in Gombe State, Nigeria, in mid-February can be linked to 3 cases of meningitis that are part of ongoing seasonal outbreaks.

The agency tells Nature that it is aware of reports of dozens of fatalities, but that on investigation it has found there have in fact been just three, resulting from confirmed cases of meningitis.

Nigeria’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the regional Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have not confirmed or denied an unknown-disease outbreak in Gombe State. Neither organization responded to requests for comment from Nature’s news team.

The case highlights the importance of thorough disease-surveillance systems and the need for timely communication, say researchers. West African countries are on high alert for flare-ups of infectious diseases. Nigeria, the most populous African country and the one with the largest economy, is currently struggling with surges of Lassa fever, diphtheria and meningitis. In the past decade, it has also contended with spikes in cholera, mpox (formerly called monkeypox) and Ebola, as well as COVID-19. High mobility between countries in the region makes residents particularly susceptible to the rapid spread of infections, according to a 2022 study published in The Lancet1.

Unknown disease?

On 27 February, Nigeria’s National Assembly instructed the country’s health ministry to investigate a “strange disease” said to have killed more than two dozen people in the northeastern state of Gombe.

News of the deaths had come from an 18 February Facebook post regarding unexplained deaths at the Nafada General Hospital, said to have occurred within 24 hours of the victims contracting an unknown disease that caused abdominal pain, diarrhoea and fever.

But on 28 February, Gombe State commissioner of health Habu Dahiru denied the report of mystery deaths, according to local newspapers. “Formally, we received cases with symptoms suggestive of cerebrospinal meningitis in the Nafada local government area on 18 February and immediately swung into action,” he told media outlet Punch.

“The more specific and plainly described information is given about what is known and not known promotes confidence that the authorities are sincerely trying to give the best-quality information,” says Julii Brainard, who models public-health threats at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.

“The void created by limiting or not giving the necessary fact-checked information can be filled by mis- or disinformation or rumours,” says Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, a political-communication researcher at the Free University of Amsterdam. It can be difficult to correct the false information once it is circulating, she adds.

Surveillance systems

Public-health bodies in the region are attuned to potential outbreaks, says Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who works with scientists in Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

“People are aware that viruses are of serious concern and need to be dealt with aggressively”, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, he says. The 2014 Ebola outbreak was also a “wake-up call” to West African countries, Garry adds. Between 2013 and 2016, more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone died of this viral haemorrhagic fever. Eight people in Nigeria died of the disease.

In the years since, “the Nigerian CDC put their best foot forward”, says Garry. “They’ve got a lot of good people there. They’re putting the appropriate resources into it.”

Virologist Peter Piot, former director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, agrees that there have been major efforts to improve disease surveillance in West African countries over the past decade. “The Nigerian Centres for Disease Control have done excellent work on Lassa and monkeypox,” he says. But he adds that in such a large country, surveillance can be “uneven”, and the system is constantly being tested. Last week, Yobe State — north of Gombe — quarantined more than 200 people after reports of 20 meningitis-related deaths in the province, Punch reported.

Trust between health authorities and citizens is vital, says Brainard. If people feel that authorities are hiding information or are clueless, “then people try to figure out their own explanations, which may be completely wrong”, she says.

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Here’s what many digital tools for chronic pain are doing wrong

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Chronic pain is a health crisis of enormous proportions. In the United States and Europe, about 20% of adults experience chronic pain, defined as pain lasting more than three months. Incidence is likely to rise in the coming decades, owing in part to ageing populations.

The past few years have witnessed an explosion in the number of digital tools, some powered by machine learning and big data, that promise to help people living with pain. Digital-therapeutics companies, such as Hinge Health in San Francisco, California, offer remote physical therapy, monitored by computer vision, to correct posture. In 2022, the device company Neurometrix in Woburn, Massachusetts, received authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration to market Quell, a wearable smart device for nerve stimulation, as the first non-pharmacological treatment for fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by widespread body pain and fatigue. Virtual-reality (VR) platforms for neurofeedback therapy, which helps users train their brains to cope better with pain over time, promise to provide relief similar to that offered by opioid medications.

In my sociological research, I have spoken to dozens of entrepreneurs, physicians and people with chronic pain about the promise of digital technology for pain management. Our conversations are full of examples showing that data-driven alternatives to addictive drugs can help to fight chronic pain. Indeed, the companies spearheading this trend have produced good evidence that their tools work, such as Hinge Health’s longitudinal cohort study (J. F. Bailey et al. J. Med. Internet Res. 22, e18250; 2020).

