Spotify is reportedly working on adding remixing tools to its streaming service, giving users a way to reimagine their favorite tracks.
The news comes from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) whose sources state people will be able to “speed up, mash-up, and otherwise edit songs” however they want. The article explains that one of the purported additions is a playback feature for controlling how fast or how slow a track plays. When you’re finished with a remix, you can then share it with other Spotify users, but not to third-party platforms or social media. There are licensing agreements in place that will prevent people from sharing their creations.
The availability of these tools will differ depending on the type of Spotify subscription you have. The “more basic features” such as the speed control will be on the basic plan; however, the “advanced song modification features” will be on the company’s long-rumored Supremium tier.
Imminent launch
Several lines of code were discovered by Reddit user Hypixely on the Spotify subreddit revealing the company plans on introducing the remix patch as the “Music Pro” add-on. Accompanying text also talks about lossless audio arriving on the platform which could be referring to Supremium. The name of the plan isn’t explicitly stated, but the clues are there. The fact that lossless was mentioned alongside the remix update could hint at an imminent release for both, although it may still be a while before we see either one.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the platform is currently hashing out the details with music rights holders. Development is still in the early stages, but once everything comes out, it could upend the way we enjoy music.
Analysis: if you can’t beat them…
Arguably, some of the more popular versions of songs are remixes. Fan reinterpretations can alter the meaning of the original and even serve as an introduction to a new generation. As the WSJ points out, people like to add their own unique twists on a classic or edit them for dance challenges or memes. That type of content can be a very effective way of discovering new music. How many times have you seen people in the comments section asking for the source of a song or movie or whatever? It’s quite common.
As great as fan remixes may be, they’ve apparently become a bit of a problem. Musicians and labels don’t get paid for the content utilizing their work. The WSJ mentions how a “sped-up cover version” of the song “Somewhere Only We Know” by the rock band Keane has over 33 million tracks on Spotify. Record executives see this and force these platforms to do something.
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There are different solutions to this problem. Spotify chose the path of “if you can’t beat them, join ‘em.” It’s a win-win scenario for everyone involved. Rather than ban the content, the company is choosing to embrace the remixes. People can be creative and artists can get paid.
Climate change can cause anxiety — researchers need to work out when that requires specialist help.Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty
Nearly one billion people worldwide — including one in seven teenagers — have a mental disorder. A growing body of research suggests that climate change is worsening people’s mental health and emotional well-being. Acute heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires fuelled by climate change cause trauma, mental illness and distress. So can chronic effects of global warming, such as water and food insecurity, community breakdown and conflict, as we report in a News feature.
The rise of eco-anxiety: scientists wake up to the mental-health toll of climate change
Surveys are revealing that experiencing the effects of climate change — and awareness of the threat — can lead to psychological responses such as a chronic fear of environmental doom, known as eco-anxiety. Eco-distress, climate anxiety and climate grief are other terms used. In a 2021 survey of 10,000 people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, nearly 60% of respondents were highly worried about climate change, and more than 45% said their feelings about climate change affected their daily lives, such as their ability to work or sleep1.
Make the problem visible
Such reactions to an existential threat are expected, and many people can handle these feelings on their own — but some need specialist help. Although there is anecdotal evidence that people with eco-anxiety are increasingly going to clinics, the psychological toll of climate change tends to be invisible — one reason why it has been neglected.
Researchers and governments need better ways to measure the wide-ranging extent of climate change’s effects on mental health. Data scientists, climate scientists and climate-attribution researchers, among others, should join mental-health researchers in furthering the underlying science. Mental-health professionals also need training and support to provide help. Mental illness is already underdiagnosed and stigmatized, and mental health care in most countries is shockingly insufficient. Climate change makes the case for addressing this crisis even more urgent.
Greener cities: a necessity or a luxury?
One key challenge for researchers is measuring the mental-health burden attributable to climate change and tracking it over time. Most research so far has been conducted in high-income countries, despite low- and middle-income countries experiencing the harshest effects of the warming planet. The day-to-day experiences of people in marginalized groups and Indigenous communities must also be captured.
Much research on climate and mental health has focused on one end of the spectrum of mental health — such as clinical diagnoses, emergencies or suicides2. But when around half the global population lives in nations with one psychiatrist per 200,000 people, it is no surprise that many conditions are undiagnosed and undocumented. Better monitoring and sharing of clinical mental-health data are needed. Researchers must develop and track standardized ways to measure milder or more fleeting forms of eco-anxiety and distress that fall outside standard diagnoses, and work out when interventions are needed.
A call to action
Some steps are already being taken. Researchers are, for instance, trying to develop global mental-health indicators that can be linked to weather and climate data, as part of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, a collaboration of specialists from more than 50 academic institutions and United Nations agencies. The group welcomes collaborators to further this work, says Kelton Minor, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute in New York City who is leading the collaboration’s effort on climate and mental health.
