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Tetsuwan Scientific está construyendo científicos robóticos con inteligencia artificial que puedan realizar experimentos

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Tetsuwan Scientific, una startup con sede en San Francisco, está construyendo inteligencia artificial (Inteligencia artificial) Robots que pueden realizar las tareas del mundo. Los fundadores, el director ejecutivo Christian Pons y el director de tecnología (CTO), Theo Schäfer, sacaron la startup del secreto en noviembre después de una exitosa ronda de financiación inicial. La empresa tiene como objetivo crear software inteligente que pueda integrarse con robots de laboratorio para automatizar todo el proceso de descubrimiento e invención científicos, desde generar una hipótesis hasta realizar experimentos y sacar conclusiones.

Construyendo científicos en robótica impulsados ​​por IA

Fundada en 2023, la startup ha estado trabajando sigilosamente durante el último año y medio para construir su primer producto, un científico de inteligencia artificial que pueda realizar experimentos. Ahora está fuera del sigilo y actualmente trabaja con La Jolla Labs desarrollando fármacos terapéuticos de ARN. ático Sitio webla startup detalló su visión y el primer producto en el que está trabajando. En particular, todavía no tiene ningún producto de propiedad pública.

Al resaltar el planteamiento del problema que pretende resolver, la startup dice que la automatización en la ciencia se centra en un gran volumen de experimentos en lugar de una gran variedad. Esto se debe a que los robots de laboratorio actualmente requieren una programación extensa para replicar protocolos específicos. La compañía dijo que esto llevó a la creación de un sistema que crea líneas de ensamblaje en lugar de robots que podría ser de ayuda para los científicos.

Tetsuwan Scientific afirmó que el problema es que los robots no pueden comprender la intención científica y, por lo tanto, no pueden realizar un experimento por sí solos. Sin embargo, al observar modelos generativos de IA, afirma la compañía, ahora es posible cerrar esta brecha de comunicación y enseñar a los robots cómo actuar como científicos. Es un problema doble y requiere software inteligente combinado con hardware robótico versátil.

en entrevista Con TechCrunch, Pons destacó que los modelos de lenguaje grandes (LLM) pueden cerrar la brecha del software al permitir a los desarrolladores comunicar la intención científica a un bot sin tener que escribir miles de líneas de código. El director ejecutivo enfatizó que el marco de recuperación aumentada (RAG) también puede ayudar a reducir las alucinaciones de la IA.

Según la publicación, Tetsuwan Scientific está construyendo robots no humanoides. Estos robots, que también se muestran en el sitio web, son una estructura grande, cuadrada, parecida al vidrio, que se dice que evalúa resultados y realiza cambios en experimentos científicos sin necesidad de intervención humana. Se dice que estos robots funcionan con software y sensores de inteligencia artificial para adquirir conocimientos sobre parámetros técnicos como la calibración, la caracterización de la clase de líquido y otras propiedades.

En particular, la startup se encuentra actualmente en las etapas iniciales hacia su objetivo final de construir científicos robóticos autónomos de IA que puedan automatizar todo el proceso científico e inventar cosas.

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Los renders filtrados del Samsung Galaxy M16 5G muestran las opciones de diseño y color esperadas



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NATO is boosting AI and climate research as scientific diplomacy remains on ice

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Pilot whales surface near the NATO Research Vessel Alliance during the Biological and Behavioral Studies of Marine Mammals in the Western Mediterranean Sea study.

A NATO research vessel conducting studies of marine mammals in the Mediterranean Sea (pictured in 2009).Credit: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kristen Allen via Mil image/Alamy

Science has been essential to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the political and military alliance founded 75 years ago this month. The 32-country alliance is admitting more members as it faces evolving geopolitical and military threats. The organization’s scientific work focuses largely on defence and civil-security projects that, for instance, investigate how climate change is affecting war, how emerging technologies could enhance soldiers’ performance and how to reduce discrimination and intolerance among military personnel. “The role of science and technology for NATO is likely to grow significantly over the next two decades,” predicts Simona Soare, a defence-technologies researcher at Lancaster University, UK.

How does NATO use science?

“We’re looking to make sure that we can provide scientific advice to the nations of NATO to enable them to maintain a technical and military advantage,” says Bryan Wells, a chemist and the organization’s chief scientist. Wells works at NATO’s Brussels headquarters, where world leaders gathered earlier this month to mark the organization’s 75th anniversary.