But there are caveats. A 2022 review of research from 12 countries, including the United States, found that digital health technologies could create health disparities or exacerbate existing ones (R. Yao et al. J. Med. Internet Res. 24, e34144; 2022). For example, rural areas often don’t have broadband Internet access, and older adults might lack digital literacy. Disabled people can be left behind if digital tools are not designed to be accessible. If digital health equity concerns are not taken into account, these technologies will be inadequate in tackling the pain crisis.

Although digital therapies that use a single approach, such as online physical therapy, can benefit some people, they can promote a view of pain as easily fixable and ignore co-occurring conditions that require other solutions. Chronic pain is complex and often involves several overlapping pain conditions, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders and social factors. That’s why the International Association for the Study of Pain affirms that the gold standard for treating chronic pain is integrative care, which centres on an individual’s needs, involves collaboration between pain physicians and other health professionals and can combine several therapies. This approach requires time, resources and infrastructure enabling seamless, real-time coordination among specialists and with the patient.

Digital technology has huge potential to improve access to integrative care, but it falls short on delivery. The competitive mentality of Silicon Valley does not mesh with the continuity of care and inter-professional communication and organization that are needed to manage this condition. If simply added alongside existing systems — instead of being integrated thoughtfully — digital technology might lead to sub-optimal care and contribute to burnout of providers, who will have to spend more time on electronic health records and coordinate the use of yet another tool.

One solution is focusing on strategic partnerships between digital-health companies that have technological know-how and hospitals and health systems that provide quality pain care. For example, Fern Health, based in New York City, is co-developing and scaling its multimodal education and lifestyle-intervention programme with the MetroHealth System, a non-profit public health-care system based in Cleveland, Ohio. Fern also merged with VR company BehaVR, based in Nashville, Tennessee, which offers neurofeedback therapy at home. New digital health solutions should be designed as add-ons or plug-ins for broader collaborative platforms, rather than as standalone solutions.

Other examples of digital technologies that are addressing the divide and making care accessible to more people can be seen in some newer companies, including US firm Override Health and Upside Health in New York City. These platforms do not promote one specific therapy; rather, they digitally connect several providers to discuss a person’s progress in a coordinated way, and provide patients with access to networks of people with similar conditions.

This leaves the challenge of access. Beyond broader societal issues, such as broadband access, digital technology must be understood as a two-way medium not only between health-care provider and patient, but also between platform designers and users. The digital transformation of chronic-pain care cannot succeed without design input from those who should benefit from these tools.

Everyone affected by pain misses out on a massive opportunity when digital technology is seen merely as an upgrade of existing, singular solutions, instead of as a transformative connector.

Technological fixes to medical problems should be viewed with caution. But digital health technology — if used to integrate care and focused on equitable access — might change the course of the current pain crisis.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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Oldest stone tools in Europe hint at ancient humans’ route there

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Close up view of a stone tool possibly from Layer VII at Korolevo I.

A stone tool from the archaeological site of Korolevo in western Ukraine.Credit: Roman Garba

Stone tools found in western Ukraine date to roughly 1.4 million years ago1, archaeologists say. That means the tools are the oldest known artefacts in Europe made by ancient humans and offer insight into how and when our early relatives first reached the region.

The findings support the theory that these early arrivals — probably of the versatile species Homo erectus — entered Europe from the east and spread west, says study co-lead author Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “Until now, there was no strong evidence for an east-to-west migration,” he says. “Now we have it.”

Prehistoric sites documenting the presence of human ancestors in Europe before 800,000 years ago are extremely rare, says Véronique Michel, a geochronologist at the University of Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, who was not involved in the research. “This new study adds another piece to the puzzle [of] the dispersal of early hominins in Europe.”

The findings were published on 6 March in Nature.

Set in stone

The tools were discovered in the 1980s at the Korolevo archaeological site near Ukraine’s border with Romania, yet no one had been able to precisely date them.

To do so, Garba and his colleagues used a dating method based on cosmogenic nuclides — rare isotopes generated when high-energy cosmic rays collide with chemical elements in minerals on Earth’s surface. Changes in the concentrations of these cosmogenic nuclides can reveal how long ago a mineral was buried. By calculating the ratio of specific cosmogenic nuclides in the sediment layer in which the tools were buried, the team estimated that the implements must be 1.4 million years old. The dating analyses, Michel says, “appear highly reliable”.

Until now, the earliest precisely dated evidence of hominins in Europe comprised fossils2 and stone tools3 found in Spain and France. Both are 1.1 million to 1.2 million years old.