Making cities mental health friendly for adolescents and young adults
A top priority must be developing and evaluating ways to effectively reduce climate change’s mental-health burden while strengthening the resilience of communities that are particularly at risk. Existing tools and treatments — such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which helps people to challenge unhelpful thoughts and behaviours — will be part of the solution. Some studies suggest that, for individuals, taking action to combat climate change could also help to manage their eco-anxiety3: a double win.
The problem amounts to a call to action on all fronts. The constant drip of research adding to evidence of a climate crisis — as well as leaders’ inaction — is itself probably a source of eco-anxiety and frustration. More than 55% of young people in the 2021 survey said that climate change made them feel powerless, and 58% that their government had betrayed them and future generations1.
Those who experience debilitating effects on their mental health caused by climate change need help from specialists. The many others who are scared or angry, but otherwise not unwell, need to know that these feelings are normal — and if they can harness their unease to spur action, they could help themselves, others and the world.
At the same time, it must also be recognized that world leaders’ inaction is a cause of distress — and action by governments is what is needed to soothe it.
Every year for six years, Laureen Wamaitha hoped that her fields in Kenya would flourish. Every year, she’d see drought wither the crops and then floods wash them away. The cycle of optimism and loss left her constantly anxious, and she blamed climate change. “You get to a situation where you have panic attacks because you’re always worried about something,” she says.
Medical student Vashti-Eve Burrows, meanwhile, saw powerful hurricane Dorian rage through the Bahamas in 2019 and now she is fearful about the future of the country, an island archipelago that is vulnerable to sea-level rise and storms. “Will there even be a Bahamas in maybe 20 to 30 years?” she says.
Wamaitha and Burrows are part of a growing chorus of people speaking up about the impacts of climate change on mental health. Climate change is exacerbating mental disorders, which already affect almost one billion people and are among the world’s biggest causes of ill health. A global survey in 2021 found that more than half of people aged 16–25 felt sad, anxious or powerless, or had other negative emotions about climate change1. Altogether, hundreds of millions of people might be experiencing some type of negative psychological response to the climate crisis.
What happens when climate change and the mental-health crisis collide?
Scientists say the topic has been sorely neglected, but is leaping up the research agenda. “I’ve seen an explosion of research in the last five years for sure. That’s been very exciting,” says Alison Hwong, a psychiatrist and mental-health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. The growing severity of heat, hurricanes and other impacts mean “it’s impossible to ignore”, she says.
Researchers want to unpick the many pathways by which climate change affects mental health, from trauma caused by hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires to ‘eco-anxiety ’— a chronic fear of environmental doom. Studies on methods that can help people prevent or manage these problems are also needed, although some work suggests that climate action and activism might help.
A seam of climate injustice is exposed by the research. Young people are likely to experience the greatest mental burden from climate change that older generations have caused. Groups of people that already experience poverty, illness or inequalities are most at risk of deteriorating mental health. “Climate change exacerbates already existing economic situations, where it’s the poorer people who are feeling even worse,” says Jennifer Uchendu, a researcher, climate activist and founder of SustyVibes, an environmental group based in Lagos, Nigeria.
Mental-health toll
The fact that climate change affects people’s mental health is not surprising: what’s new is the attention the issue is attracting — and the myriad ways that scientists are documenting its varied and sometimes shocking effects.
It is well known that extreme weather events and disasters can have an immediate traumatic impact — as well as “a long tail of mental-health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, substance abuse,” says Emma Lawrance, who studies mental health at Imperial College London. Also taking a mental-health toll in vulnerable countries are less sudden — but nonetheless devastating — disruptions caused by global warming’s impacts, such as forced migration, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity and community breakdown.
Research on how climate-change impacts, such as drought, affect mental health is growing.Credit: Simone Boccaccio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty
There is evidence that directly experiencing higher temperatures can worsen mental health. A 2018 study of suicide data from the United States and Mexico over two or more decades showed that suicide rates rose by 0.7% in the United States and 2.1% in Mexico, with a 1 °C increase in average monthly temperature2. The researchers projected an extra 9,000–40,000 suicides by 2050 in the two countries if no action was taken against climate change. Other work has shown that higher temperatures are linked to poor sleep — which can in turn contribute to mental distress3.
Studies also suggest that people with existing mental illness are at greater risk of dying during extreme heat4, but “understanding why that is and what we can do to stop it is really unexplored”, Lawrance says. One potential explanation is that some psychiatric drugs can interfere with the body’s response to heat5.
Eco-anxiety goes global
Another striking field of research examines how the awareness of climate change and its impacts can lead to concern or distress, a phenomenon sometimes called eco-anxiety, eco-distress, climate grief or solastalgia (distress linked to environmental change). In a 2018 survey, 72% of people aged 18–34 said that negative environmental news stories affected their emotional well-being, such as by causing anxiety, racing thoughts or sleep problems (see go.nature.com/3vbbt7p). A 2020 survey6 in the United Kingdom found that young people aged 16–24 reported more distress from climate change than from COVID-19.