NATO has a complex organizational structure including both military and civilian staff. The civilian part of NATO is headed by a senior political figure from a member state and also includes diplomats representing member countries. The military part is headed by senior military personnel.

Much of NATO’s research and development (R&D) takes place through the Science and Technology Organization (STO), a network of more than 6,000 scientists at universities and national laboratories and in industry. They work together on defence research projects. NATO’s member states and non-member countries together contribute around €350 million (US$380 million) annually for the work of this network, says Wells.

The STO also has its own research laboratory, the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy. The laboratory employs around 150 people and is led by Eric Pouliquen, a physicist who has worked on underwater remote sensing.

NATO’s civilian arm provides grants for a Science for Peace and Security (SPS) research programme, headed by Claudio Palestini, a researcher in communications engineering.

The programme funds studies in areas such as counterterrorism and cyber defence. Earlier this month, the SPS programme updated its priorities. These now include studies on the impact on defence and security from climate change and from AI; protecting underwater infrastructure, and what it calls “hybrid threats”, which includes interference in elections and disinformation. Each of its larger grants is worth between €250,000 and €400,000 and lasts for two to three years.

Wells says the STO publishes research — mostly from the CMRE — in peer-reviewed journals where possible. “We recognize if we can publish openly, it’s very beneficial to do that,” he says.

However, many of its research projects are classified. NATO also does not publish a detailed breakdown of its R&D income and expenditure by country; nor does it release its funding trend data.

What sort of research is NATO doing?

Projects cover a spectrum of fields including using autonomous undersea surveillance to hunt for and identify mines; tracking and identifying submarines; quantum radar; and synthetic biology.

For example, one programme led by CMRE researchers explores how autonomous underwater vehicles can identify submarines using quantum technologies and artificial intelligence. Similarly, another project, ‘Military Diversity in Multinational Defence Environments: From Ethnic Intolerance to Inclusion’ studied the reasons for intolerance within NATO members’ armed forces as part of an overall strategy to improve diversity and inclusion across the organization..

NATO is examining how AI could affect troops’ ability to conceal themselves and evade detection. Another initiative is investigating how biotechnology could boost soldiers’ performance by enhancing the microbiome or through brain-computer interface technologies.

Why is NATO interested in climate research?

NATO is concerned that climate change has significant impacts on security. Melting sea ice creates more routes for naval shipping in the Arctic, for example, and NATO and non-NATO countries are increasingly operating in the region.

NATO is also interested in how temperature changes could affect the security of its member and non-member countries as well as of military installations around the world. In a 2024 review paper in the Texas National Security Review, CMRE researchers — along with colleagues from the University of St Andrews, UK, the University of L’Aquila, Italy, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich — found that submarines could become more difficult to detect using sonar in the North Atlantic Ocean as water temperature rises.

In another study, presented at last week’s conference of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna , CMRE researchers working with scientists at the universities of Princeton in New Jersey and Central Florida in Orlando assessed how extreme weather might affect 91 NATO military bases and installations. The researchers found that multiple bases and installations are likely to become susceptible to climate change as emissions continue to rise.

In another project, last year one of NATO’s research vessels moored vertical lines holding oceanographic and acoustic recorders in the Arctic Ocean. The intention was to monitor temperature, salinity and ambient noise throughout the water column. Other research projects are looking at the use of new materials for military clothing in warmer climates, says Wells.

In 2022, NATO also published the first of a series called Climate change and Security Impact Assessment. It is also developing a methodology to map greenhouse-gas emissions from NATO-member military activities and installations.

lower a Slocum Glider unmanned undersea vehicle into the Gulf of Aqaba during International Maritime Exercise/Cutlass Express 2022.

Personnel from NATO and the Royal Jordanian Navy lower an unmanned undersea vehicle into the Gulf of Aqaba (pictured in 2022).Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Dawson Roth

How has NATO’s expansion affected science?

NATO’s membership has more than doubled since its founding on 4 April 1949. Finland and Sweden are the latest countries to join. Three more — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine — want to become members.

More members potentially means more funding and support for research and development, as well as access to a bigger pool of scientific expertise. However, Finland and Sweden both participated in NATO’s collaborative research for several years before they joined, says Wells.