Intrepid travellers

The dates of the Korolevo tools lead the researchers to speculate that the human ancestors who made them were H. erectus, the only archaic humans known to have lived outside Africa about 1.4 million years ago. What’s more, the Korolevo tools resemble those found at archaeological sites in the Caucasus Mountains that have been linked to H. erectus and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, says Mads Knudsen, a geoscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who co-led the study. However, Knudsen adds, Korolevo’s most ancient layer of sediment didn’t yield any fossilized human remains, so it is impossible to say for sure that the tools were made by H. erectus.

Geographically, Korolevo lies between older archaeological sites at the intersection of Asia and Europe, and younger sites in southwestern Europe. The findings give a fuller picture of the direction of travel probably taken by the first Europeans, supporting the idea that they spread from east to west — perhaps along the valleys of the Danube River, Garba says.

Korolevo is a treasure trove of prehistoric remains, says study co-author Vitaly Usyk, an archaeologist affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, who visited the site last year with Garba for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Korolevo site is relatively safe and hasn’t been damaged during the war, although the area is now overgrown with vegetation, Garba says. “I can imagine doing fieldwork there even now.”

However, Usyk notes, few scientists can participate in field research at Korolevo or anywhere else in the country, because of travel restrictions or because they have fled the conflict. Usyk himself left Ukraine in 2022 and is now working at the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, Czech Republic, with a fellowship that allows him to continue doing his research. “Would I like to go back [to Ukraine]? Yes, of course,” he says. “I would like to organize expeditions to Korolevo to help other scientists reveal how ancient humans came from Africa to Europe.”

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what the rematch could mean for three key science issues

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This combination of pictures shows US President Donald Trump (L) and Democratic Presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22, 2020. This combination of pictures shows US President Donald Trump (L) and Democratic Presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22, 2020.

Former US president Donald Trump and current US President Joe Biden will face off in November to win a second term.Credit: Morry Gash, Jim Watson/AFP via Getty

Voters in 15 US states and one territory weighed in at the polls on 5 March, or ‘Super Tuesday’, and the results lock in a rematch between Republican Donald Trump and the incumbent, Democrat Joe Biden, in November’s election for the next US president. The outcome could have massive implications for the environment, public health and international collaborations between scientists — as well as, some fear, US democracy itself.

Trump soundly beat his lone remaining challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, who dropped out of the race on 6 March. The former president prevailed despite facing 91 criminal charges alleging interference with the 2020 presidential election, economic fraud and mishandling of classified materials. The result of this year’s election could hinge on the outcome of those cases, as well as on potential long-shot presidential challenges from candidates labelling themselves as independents. But for now, Trump has consolidated his control over the Republican Party and will once again run against Biden, whom Democrats have rallied behind.

The two candidates have opposing views on a host of scientific issues. As president, Biden has promoted climate and clean-energy innovation, and bolstered scientific-integrity policies throughout the federal government that are meant to protect evidence-based decision-making. During his presidency from 2017 to 2020, Trump repealed climate policies and promoted fossil fuels, while sidelining public-health officials and other government scientists. Each is expected to lean further into these stances if he wins a second term.

Here, Nature talks to policy analysts and researchers about what’s on the line in November.

Climate action or disruption?

“It’s a trope to say that every election is critical, but this election is particularly stark in the two paths that it presents for the United States,” says Alexander Barron, an environmental scientist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, who has worked under both Biden and former US president Barack Obama.

As president, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord. He would probably do so again if elected while seeking to roll back climate regulations put in place by the Biden administration to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, including from vehicles and power plants. But there might be limits to what Trump would be able to achieve.

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump reacts to supporters as he arrives on stage at a Get Out the Vote Rally March 2, 2024 in Richmond, Virginia.

Trump at a campaign rally in Richmond, Virginia, on 2 March.Credit: Win McNamee/Getty

For instance, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, which by some estimates helped to lock in around US$1 trillion in funding for clean-energy programmes over a decade. If Trump wanted to repeal that legislation, it would require an act of Congress, which would be possible only if Republicans maintain control of the US House of Representatives and gain a majority in the Senate, which Democrats now control by a slim margin. And even then, observers say, the politics could be tricky given that large investments are already starting to flow into communities represented by lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle.

Nonetheless, Trump could still disrupt the climate agenda laid out in the IRA, says Greg Dotson, a legal scholar at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who was involved in crafting the legislation as a Democratic staff member in the Senate.

“The first Trump administration was very hostile to climate policies, and they didn’t feel necessarily restrained by the law,” Dotson says, noting that Trump could still block funding and rewrite climate-programme rules if he returned to office. By contrast, climate-policy specialists say that another four years under Biden could lock in nearly a decade of significant progress. This is what will be needed if the country is to have any hope of achieving Biden’s pledge to halve US emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero by mid-century.

“Getting to those targets is going to be a tremendous group effort,” Barron says. “We really need all levels of government and all sectors to continue moving in the right direction.”

