COP28: A historic moment for loss and damage

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Hello Nature readers, Today we hear from the first days of COP28, learn that some penguins survive on thousands of short naps and consider how to end the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

A chinstrap penguin sleeps on a beach in Antarctica. (Mathias Rhode/Alamy)

Penguins live on thousands of microsleeps Briefing penguin-puzzle star Leif Penguinson believes in getting a solid 8 hours a night — but chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) prefer a little nap. They sleep more than 10,000 times a day for an average of 4 seconds at a time. Researchers wanting to understand penguin sleep observed 14 birds over 10 days, and found that the most they ever slept for was a 34-second snooze — though the microsleeps add up to more than 11 hours of daily rest. Nature | 4 min read Reference: Science paper

Local teams make more breakthroughs In-person teams do more 'disruptive' science than remote groups, suggests an analysis of 20 million papers and 4 million patents published over six decades. It's not clear why this is, given that remote collaborators can benefit from greater collective knowledge. "It probably has to do something with the intensity," says economist and study co-author Carl Frey. "And the fact that, when something is tacit and when an idea isn't quite crisp yet, it's actually quite hard to communicate." Nature | 5 min read Reference: Nature paper

Human-cell robots might help us heal Using cells from the human windpipe, scientists have developed tiny self-propelling robots that might have therapeutic properties. When researchers placed the 'anthrobots' on a layer of neural tissue that had been scratched, the neurons underneath completely healed within three days. This suggests the potential for personalized regenerative medicine, say the researchers. Nature | 4 min read Reference: Advanced Science paper

Each anthrobot is made up of a few hundred cells. (Gizem Gumuskaya, Tufts University)

COP28 climate conference

News Historic moment for loss and damage fund The 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, began yesterday with a bang as countries came together to adopt a draft resolution for a loss and damage fund — in which rich countries that have benefited from historical activities that produced high emissions help the poorer countries that are hardest-hit by the impacts of climate change. Nations have already pledged more than US$400 million to the fund, with host country the United Arab Emirates and Germany both promising US$100 million. The United States came forward with $17.5 million — a relatively paltry sum, but still significant because the United States had previously fought against loss and damage, seeing it as a slippery slope to the idea of climate reparations, which it opposes. Details about how the fund will be disbursed — and whether poorer nations will have to repay the cash — remain to be decided. Nature | 4 min read News Make room for microbes in climate models At COP28 and beyond, microbiologists are making the case for more attention to microbes in climate models and solutions. Microorganisms are the base of all the world's food chains, and their responses to climate change will have wide-ranging implications for biodiversity, fisheries and agriculture. And they are the engines that drive most marine processes — they both produce and take up methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide on tremendous scales. Nature | 6 min read Read more: ocean scientist Alessandro Tagliabue outlines some priority areas in which researchers in marine microbiology, physiology, biogeochemistry and modelling can join forces. (Nature | 9 min read) Opinion How we'll know when we've reached 1.5 ℃ The 2015 Paris climate agreement enshrines an ambitious goal: to keep global warming below 1.5 ℃ on average, compared with pre-industrial times. But it doesn't define how to measure the change. "This is likely to result in distraction and delay just at the point when climate action is most urgent," argue climate-impacts researcher Richard Betts and nine other scientists at the UK Met Office. They propose a new, future-proof indicator — the 20-year average temperature rise centred around the current year, blending observations for the past 10 years with climate-model projections for the next 10. "Researchers must ensure that it is ready well before the controversy begins," they write. Nature | 10 min read Podcast COP28 and the 1.5-degree dream The challenge of keeping global warming below 1.5 ℃ above pre-industrial levels is "big and it gets bigger every year", Nature climate correspondent Jeff Tollefson tells the Nature Podcast. At COP28, countries are supposed to assess their progress towards climate goals and make commitments for the future. "How that is going to work, it's still a little bit unclear," Tollefson says. "What we need is more action at the national level and less talk at meetings like these." Nature Podcast | 26 min listen Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify, or use the RSS feed.

Features & opinion

How to end the HIV/AIDS pandemic "We now have the tools and knowledge to end the HIV/AIDS pandemic as a threat to public health — and to do so by 2030," write John Nkengasong, Mike Reid, Ingrid Katz at the US AIDS-relief programme PEPFAR. The goal: to reach the '95-95-95' targets of at least 95% of people living with HIV knowing their status; at least 95% of those people being on life-saving antiretroviral therapy; and at least 95% of those people having an undetectable viral load. To get there, argue the authors, will require the use of behavioural-science approaches to reach populations that are most in need. Nature | 9 min read

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Futures: Stuck in the middle A person rethinks the wisdom of investing in a robot body in the latest short story for Nature's Futures series. Nature | 7 min read

Five best science books this week Andrew Robinson's pick of the top five science books to read this week includes the first systematic study of all graphical symbol systems and the surprisingly meaningful answers to ten simple questions. Nature | 4 min read

Quote of the day "Understanding and solving global health inequalities requires getting to the root causes of ugly social realities … What is needed is political willpower and just distribution of power and resources, not LLMs." Many researchers are feeling the pressure to jump on the bandwagon of large language models (LLMs), says cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane — and many are not considering whether technology is an appropriate 'solution' to complex, multifaceted challenges. (Nature | 10 min read)

Today Leif Penguinson is enjoying the crashing waves at MacKenzie State Recreation Area in Hawaii. Can you find the penguin? The answer will be in Monday's e-mail, all thanks to Briefing photo editor and penguin wrangler Tom Houghton. This newsletter is always evolving — tell us what you think! Please send your feedback to briefing@nature.com. Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing With contributions by Katrina Krämer and Sara Phillips

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