Soare says that NATO’s defence science originally focused on aerospace, to help its members catch up after the Soviet Union launched Earth’s first artificial satellites — Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 — in 1957. “Throughout the cold war, ensuring air superiority was considered crucial,” she says.

What about a role for science in diplomacy?

In 1958, NATO established research fellowships and projects in what later became its Science for Peace and Security programme, to boost collaboration between nations including the United States and the Soviet Union. “Science provided a path for superpower adversaries to cooperate,” says Paul Arthur Berkman, founder of the Science Diplomacy Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

The fellowships and collaborative projects continued to provide a point of contact between NATO and Russia until 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea. That year, Russia, Romania and the United States were jointly developing a system to connect telemedicine capabilities across all three countries to provide medical care in remote and emergency situations. However, the invasion prompted NATO to freeze cooperation with Russia.

Berkman, who in 2010 co-organized and chaired the first dialogue between NATO and Russia regarding environmental security in the Arctic, is concerned at the alliance’s shift away from using science as a “safety valve” in its relations with Russia. He warns that cutting off scientific dialogue with Russia undermines democracy and nations’ ability to tackle global challenges such as climate change.

“Open science is akin to freedom of speech. If we turn off open science, in a sense we’re undermining democracy,” says Berkman.

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US COVID-origins hearing puts scientific journals in the hot seat

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rad Wenstrup speaks with Raul Ruiz during a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis

Brad Wenstrup (right), a Republican from Ohio who chairs the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, speaks with Raul Ruiz (left), a Democrat from California who is ranking member of the subcommittee.Credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty

During a public hearing in Washington DC today, Republicans in the US House of Representatives alleged that government scientists unduly influenced the editors of scientific journals and that, in turn, those publications stifled discourse about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats clapped back, lambasting their Republican colleagues for making such accusations without adequate evidence and for sowing distrust of science.

The session is the latest in a series of hearings held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to explore where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus came from, despite a lack of any new scientific evidence. Scientists have for some time been arguing over whether the virus spread naturally, from animals to people, or whether it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Some have alleged that in the early days of the pandemic, government scientists Anthony Fauci, former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, former director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), steered the scientific community, including journals, to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis.

During the pandemic, “rather than journals being a wealth of information”, they instead “put a chilling effect on scientific research regarding the origins of COVID-19”, Brad Wenstrup, a Republican representative from Ohio who is chair of the subcommittee, said at the hearing. Raul Ruiz, a Democratic representative from California who is the ranking member of the subcommittee, shot back: “Congress should not be meddling in the peer-review process, and it should not be holding hearings to throw around baseless accusations.”

Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals in Washington DC, appeared before the committee to deny the suggestion that he had been coerced or censored by government scientists.

The subcommittee also invited Magdalena Skipper, Nature’s editor-in-chief, and Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet, to appear, but neither was present. Skipper was absent owing to scheduling conflicts, but a spokesperson for Springer Nature says the company is “committed to remaining engaged with the Subcommittee and to assisting in its inquiry”. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journals team and of its publisher, Springer Nature.) The Lancet did not respond to requests for comment.

Academic influence?

This is not the first time that Republicans have accused members of the scientific community of colluding with Fauci and Collins. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen and virologist Robert Garry appeared before the same subcommittee on 11 July last year to deny allegations that the officials prompted them to publish a commentary in Nature Medicine1 in March 2020 concluding that SARS-CoV-2 showed no signs of genetic engineering. They wrote in the journal that they did not “believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” for the virus’s origins.

Portrait of Holden Thorp

Holden Thorp became editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals in 2019.Credit: Steve Exum

Some lab-leak proponents have suggested, without evidence, that the pandemic began because the NIH funded risky coronavirus research at a lab in Wuhan, offering a motive for Collins and Fauci to promote a natural origin for COVID-19.

During the latest hearing, Republicans went a step further to suggest that not only did Collins and Fauci influence prominent biologists, but that they also encouraged journals to publish research supporting the natural-origin hypothesis. This accusation is based on e-mails that Wenstrup says the subcommittee obtained showing communication between top journal editors and government scientists. Thorp forcefully denied this line of questioning. “No government officials prompted or participated in the review or editing” of two key papers2,3 on COVID-19’s origins published in Science, he testified. “Any papers supporting the lab-origin theory would go through the very same processes” of peer review as any other paper, he said.