A few years ago, such ‘eco-emotions’ were sometimes dismissed as fretting of the ‘worried-well’ in high-income countries, Lawrance says. But research that shows the global reach of these feelings is challenging that view. The 2021 survey1 was the biggest so far on climate anxiety and included 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries. More than 45% of respondents said that worry about climate change had a negative impact on eating, working, sleeping or other aspects of their daily lives. Reports of climate change affecting people’s ability to function were highest in the Philippines, India and Nigeria and lowest in the United States and United Kingdom — contradicting the idea that eco-anxiety is just a rich-country problem (see ‘Climate anxiety around the world’).
Source: Ref. 1
For some, eco-anxiety might be linked to first-hand experience of climate-related devastation. The fact that young people in the Philippines reported some of the highest levels of worry was no surprise to John Jamir Benzon Aruta, an environmental psychologist at De La Salle University in Manila. In 2013, he saw first-hand the devastation and trauma caused in the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan — one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded. “You see houses, communities devastated. You also see corpses all over the place,” he says. “Just witnessing the aftermath made me feel traumatized.”
But the 2021 survey documented widespread distress that went beyond those who were immediately affected by extreme climate events. Around 75% of respondents said that climate change made them think the future is frightening and 56% said that it made them think that humanity is doomed. People who felt their government was failing to act on climate issues were more likely to feel eco-distress.
Are we all doomed? How to cope with the daunting uncertainties of climate change
Climate change isn’t the first existential crisis that humanity has faced. But researchers point out that it is different from some other threats: it is happening now rather than being a future risk, such as a nuclear war; it’s affecting the entire globe at once; and many people feel angry that they have to bear the brunt of climate change that other people have caused.
Feelings of eco-anxiety are not necessarily a sign of dysfunction. “If you are under immediate threat, it is a realistic, rational, healthy survival instinct to react by being anxious or to experience fear,” says Elizabeth Marks, a clinical psychologist at the University of Bath, UK, and one of the survey’s lead authors. It could even be harmful to think of these feelings as a disorder. “If we think of it as a diagnosable condition, that risks placing the blame on the individual as having an unhealthy response,” she says. That said, some people might become so impaired by their eco-distress that they would benefit from psychological help.
Social media is being used to monitor negative feelings linked to climate change. In 2023, Kelton Minor, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute in New York and Nick Obradovich, a climate mental-health researcher at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reported an analysis of more than eight billion posts on Twitter (now known as X) that appeared between 2015 and 2022 from people who had opted to share their geolocation data. (The analysis was part of a wider report on health and climate change7.) The researchers analysed the tweets for positive words (such as good, well, new and love) and negative ones (bad, wrong, hate and hurt), and linked them to climate data from the tweeters’ locations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the team found that heatwaves and extreme rainfall increased negative feelings and decreased positive ones compared with control days without extreme weather in the same place and time of year. They also found that these negative reactions became worse over the years (see ‘Eco-anxiety on social media’).
Source: Ref. 7
Beyond the Western view
The full effects of climate change on mental health are hard to measure. A combination of factors, including the stigma around mental health and lack of access to health-care services, mean that many people with mental-health concerns go undiagnosed. When Wamaitha talked to her family in Kenya about how worried she was, they’d say: “It’s not a big deal, it’s part of life,” she says. Anxiety and depression are barely recognized as disorders in her region, she says. Mental-health services are scarce and older people just “think that you’re very sensitive” because they survived droughts in the past. In the 2021 survey, nearly 40% of young people worldwide said their concerns about climate change had been ignored or dismissed.
Climate change is also a health crisis — these 3 graphics explain why
Researchers are particularly worried that countries and regions that experience the harshest effects of climate change are where the least climate mental-health research has been done. In her studies, Uchendu found that most research was Western-centric. “Not a lot of people were talking about these issues in Africa,” she says. In 2022, she started the Eco-anxiety in Africa Project, which, in collaboration with the University of Nottingham, UK, has documented the emotional turmoil that heat and erratic weather has created for people living in five African cities.
Another question researchers have is how context and culture affect climate anxiety. Some studies have shown that “connection to country” — through cultural practices such as hunting and gathering food — is important to the mental health and well-being of some Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander communities8, says Michelle Dickson, who studies the mental health of Indigenous Australians at the University of Sydney, Australia. But rising sea levels, drought and bushfires threaten those practices. Tools used in health-care settings “rarely take into account the important cultural values that underpin Indigenous mental health”, says Dickson, who is a Darkinjung/Ngarigo Australian Aboriginal.
Dickson is now co-leading a project to empower communities to design their own climate action plans — allowing researchers to test whether doing this could improve people’s mental health.
Heatwaves — such as one that hit New Delhi in 2022 — can worsen mental disorders and are linked to increased negative feelings.Credit: Kabir Jhangiani/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty
Overcoming eco-distress
Addressing climate-fuelled mental-health conditions will be a colossal task when mental-health care globally is already poor: only around 3% of people with depression receive adequate treatment in low- and lower-middle-income countries, and 23% in high-income countries9. Lawrance says that many communities are finding their own ways to cope, but that the effectiveness of these efforts is rarely studied and shared. “There’s a massive gap around evaluation,” she says.