The health of the nation

The two candidates also differ notably in their approach to investing in public health. For example, in each of Trump’s four years in office, his administration sought, unsuccessfully, to cut the budget of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the country’s premier biomedical-research agency. Biden, on the other hand, kick-started the US$2.5-billion Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, aimed at tackling high-risk, high-reward biomedical research — which he’d probably continue to support if re-elected.

The Trump administration also attempted to cut funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — an agency tasked with protecting public health — and undermined its scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic by, for example, countering their claims about the seriousness of the health emergency. By contrast, Biden has proposed budget increases for the CDC and has publicly defended the agency and its scientists. “Trump did a lot to discredit public health and scientific agencies in the United States, and it has been difficult to rebuild the trust,” says Larry Levitt, an executive vice-president at the health-policy research organization KFF, based in San Francisco, California.

First lady Jill Biden, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff on stage during a campaign rally in Virginia.

Biden has pledged to resecure the nationwide right to an abortion, once protected by a Supreme Court ruling in the case Roe v. Wade.Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty

That stance will probably continue. At a campaign rally last week, Trump hinted that he would endorse elements of the anti-vaccine movement if re-elected, suggesting that he would deny federal funds to schools with a vaccine mandate.

The United States’ role in global health is also at stake. During his presidency, Trump pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization (WHO) and generally pursued isolationist policies, Levitt says. “Biden has done a lot to undo that, but we will likely see a slip back if Trump were elected again,” he says. Officials in the Biden administration have expressed their commitment to a global pandemic treaty — an agreement being negotiated among countries to help prevent the next global-health emergency. Meanwhile, Republicans have been critical of it, suggesting that it could be a threat to US intellectual-property rights, forcing companies to share vaccine and treatment know-how.

Ever since the 2022 US Supreme Court decision that ended nationwide abortion rights, the issue has become crucial for voters. The two candidates have adopted opposing positions: Trump, who vowed to overturn abortion rights when he took office, now supports a national ban on abortions after 16 weeks of pregnancy, whereas Biden has vowed to once again secure abortion rights, by passing a law to protect them. Both pledges would require congressional action to be fulfilled, so it isn’t clear whether either would be successful. “We’re at one of the most consequential moments for abortion access in modern American history,” says Nourbese Flint, president of All Above All Action Fund, an abortion-justice advocacy group in Washington DC.

Cross-border science

Another area where Biden and Trump differ vastly is in their approach to immigration, as well as the visas that thousands of foreign students and scientists depend on to study and work in the United States. Weeks after Trump’s presidential inauguration, he introduced broad travel bans that stopped citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Iran and Syria, from entering the United States. The move left international students stranded at airports and shocked the scientific community.

When Biden took office in 2021, he quickly overturned the ban. And he has taken other steps to reform immigration for professionals such as scientists: in January 2022, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services clarified guidance for workers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) who are seeking visas to come to the United States. This has increased the number of STEM visas being issued, according to the agency.

Should either candidate win the election in November, these stances will probably influence their agendas, experts say. But one area where their policies have more closely aligned — and is unlikely to change — is relations with China.

In 2018, under Trump, the US Department of Justice launched the China Initiative, a programme meant to safeguard US laboratories and businesses against espionage. The initiative led to a number of arrests of scientists with Chinese heritage, but when Biden took office, his administration reviewed the initiative and ended it, arguing that the programme had been perceived as using racial profiling to achieve its aims. Biden nonetheless continued with reforms introduced by Trump that required US universities and research organizations that were awarded more than $50 million per year in federal research funding to prove that they have instituted a research-security programme, including tougher scrutiny of foreign travel.

Such policies have made US institutions wary of collaborating with scientists in China, experts say. And in fact, studies have shown that scientific collaborations between the United States and China have continued to decrease under Biden. The number of students coming from China to study in the United States has dropped, too.

At the end of last year, Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives wrote that it had been “unwise” of the Biden administration to end the China Initiative, sparking fear among civil-liberties advocates that they would try to reinstate the programme. They hope that a renewed Biden administration would stave off such efforts, but aren’t sure what would happen under a second Trump term.

“Relations with China won’t improve in the foreseeable future, but they could get worse,” says Jenny Lee, a higher-education researcher and vice-president for international affairs at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The elections in November will undoubtedly affect government policies on many scientific issues. But for Barron, similar to many others, science is just one of many concerns that he has about a potential second term for Trump, who has questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, promoted misinformation on a number of fronts, and signalled that he will institute new rules that critics argue will make it easier to fire career government employees who oppose his politics. “I would put myself in the camp that is most worried about democracy,” Barron says.

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