Thorp otherwise spent much of the 80-minute hearing answering questions about how a scientific manuscript is prepared for publication, what a preprint is and how peer review works. In a tense moment, Wenstrup questioned a social-media post on Thorp’s personal X (formerly Twitter) page, in which he downplayed the lab-leak hypothesis. Thorp called the post “flippant” and apologised.

Communication queries

Correspondence between journal editors and government scientists is to be expected, Deborah Ross, a Democratic representative from North Carolina, said at the hearing. “Government actors querying academia on issues that are academic in nature isn’t malpractice or unlawful — it’s just doing their jobs.”

Anita Desikan, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists who is based in Washington DC and focuses on scientific integrity, tells Nature’s news team that it is customary for government agencies to reach out to stakeholders to inform policy decisions. Even if a government scientist suggests an idea for a journal paper, “that doesn’t mean it will be published or receive praise from the scientific community”.

Roger Pielke Jr, a science-policy researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was originally slated to testify before the subcommittee until his invitation was rescinded owing to logistical reasons, disagrees. He thinks that Fauci and Collins still shaped the Nature Medicine COVID-19 origins paper by recommending that specific scientists investigate and by offering advice along the way. Nevertheless, the hearing was a “dud”, Pielke Jr says, because Thorp was the wrong witness. Instead, a more relevant witness would have been a government scientific-integrity officer who is more knowledgeable about what constitutes an ethical breach, he adds.

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How papers with doctored images can affect scientific reviews

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It was in just the second article of more than 1,000 that Otto Kalliokoski was screening that he spotted what he calls a “Photoshop masterpiece”.

The paper showed images from western blots — a technique used to analyse protein composition — for two samples. But Kalliokoski, an animal behaviourist at the University of Copenhagen, found that the images were identical down to the pixel, which he says is clearly not supposed to happen.

Image manipulation in scientific studies is a known and widespread problem. All the same, Kalliokoski and his colleagues were startled to come across more than 100 studies with questionable images while compiling a systematic review about a widely used test of laboratory rats’ moods. After publishing the review1 in January, the researchers released a preprint2 documenting the troubling studies that they uncovered and how these affected the results of their review. The preprint, posted on bioRxiv in February, has not yet been peer reviewed.

Their work “clearly highlights [that falsified images] are impacting our consolidated knowledge base”, says Alexandra Bannach-Brown, a systematic-review methodologist at the Berlin Institute of Health who was not involved with either the review or the preprint. Systematic reviews, which summarize and interpret the literature on a particular topic, are a key component of that base. With an explosion of scientific literature, “it’s impossible for a single person to keep up with reading every new paper that comes out in their field”, Bannach-Brown says. And that means that upholding the quality of systematic reviews is ever more important.

Pile-up of problems

Kalliokoski’s systematic review examined the reliability of a test designed to assess reward-seeking in rats under stress. A reduced interest in a reward is assumed to be a proxy symptom of depression, and the test is widely used during the development of antidepressant drugs. The team identified an initial pool of 1,035 eligible papers; 588 contained images.

By the time he’d skimmed five papers, Kalliokoski had already found a second one with troubling images. Not sure what to do, he bookmarked the suspicious studies and went ahead with collating papers for the review. As the questionable papers kept piling up, he and his colleagues decided to deploy Imagetwin, an AI-based software tool that flags problems such as duplicated images and ones that have been stretched or rotated. Either Imagetwin or the authors’ visual scrutiny flagged 112 — almost 20% — of the 588 image-containing papers.

“That is actually a lot,” says Elizabeth Bik, a microbiologist in San Francisco, California, who has investigated image-related misconduct and is now an independent scientific-integrity consultant. Whether image manipulation is the result of honest error or an intention to mislead, “it could undermine the findings of a study”, she says.

Small but detectable effect

For their final analysis, the authors examined all the papers that met their criteria for inclusion in their review. This batch, consisting of 132 studies, included 10 of the 112 that the team had flagged as having potentially doctored images.

Analysis of these 10 studies alone assessed the test as 50% more effective at identifying depression-related symptoms than did a calculation based on the 122 studies without questionable images. These suspicious studies “do actually skew the results”, Kalliokoski says — although “not massively”, because overall variations in the data set mask the contribution from this small subset.