Some evidence suggests that taking action to combat climate change can help people to manage eco-anxiety. “There does seem to be an argument for supporting people to take collective action,” says Marks, such as joining campaign groups with like-minded people. It’s also important to “recognize that I feel this way because I care”, she says. “These climate emotions are actually something to be honoured and allowed, not pushed away.” Marks also suggests that some people who are feeling eco-distress limit the amount of time they spend ‘doom-scrolling’ through climate news.
Extreme heat harms health — what is the human body’s limit?
Researchers are starting to take collective action themselves. Last month, the Connecting Climate Minds project, one of the most ambitious research efforts in the field of climate-related mental health10, released a series of regional ‘research and action’ priorities, including, for example, to understand how climate change compounds the stress of wars, violence and disease epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa. The project includes researchers, policymakers and people with first-hand experience of climate change. Uchendu says that in one of the meetings, someone joining remotely was standing in flood water in their room. “It was mind-blowing,” she says.
Wamaitha, who along with Burrows is one of many people who shared their experiences with Connecting Climate Minds, has turned some of her concerns into action. Last year, after trying and failing to grow drought-resistant crops, she quit farming and is now working at a non-governmental organization in Bura, Kenya, that is focused on poverty relief. She is earning enough to study for a master’s degree in public health, and she raises awareness of global health on the social-networking site LinkedIn. But she is anxious about the future and worries about whether to have children. “I don’t think I am in a good environment to be able to bring kids into this particular place,” she says. “That is the saddest thing when I think about it.”
Burrows, who is studying medicine at the University of the West Indies in Saint Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, says she chooses to be positive and does small things to help the environment, such as walking instead of driving. She says that she prays that wealthy countries and companies “will really, truly understand what is happening and not just say smooth words to try to pacify us in the moment”. They should act to “help the smaller countries and the world at large”, she says.
The Mac cursor doesn’t have to be boring black-and-white. Image: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
The Mac pointer (also called the cursor) is black with a white outline by default, but you can change the pointer color if you want to make it more prominent. Plus, you can even change the Mac pointer size.
You might lose track of the small cursor if you have low vision — or just a really big monitor. Making the pointer larger can make it easier to see.
Changing the pointer color to, for instance, bright red can make it easier to see, too. You can choose any color, like light purple or green, to fit the aesthetic of your setup. (This is especially cool if you have a matching colorful iMac.)
Here’s how to change your Mac pointer size and color.
Change pointer color and size on Mac
Time needed: 5 minutes
How to change pointer color and size on Mac
Open Accessibility Settings
On your Mac, go to the menu bar in the top left and click > System Settings… to open the settings panel. In the sidebar, scroll down to click on Accessibility, then click on Display.
Change Mac pointer size
To make your Mac’s cursor bigger, scroll down to the Pointer section. Move the Pointer size slider to the right to embiggen it. Just the first notch might be enough to make the pointer easier for you to see, as it doubles in size. You can make it up to 6× bigger if you need or want to.
Change your Mac pointer color
Look a little further down in the Accessiblity Display settings and you can edit the pointer color — both the outline and its fill color. Click the color, and a pop-up window will let you pick a color. I recommend clicking the crayon tab for a simple color palette. You can pick from shades of gray or all the colors at three different levels of brightness. If you pick one of the lighter colors, I recommend you set the outline color to black.
Some people go all-in on creating a themed Home Screen for their iPhones. Similarly, I think if you have a colorful aesthetic setup on your Mac, you might like changing the pointer color so you have a cursor to match.
Alternatively, if you’re a lifelong PC user who recently made the switch to a Mac, you can go with a simple black outline and white fill to match the color scheme used on Windows.
Another setting you should make sure you have checked in this settings panel is Shake mouse pointer to locate. Once enabled, if you lose track of your pointer’s location on the screen, you can shake your mouse on your desk (or wave around on the trackpad) to enlarge the cursor temporarily.
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As polar ice has melted and moved mass towards the Equator, it has slowed Earth’s rotation.Credit: Alessandro Dahan/Getty
Melting ice caps are slowing the rotation of the Earth and could delay the next leap second by three years. Adding or removing seconds every few years keeps official atomic-clock time in line with the natural day, which varies slightly in line with the planet’s rotation rate. Since the early 1990s, the flow of water away from Earth’s axis of rotation and towards the Equator has worked to slightly slow down its spin. “It’s yet another way of impressing upon people just how big a deal [climate change] is,” says geophysicist and study author Duncan Agnew.
Earlier this month, editors at the linguistics journal Syntaxpublicly announced their resignations in response to changes to the manuscript-handling process imposed by its publisher, Wiley. The move is the latest in what seems to be an emerging form of protest: the mass resignation of academic editors. Many such events are in response to changes to business models in the publishing industry. “The big theme [of mass resignations] is this tension of competing priorities,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch.