Examples from this study “cover pretty much all types of image problems”, Bik says, ranging from simple duplication to images that showed evidence of deliberate alteration. Using a scale that Bik developed to categorize the degree of image manipulation, the researchers found that most of the problematic images showed signs of tampering.

The researchers published their review in January in Translational Psychiatry without telling the journal that it was based in part on papers that included suspicious images. The journal’s publisher, Springer Nature, told Nature that it is investigating. (The Nature news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature).

When they published their preprint the following month, the researchers included details of all the papers with suspicious images. They also flagged each study on Pubpeer, a website where scientists comment anonymously on papers. “My first allegiance is towards the [scientific] community,” Kalliokoski says, adding that putting the data out is the first step.

Bring reviews to life

The process of challenging a study’s integrity, giving its authors a chance to respond and seeking retraction for fraudulent studies can take years. One way to clear these muddied waters, says Bannach-Brown, is to publish ‘living’ systematic reviews, which are designed to be updated whenever papers get retracted or new research is added. She has helped to develop one such method of creating living reviews, called Systematic Online Living Evidence Summaries.

Systematic-review writers are also keen to see publishers integrate standardized ways to screen out dubious studies — rather than waiting until a study gets retracted.

Authors, publishers and editorial boards need to work together, Bannach-Brown says, to “catch some of these questionable research practices before they even make it to publication.”

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Did ‘alien’ debris hit Earth? Startling claim sparks row at scientific meeting

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An electron microprobe image of a grey sphere on a black background. The sphere has a partially irregular surface and is about 200 micrometres across according to the scale bar.

Avi Loeb and his team say that metallic balls found near Papua New Guinea could be of extraterrestrial origin.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection

The Woodlands, Texas

A sensational claim made last year that an ‘alien’ meteorite hit Earth near Papua New Guinea in 2014 got its first in-person airing with the broader scientific community on 12 March. At the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, scientists clashed over whether a research team has indeed found fragments of a space rock that came from outside the Solar System.

The debate occurred at a packed session featuring Hairuo Fu, a graduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the team that found the fragments. Team leader Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard who did not attend the conference, has made other controversial claims about extraterrestrial discoveries. Many scientists have said that they don’t want to spend much of their time analysing and refuting these claims.

During his presentation, Fu described tiny metallic blobs that Loeb’s expedition dredged from the sea floor near Papua New Guinea last year, and said that the spherules have a chemical composition of unknown origin1. He then faced questions from a long line of scientists sceptical of the implications of extraterrestrial material. “At the very least, it is something different from what we know,” Fu responded.

New work questions the team’s findings. In a manuscript posted on the arXiv preprint server on 8 March2, ahead of peer review, a researcher argues that the debris collected by Loeb and his co-workers is actually molten blobs generated when an asteroid hit Earth 788,000 years ago.

“What they found has all the characteristics of microtektites — little pieces of melted Earth that came from this impact,” says preprint author Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Meanwhile, other studies are challenging different aspects of Loeb’s claim, such as whether the meteor that reportedly produced the fragments was on the trajectory Loeb says it was. Together, the findings show how the broader scientific community is engaging with Loeb’s extraterrestrial claims, in spite of reluctance to do so.

A unique find?

‘Interstellar’ objects remained in the realm of theory until 2017, when astronomers spotted the first known celestial object to be on a trajectory that meant it could only have come from outside the Solar System. Loeb made headlines when he speculated that the object, a comet-like body named ‘Oumuamua, was an artefact sent by an extraterrestrial civilization.

‘Oumuamua passed through the Solar System far from Earth, but Loeb hoped to find another interstellar object that had hit the planet. He later proposed that a bright meteor that appeared in the sky north of Papua New Guinea in January 2014 had an interstellar trajectory and could have scattered debris in the ocean.

Three people use a vacuum tool on a metallic sledge on board a ship.

Avi Loeb (in hat) and colleagues recover particles from a magnetic sledge on their 2023 expedition.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection

In June 2023, Loeb led a privately funded expedition to the site that used magnetic sledges to recover more than 800 metallic spherules from the sea floor. About one-quarter of the spherules had chemical compositions indicating that they came from igneous, or once-molten, rocks. Of those, a handful were unusually enriched in the elements beryllium, lanthanum and uranium. The researchers concluded that those spherules are unlike any known materials in the Solar System1.