Injecting particles into the upper atmosphere could deflect some sunlight back into space — but experiments to test this remain controversial. Recently, Harvard University cancelled their solar geoengineering project amid opposition. Advocates say geoengineering might one day provide emergency relief from the worst impacts of climate change. Critics argue that artificially cooling the planet could have unintended consequences and that the idea could reduce pressure on leaders to tackle climate change. “For better or worse, momentum is growing in this space,” says environmental engineer Shuchi Talati.
The Chipko movement, named after the Hindi word ‘to cling’, began 50 years ago this week when Gaura Devi, an ordinary woman from a village in the Western Himalayas, hugged a tree, using her body as a shield to stop the tree from being cut down. The Chipko movement led to India’s Forest Conservation Act of 1980, and a 15-year moratorium on tree felling. But the villagers’ dreams of bottom-up development never materialized. “Ironically, Chipko, which had set these laws in motion, resulted in local communities losing access to the very forests that met their livelihood and subsistence needs,” writes sustainability researcher Seema Mundoli. Yet Chipko continues to inspire other protest movements led by marginalized communities today.
A moisture-wicking adhesive patch makes wearable electronics more comfortable and stops them from losing signal quality or falling off when the user is sweating. A material that channels perspiration to the edges of the patch ensures that electronic components in the centre stay dry. In a week-long test, a sweat-wicking electrocardiogram (ECG) patch provided stable heart-rate readings, stuck to the skin better and was cooler to wear than other ECG patches.
Programme manager Monica Tomaszewski pranked her Canadian PhD advisor for years by convincing him that his cactus collection smelled like maple syrup in springtime. (Nature | 9 min read)
As always, thanks to Briefing photo editor and penguin wrangler Tom Houghton for his efforts convincing Leif to cling, lounge and hang in such surprising locations each week.
Last September, while completing a grant application, I faltered at a section labelled ‘summary of progress’. This section, written in a narrative style, was meant to tell reviewers about who I was and why I should be funded. Among other things, it needed to outline any family leave I’d taken; to spell out why my budget was reasonable, given my past funding; and to include any broad ‘activities, contributions and impacts’ that would support the application.
How could I sensibly combine an acknowledgement of two maternity leaves with a description of my engagement with open science and discuss why I was worthy of the funding I’d requested? There was no indication of the criteria reviewers would use to evaluate what I wrote. I was at a loss.
Bring PhD assessment into the twenty-first century
When my application was rejected in January, the reviewers didn’t comment on my narrative summary. Yet they did mention my publication record, part of the conventional academic CV that I was also required to submit. So I’m still none the wiser as to how the summary was judged — or if it was considered at all.
As co-chair of the Declaration On Research Assessment (DORA) — a global initiative that aims to improve how research is evaluated — I firmly believe in using narrative reflections for job applications, promotions and funding. Narratives make space for broad research impacts, from diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to educational outreach, which are hard to include in typical CVs. But I hear stories like mine time and again. The academic community is attempting, in good faith, to move away from narrow assessment metrics such as publications in high-impact journals. But institutes are struggling to create workable narrative assessments, and researchers struggling to write them.
The problem arises because new research assessment systems are not being planned and implemented properly. This must change. Researchers need explicit evaluation criteria that help them to write narratives by spelling out how different aspects of the text will be weighted and judged.
Research communities must be involved in designing these criteria. All too often, researchers tell me about assessment systems being imposed from the top down, with no consultation. This risks these new systems being no better than those they are replacing.
How to boost your research: take a sabbatical in policy
Assessments should be mission-driven and open to change over time. For example, if an institute wants to increase awareness and implementation of open science, its assessments of which researchers should be promoted could reward those who have undertaken relevant training or implemented practices such as data sharing. As open science becomes more mainstream, assessments could reduce the weight given to such practices.
The value of different research outputs will vary between fields, institutes and countries. Funding bodies in Canada, where I work, might favour grants that prioritize Indigenous engagement and perspectives in research — a key focus of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the Canadian scientific community. But the same will not apply in all countries.
Organizations must understand that reform can’t be done well on the cheap. They should invest in implementation scientists, who are trained to investigate the factors that stop new initiatives succeeding and find ways to overcome them. These experts can help to get input from the research community, and to bring broad perspectives together into a coherent assessment framework.
Some might argue that it would be better for cash-strapped research organizations to rework existing assessments to suit their needs rather than spend money on experts to develop a new one. Yes, sharing resources and experiences is often useful. But because each research community is unique, copying a template is unlikely to produce a useful assessment. DORA is creating tools to help. One is Reformscape (see go.nature.com/4ab8aky) — an organized database of mini case studies that highlight progress in research reform, including policies and sample CVs that can be adapted for use in fresh settings. This will allow institutions to build on existing successes.
The postdoc experience is broken. Funders such as the NIH must help to reimagine it
Crucially, implementation scientists are also well placed to audit how a new system is doing, and to make iterative changes. No research evaluation system will work perfectly at first — organizations must commit sustained resources to monitoring and improving it.
The Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) shows the value of this iterative approach. In 2021, it began requesting a narrative CV for funding applications, rather than a CV made up of the usual list of affiliations and publications. Since then, it has been studying how well this system works. It has had mostly positive feedback, but researchers in some fields are less satisfied, and there is evidence that institutes aren’t providing all researchers with the guidance they need to complete the narrative CV. In response, the FNR is now investigating how to adapt the CV to better serve its communities.
Each institution has its own work to do, if academia is truly to reform research assessment. Those institutions that drag their feet are sending a message that they are prepared to continue supporting a flawed system that wastes research time and investment.
Competing Interests
K.C. is the co-chair of DORA (Declaration On Research Assessment) — this in an unpaid role.
Microsoft could be reworking a major part of the Start menu in Windows 11, or at least there are changes hidden in testing right now which suggest this.
As flagged up by a regular contributor of Windows leaks, PhantomOfEarth on X (formerly Twitter), the Start menu could end up with a very different layout for the ‘All apps’ panel.
A Start menu update that could be coming soon: an updated All apps page in the Start menu, which displays apps in a grid of icons instead of a vertical list. pic.twitter.com/o8EYjf17UfMarch 30, 2024
See more
Currently, this presents a list of all the applications installed on your system in alphabetical order, but if this change comes to fruition, the panel will be switched to a grid-style layout (as shown in the above tweet) rather than a long list.
Note that this move is not visible in preview testing yet, and the leaker had to dig around in Windows 11 – a preview build in the Beta channel specifically – to find it (using ViVeTool, a configuration utility).
Analysis: 10X better?
What this means is that you’ll be able to see a lot more of the installed software in the ‘All apps’ panel at one time, with a whole host of icons laid out in front of you in said grid, rather than having a list with a very limited number of icons in comparison.
On the flipside, this looks a bit busier and less streamlined, with the alphabetical list being neater. Also, some have noted the resemblance to Windows 10X with this hidden change (which might provoke unwelcome OS flashbacks for some).
As ever, some might lean towards the list of installed apps, or some may not, and prefer the new grid-based view instead – which leads us to our next point: why not offer a choice of either layout, based on the user’s preference? A simple toggle somewhere could do that trick.
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We shall see what happens, but bear in mind that this grid layout concept might go precisely nowhere in the end. Microsoft could just be toying with the idea, and then abandon it down the line, before even taking it live in testing.
If we do see it go live in Windows 11 preview builds, odds are it’ll be incoming maybe with Windows 11 24H2 later this year – fingers crossed with that mentioned toggle.
Apple’s M3 Ultra chip may be designed as its own, standalone chip, rather than be made up of two M3 Max dies, according to a plausible new theory.
The theory comes from Max Tech‘s Vadim Yuryev, who outlined his thinking in a post on X earlier today. Citing a post from @techanalye1 which suggests the M3 Max chip no longer features the UltraFusion interconnect, Yuryev postulated that the as-yet-unreleased “M3 Ultra” chip will not be able to comprise two Max chips in a single package. This means that the M3 Ultra is likely to be a standalone chip for the first time.
This would enable Apple to make specific customizations to the M3 Ultra to make it more suitable for intense workflows. For example, the company could omit efficiency cores entirely in favor of an all-performance core design, as well as add even more GPU cores. At minimum, a single M3 Ultra chip designed in this way would be almost certain to offer better performance scaling than the M2 Ultra did compared to the M2 Max, since there would no longer be efficiency losses over the UltraFusion interconnect.
Furthermore, Yuryev speculated that the M3 Ultra could feature its own UltraFusion interconnect, allowing two M3 Ultra dies to be combined in a single package for double the performance in a hypothetical “M3 Extreme” chip. This would enable superior performance scaling compared to packaging four M3 Max dies and open the possibility of even higher amounts of unified memory.
Little is currently known about the M3 Ultra chip, but a report in January suggested that it will be fabricated using TSMC’s N3E node, just like the A18 chip that is expected to debut in the iPhone 16 lineup later in the year. This means it would be Apple’s first N3E chip. The M3 Ultra is rumored to launch in a refreshed Mac Studio model in mid-2024.