However, Desch counters that the spherules could have come from an asteroid impact in southeast Asia. Key to his proposal2 is a kind of soil called laterite, which forms in tropical regions when heavy rainfall carries some chemical elements from the topmost layers of soil into deeper ones. This leaves the upper soil enriched in other elements, including beryllium, lanthanum and uranium — similar to the composition of the spherules collected by Loeb and his colleagues. Desch says that an asteroid known to have struck the region around 788,000 years ago3 probably hit lateritic rock and created the molten blobs found by Loeb’s team.

In an e-mail to Nature, Loeb argues that spherules from an impact 788,000 years ago should have been buried by ocean sediments. Desch counters that sedimentation rates are relatively low in the offshore area where the spherules were collected.

But others are sceptical of Desch’s proposal, too. Scientists have yet to find any confirmed tektites from lateritic rock, notes Pierre Rochette, a geoscientist at Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France, who is not affiliated with either team. And very few tektites are magnetic, he says, so it would be difficult for Loeb and his colleagues to have pulled up hundreds from the sea floor.

Fiery critiques

Desch was not the only scientist to challenge Loeb’s work this week.

After Fu’s conference presentation, Ben Fernando, a seismologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, spoke and took aim at claims concerning the 2014 meteor. Fernando and his colleagues, including Desch, analysed seismic and acoustic data gathered by ground-based sensors at the time the meteor hit the atmosphere4. Data from a seismometer on nearby Manus Island, which Loeb and his team studied as they were deciding where to dredge, show no characteristics of a high-altitude fireball — but do indicate a vehicle driving past, Fernando said. “This is almost certainly a truck,” he told the meeting. A second set of observations, made using infrasound sensors that listen for clandestine nuclear tests, seems to have detected the meteor hitting the atmosphere, but suggests it happened around 170 kilometres away from where Loeb’s team calculates.

Loeb told Nature that such critiques do not take into account US Department of Defense data that he says confirm the exact trajectory of that fireball. But because those data are held by the government, they have not been independently cross-checked by other scientists.

As conference-goers poured out of the room after his talk, Fu told Nature that Loeb’s team is working on further analyses, such as isotopic studies, that could shed more light on what the spherules are. After that, Fu said, he is looking forward to graduating and working on a new project — on how the Moon was formed.

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Being a parent is a hidden scientific superpower — here’s why

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Lindsey Smith Taillie and daughter walking seaside near hills while spotting puffins in Runde, Norway, June 2023

Being a parent is often seen as a career obstacle, but it can actually make you a better scientist, says nutrition epidemiologist Lindsey Smith Taillie.Credit: Paul Taillie

More than once in the past few years, in a variety of informal settings, I’ve overheard senior scientists recommend hiring people without children over those who are parents. Their reasoning, I gather, is that a parent might be smart and well-trained, but wouldn’t have the time or dedication to cut it in research. As a mid-career scientist with two young children, these comments floored me.

In my experience, these assumptions, typically aimed at faculty members or postdocs, are all too frequent. And although people tend to phrase their concerns in a gender-neutral way, about ‘parents’, they’re almost always talking about women. Women, who comprise only 33% of full professors despite accounting for more than 50% of the PhDs awarded each year, and who consistently have lower salaries than men across all ranks. Women, who still disproportionately do the bulk of domestic work, including childcare, around the globe. Although I’ve heard these comments more often from men, I’ve also heard female scientists essentially dismiss someone if they become pregnant, as if their career is over before really getting started.

It’s true that being an academic woman with children is hard. In my field of global nutrition, it’s very common to have meetings at odd hours or need to travel at short notice. Dealing with school closures and frequent illnesses feels similar to playing whack-a-mole, needing to keep research moving while juggling childcare.

I have benefited from being white, heterosexual, married, neurotypical and working at a prestigious university. Crucially, I also benefit from having a husband, also a scientist, who does at least half of the childcare, cooking and cleaning, something that I think is still rare in heterosexual co-parenting relationships. Still, even with all of this privilege, it’s hard: there are many days when my brain feels shattered.

But, becoming a parent has also undoubtedly helped my career; both my rate of publishing and my number of grants won have increased substantially since my first daughter was born in 2017. I’ve become a more productive scientist. Here’s why.