Phishing attacks taking advantage of Apple’s password reset feature have become increasingly common, according to a report from KrebsOnSecurity. Multiple Apple users have been targeted in an attack that bombards them with an endless stream of notifications or multi-factor authentication (MFA) messages in an attempt to cause panic so they’ll respond favorably to social engineering. An…
iOS 18 will give iPhone users greater control over Home Screen app icon arrangement, according to sources familiar with the matter. While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, to ensure there is some uniformity, our sources say that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18. For example, we expect that the update will introduce…
The next-generation iPad Pro will feature a landscape-oriented front-facing camera for the first time, according to the Apple leaker known as “Instant Digital.” Instant Digital reiterated the design change earlier today on Weibo with a simple accompanying 2D image. The post reveals that the entire TrueDepth camera array will move to the right side of the device, while the microphone will…
Apple today announced that its 35th annual Worldwide Developers Conference is set to take place from Monday, June 10 to Friday, June 14. As with WWDC events since 2020, WWDC 2024 will be an online event that is open to all developers at no cost. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos. WWDC 2024 will include online sessions and labs so that developers can learn about new…
Apple today released macOS Sonoma 14.4.1, a minor update for the macOS Sonoma operating system that launched last September. macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 comes three weeks after macOS Sonoma 14.4. The macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 update can be downloaded for free on all eligible Macs using the Software Update section of System Settings. There’s also a macOS 13.6.6 release for those who…
iOS 18 will allow iPhone users to place app icons anywhere on the Home Screen grid, according to sources familiar with development of the software update. This basic feature has long been available on Android smartphones. While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, our sources said that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18….
Apple may be planning to add support for “custom routes” in Apple Maps in iOS 18, according to code reviewed by MacRumors. Apple Maps does not currently offer a way to input self-selected routes, with Maps users limited to Apple’s pre-selected options, but that may change in iOS 18. Apple has pushed an iOS 18 file to its maps backend labeled “CustomRouteCreation.” While not much is revealed…
Climate change is starting to alter how humans keep time.
An analysis1 published in Nature on 27 March has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s unstable speed of rotation — will be delayed by three years.
“Enough ice has melted to move sea level enough that we can actually see the rate of theEarth’s rotation has been affected,” says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and author of the study.
The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
According to his analysis, global warming will push back the need for another leap second from 2026 to 2029. Leap seconds cause so much havoc for computing that scientists have voted to get rid of them, but not until 2035. Researchers are especially dreading the next leap second, because, for the first time, it is likely to be a negative, skipped second, rather than an extra one added in.
“We do not know how to cope with one second missing. This is why time metrologists are worried,” says Felicitas Arias, former director of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France.
In metrology terms, the three-year delay “is good news”, she says, because even if a negative leap second is still needed, it will happen later, and the world might see fewer of them before 2035 than would otherwise have been anticipated.
But this should not be seen as a point in favour of global warming, Agnew says. “It’s completely outweighed by all the negative aspects.”
Synchronizing clocks
For millennia, people measured time using Earth’s rotation, and the second became defined as a fraction of the time it takes for the planet to turn once on its axis. But since 1967, atomic clocks — which tick using the frequency of light emitted by atoms — have served as more precise timekeepers. Today, a suite of around 450 atomic clocks defines official time on Earth, known as Coordinated Universal Time (utc), and leap seconds are used every few years to keep utc in line with the planet’s natural day.
Atomic clocks are better timekeepers than Earth, because they are stable over millions of years, whereas the planet’s rotation rate varies. In his analysis, Agnew used mathematical models to tease apart the contributions of known geophysical phenomena to Earth’s rotation and to predict their effects on future leap seconds.
Many metrologists anticipated that leap seconds would only ever be added, because on the scale of millions of years, Earth’s spin is slowing down, meaning that, occasionally, a minute in utc needs to be 61 seconds long, to allow Earth to catch up. This reduction in the planet’s rotation rate is caused by the Moon’s pull on the oceans, which creates friction. It also explains, for example, why eclipses 2,000 years ago were recorded at different times in the day from what we would expect on the basis of today’s rotation rate, and why analyses of ancient sediments suggest that 1.4 billion years ago a day was only around 19 hours long.
Arctic 2.0: What happens after all the ice goes?
But on shorter timescales, geophysical phenomena make the rotation rate fluctuate, says Agnew. Right now, the rate at which Earth spins is being affected by currents in the liquid core of the planet, which since the 1970s have caused the rotation speed of the outer crust to increase. This has meant that added leap seconds are needed less frequently, and if the trend continues, a leap second will need to be removed from utc.
Agnew’s analysis finds that this could happen later than was previously thought, because of climate change. Data from satellites mapping Earth’s gravity show that since the early 1990s the planet has become less spherical and more flattened, as ice from Greenland and Antarctica has melted and moved mass away from the poles towards the Equator. Just as a spinning ice skater slows down by extending their arms away from their body (and speeds up by pulling them in), this flow of water away from Earth’s axis of rotation slows the planet’s spin.
The net result of core currents and of climate change is still an accelerating Earth. But Agnew found that without the effect of melting ice, a negative leap second would be needed three years earlier than is now predicted. “Human activities have a profound impact on climate change. The postponing of a leap second is just one more example,” says Jianli Chen, a geophysicist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Precision problems
A delayed leap second would be welcomed by metrologists. Leap seconds are a “big problem” already, because in a society that is increasingly based on precise timing, they lead to major failures in computing systems, says Elizabeth Donley, who heads the time and frequency division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado.
An unprecedented negative leap second could be even worse. “There’s no accounting for it in all the existing computer codes,” she says.