Time scarcity

Those senior scientists who say that parents have less time are probably right: before I had children, I worked longer hours. I would go down rabbit holes into the early evening and often on weekends. I felt like I was always working and filling up all of my available time with research. But now, I write e-mails, papers and grant drafts like I am taking an exam: with intense focus and high speed. Having time constraints has forced me into a mindset of relentless prioritization, which has increased my scientific acumen and decision-making.

For example, last December, I was asked to present my research at a US Senate committee hearing on type 2 diabetes. I had only four days to put together a written testimony summarizing decades of data and build a case for why nutrition matters in diabetes prevention. My husband was out of town and, in a cruel twist of fate, one of my children got a throat infection. It was stressful, but I was able to draft the entire testimony in a single workday — something that, before having children, would have easily taken the entire four days. Also, because I knew that I’d need to rush off any second to tend to my sick child, I was able to push through my anxiety about writing such an important document and focus on getting pen to paper.

Arguably, you could achieve this effect without children by having stronger work–life boundaries. That’s great, but it never worked for me. Having a non-negotiable deadline of school or day-care pick-up forced me to let go of my perfectionist tendencies, supercharging my productivity.

A fresh perspective

Becoming a parent also gave me a first-hand perspective on my field of nutrition. For example, similar to most young children, my three- and six-year-olds are picky eaters, and it’s been a challenge for me to get them to try new foods and eat veggies while also keeping food waste to a minimum. From social media, I discovered that giving my daughters tiny portions presented in a cute way — for example, a single broccoli floret with a toothpick and dip or a few spoons of soup in a colourful cupcake tin — helped with this. These experiences with my own children have helped me to incorporate families’ perspectives into my research design and to test interventions to prevent household food waste, increasing the chances that our interventions will be more effective for more people.

Parent networks

Even more importantly, becoming a parent has allowed me to create networks. I collaborate with colleagues who are also parents, and sharing our experiences has helped us to become friends, able to empathize and help each other out in a pinch, with work or with parenting.

Lindsey Smith Taillie swimming in a cenote in Merida, Mexico, on December 2023 with her husband and two children.

Lindsey Smith Taillie’s experiences as a mother have helped to improve her food-waste intervention designs.Credit: Hacienda Mucuyche

This network has extended far beyond my immediate colleagues, too. Through the social-media platform Facebook, I have found an online community of academic mothers, which has become a treasure trove of help and advice. More than just tips on sippy cups or football clubs, people in the group share the hidden rules of playing the academic game, from handling job searches as a couple of two academics to going up for tenure or accepting tough grant reviews.

The networking benefits of parenthood translate to the team science, too. Sharing experiences about children helps to build rapport with collaborators — we’re able to bond over our common scientific challenges and laugh about our children’s silly stunts.

Emotional intelligence

Parenting has also made me a more effective teacher. For example, because my older daughter is obsessed with mythical creatures, I’m the proud owner of a giant inflatable pink unicorn costume — something that I have worn in class to demonstrate the power of food marketing, when discussing the Starbucks pink unicorn frappuccinos. It was silly, but that silliness has been helpful for connecting with students. Beyond pink unicorns, telling stories about my children in the classroom has made me more relatable and helped me to show key points about nutrition by invoking real-world examples. Parenting has helped me to expand my horizons and relate more to my students.

Being a parent has made me a better mentor, more able to support students who have children and helping me to treat all students as whole people, with a life outside science — whether or not that includes children. Because of my own experience, I feel better equipped to help my students to integrate the facets of their lives and find what balance looks like for them. It’s been difficult to speak out publicly about both the challenges and merits of parenting as a scientist. When I push back against things such as out-of-hours meetings, I worry about increasing biases against parents and especially mothers, perpetuating challenges to hiring and retaining them in the scientific workforce. But as time goes on, and I see these biases persist, I think that now is the time to speak up and be clear. Parenting isn’t my scientific kryptonite; it’s my superpower.

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Astrolabe shows 11th-century scientific collaboration among Jews, Muslims and Christians

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An artist's impression of three woolly mammoths in a snowy landscape.