Agnew’s paper is useful in making predictions, but Donley says that there is still high uncertainty about when a negative leap second will be needed. The calculations rely on Earth’s acceleration continuing at its present rate, but activity in the inner core is almost impossible to predict, cautions Christian Bizouard, an astrogeophysicist at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris, which is responsible for deciding when to introduce a leap second. “We do not know when that mean acceleration will stop and reverse itself,” he says.
Agnew hopes that seeing the influence of climate change on timekeeping will jolt some people into action. “I’ve been around climate change for a long time, and I can worry about it plenty well without this, but it’s yet another way of impressing upon people just how big a deal this is,” he says.
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The field of audiomics combines artificial intelligence tools with human sounds, such as a coughs, to evaluate health.Credit: Getty
A machine-learning tool shows promise for detecting COVID-19 and tuberculosis from a person’s cough. While previous tools used medically annotated data, this model was trained on more than 300 million clips of coughing, breathing and throat clearing from YouTube videos. Although it’s too early to tell whether this will become a commercial product, “there’s an immense potential not only for diagnosis, but also for screening” and monitoring, says laryngologist Yael Bensoussan.
Everyone knows that usually, when it comes to charged particles, opposites attract. But in liquids, birds of a feather can flock together. Researchers investigating the long-standing mystery of why like-charged particles in solution can be drawn to each other have found that the nature of the solvent is key. The way that the liquid molecules arrange themselves around the particles can generate enough ‘electrosolvation force’ to overcome electromagnetic repulsion. The findings might require “a major re-calibration of basic principles that we believe govern the interaction of molecules and particles, and that we encounter at an early stage in our schooling,” says physical chemist and co-author Madhavi Krishnan.
A study of 34 years of online discussions from Usenet to YouTube shows that, when it comes to rude behaviour, people — not platforms — are the root of incivility. Researchers used Google’s artificial-intelligence (AI) ‘toxicity classifier’ to identify “rude, disrespectful or unreasonable” comments. They found that over three decades, longer discussions tend to be more toxic, but heated debates don’t necessarily escalate or drive away participants. “Despite changes in social media and social norms over time, certain human behaviours persist, including toxicity,” says data scientist and co-author Walter Quattrociocchi.
“I acknowledge granting a PhD is a messy business — there is no fixed bar that candidates have to meet to successfully defend,” says recently minted physics PhD Kai Shinbrough. He says that more transparency around the process would go a long way to alleviate candidates’ anxieties.
Readers’ suggestions included assessing dissertations in a similar way to grant proposals — in writing, with iterative feedback cycles — or opening theses to public comments. Many felt there should be more emphasis on evaluating PhD projects on their originality, methods and analysis rather than their ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ outcomes.
Others highlighted that assessment shouldn’t be generalized across all academic disciplines with their varying contexts, cultures and histories. “Breathless demands for sweeping innovation in yet another domain of higher education would certainly lead to additional demands on the time and workloads of supervisors” and further disincentivize PhD supervision, says linguist Mark Post.
Several readers felt that their supervisors’ hands-off leadership left them to mostly fend for themselves and missing out on learning important skills, such as grant writing or lab management. “Research should not be a painful or solitary endeavour, it should be a communal effort driven by individuals committed to serving society,” says linguist Izadora Silva Pimenta.
Features & opinion
A massive mouse-embryo map tracks the development of more than 12 million cells as they mature into organs and other tissues. Building these cell atlases typically requires multinational collaborations and lots of cash. But this one was completed in one year by a three-researcher team on a US$370,000 budget. Among the first insights from the data is that the transcriptome (the cells’ set of messenger RNA) changes most dramatically in the hour just after birth: it’s “the most stressful moment in your life”, says geneticist and atlas co-creator Jay Shendure.
A casualty of faster-than-light travel and a teenage remnant of Homo sapiens grapple over whether it was all worth it in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.
Song differences too subtle for people to hear are the special spice that make some male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) particularly attractive to females. Researchers used an AI algorithm to analyse various acoustic features and create maps of the songs’ syllables. Female finches preferred songs with wider statistical gaps on these maps — they seem to be harder to learn and therefore indicate the singer’s fitness. How this statistical distance translates into sonic quality isn’t clear yet. “They all sounded like just a regular learned zebra finch on to our ear,” says neuroscientist and study co-author Todd Roberts.
Primate-behaviour researcher Bing Lin took this photograph of a troop of gelada monkeys (Theropithecus gelada) making their way across Ethiopian highlands under a gathering storm in 2017. It was just one moment of many Lin captured during a year of studying the monkeys whilst living in a tent nearby. It was also the moment that won Nature’s 2022 Working Scientist photo competition. Now, the competition returns. You could see your photo of scientists taking part in their craft — in or out of the lab — published in Nature, plus win a cash prize and a year’s subscription. Find out more information here.
Quote of the day
Biophysicist Esther Osarfo-Mensah says that using AI to help produce summaries of papers might help disseminate research to non-specialists. (Nature Index | 7 min read)