Woolly mammoths’ closest living relatives are Asian elephants, which could be genetically engineered to have mammoth-like traits.Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Alamy

The US company Colossal Biosciences says it has put elephant skin cells into an embryonic state — the first to do so. This is an early technical step in their bid to breed Asian elephants (Elephus maximus) that have traits of extinct woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), such as shaggy hair. There are many more reproductive hurdles to clear: from making viable ‘synthetic’ embryos to creating artificial wombs for in vitro gestation. “I just don’t know the time frame and whether it’s worth the resources,” says evolutionary geneticist Vincent Lynch. He plans to attempt the Colossal method as part of his lab’s ongoing efforts to understand why elephants rarely get cancer.

Nature | 5 min read

Preprint: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Nine

The number of months in a row that have broken global monthly heat records. Climate change, the El Niño weather pattern and less sun-reflecting air pollution have all contributed. (New Scientist | 3 min read)

A landmark study of more than 200 people undergoing surgery found that nearly 60% had microplastics in fatty plaques lining their arteries. Those who did were 4.5 times more likely to experience a heart attack, stroke or death in the 3 years after their surgery than those whose arteries were plastic-free. The study comes at a pivotal moment for a global treaty to eliminate plastic pollution, first proposed in 2022, and intended to be finalized by the end of 2024. “This will be the launching pad for further studies across the world to corroborate, extend and delve into the degree of the risk that micro- and nanoplastics pose,” says physician-scientist Robert Brook.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: New England Journal Medicine paper

The two likely candidates for the November US Presidential elections — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — have opposing views on many issues. Nature talks to researchers and policy analysts about three key areas for science:

• Trump could disrupt the climate agenda laid out by Biden by reversing pledges to slash emissions and by blocking funding for clean energy projects.

• The candidates differ in their support for abortion rights, vaccinations and key federal and international health agencies.

• China relations are one area where the two candidates are more aligned: scientific cooperation between the US and China has continued to decline under Biden and this is unlikely to change.

Nature | 9 min read

An 11th-century astrolabe bears Arabic, Latin and Hebrew words and numerals inscribed by different users who added translations and corrections to the instrument. “It’s a powerful record of scientific exchange between Arabs, Jews and Christians over hundreds of years,” says Federica Gigante, a specialist in Islamic scientific instruments who spotted it in the collection of a museum in Italy.

The Guardian | 4 min read

Reference: Nuncius paper

The Verona astrolabe

Federica Gigante

“In 11th-century Spain, Jews and Muslims and Christians were working alongside each other, especially in the scientific media,” says Gigante. “All this is known, but what I find extraordinary is that this is a very tangible, physical proof of that history.”

Features & opinion

Preliminary analysis of almost 5,000 papers submitted to Nature over a five-month period reveals that too few are submitted by women in the role of leading or ‘corresponding’ author. Of the 90% of corresponding authors who were willing to disclose their gender to Nature, just 17% identified as women — globally, the female scientific workforce was around 32% in 2021, according to UNESCO data. There was also a notable difference in acceptance rates. “We cannot assume that peer review is a gender-blind process,” comments a Nature editorial, vowing to double down on efforts to reach more women: proactively seeking out women authors and reviewers, and challenging stereotypes about gender and publishing. The data will be further analysed and updated, the article adds.

Nature | 8 min read

In 1939, concerned by the pace at which nuclear-science discoveries were being made in Germany, physicist Leo Szilard persuaded Albert Einstein to write to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him of the risk of an atomic bomb in Adolf Hitler’s hands. But Szilard wasn’t the only physicist to try to use Einstein’s prestige to alert the president, writes mathematician Karl Sigmund: physicist Hans Thirring independently arrived at the same idea. “Thirring’s attempt petered out, but deserves a footnote in history, if only because it involves none less than Kurt Gödel in the unexpected role of a secret agent,” writes Sigmund.

Nature | 9 min read

Offshore energy platforms must all, eventually, be decommissioned. Whether these huge structures are abandoned, toppled, removed or repurposed, science — not just politics — must play a part in decision-making, argue four marine scientists. Many “consider anything other than the complete removal of these structures to be littering by energy companies”, they write. But a ‘rigs-to-reefs’ approach can provide habitats for marine life, with far less pollution and cost, if the location is suitable. The authors call for regulators to keep an open mind about alternative decommissioning methods like reefing and recommend that future marine infrastructure should be designed with decommissioning in mind.

Nature | 12 min read

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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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