COVID protections eliminated a strain of flu

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Hello Nature readers, Today we learn that public-health protections brought in to combat COVID-19 have eliminated a strain of flu. Plus, five tips for digitizing handwritten data.

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

Meningitis could be Nigeria 'mystery illness' Nigeria's National Assembly has instructed the country's health ministry to investigate a "strange disease" said to have killed more than two dozen people in the northeastern state of Gombe. The World Health Organization says that there have been three deaths, resulting from confirmed cases of meningitis. The case highlights the importance of thorough disease-surveillance systems and the need for timely communication, say researchers. Nature | 3 min read

UK science minister retracts accusations The UK science minister Michelle Donelan has apologized and paid damages for accusing two researchers on a UK Research and Innovation panel of "extremist" views on the Israel–Hamas conflict. More than a dozen researchers resigned from the United Kingdom's national funder after it dissolved the panel in response to the minister's demand. The Financial Times | 3 min read Read more: Researcher resignations from UKRI mount amid Israel–Hamas row (Nature | 5 min read, from November)

COVID protections wiped out a strain of flu For the first time, an influenza virus has been eliminated from the human population through non-pharmaceutical interventions. The public-health protections brought in during the COVID-19 pandemic — such as wearing a mask, social distancing and better ventilation — seem to have eliminated the influenza B/Yamagata lineage; no cases have been confirmed since March 2020. In September, the World Health Organization recommended that countries no longer include Yamagata-lineage antigens in flu vaccines, and US Food and Drug Administration advisors have now voted to remove it from flu jabs in the United States. CNN | 5 min read Reference: The Lancet Infectious Diseases editorial

277 The number of times a man in Germany was vaccinated against COVID-19 in 29 months (against public health advice). He's fine, and no more immune than someone who's had the recommended number of jabs. (CNN | 5 min read) Reference: The Lancet Infectious Diseases correspondence

Features & opinion

China updates naughty list of journals China has updated its Early Warning Journal List — a list of journals that are deemed to be untrustworthy, predatory or not serving the Chinese research community's interests. The latest edition includes 24 journals and, for the first time, takes note of misconduct called citation manipulation, in which authors try to inflate their citation counts. Scholarly literature researcher Yang Liying heads up the team that produces the influential list and spoke to Nature about how it's done. Nature | 6 min read

Five tips for digitizing handwritten data Tracking malaria infections in lizards in a rainstorm? Recording beetle species in a dusty cornfield? Sometimes a pencil and notebook still outperform a computer or smartphone in the field. Other data might be immortalized in ledgers crowded with historical handwriting. For those times, Nature has compiled five tips for getting handwritten data digitized into a form that can be analysed. Nature | 8 min read

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How the digital city is changing culture In Atlas of the Senseable City, architect-researchers Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti delve into the impact of digital maps on human society. "Ancient Romans had two words for city: 'urbs', the physical environment, and 'civitas', the community of citizens," says Ratti. "For the first time, technology allows us to visualize and understand civitas: how people move in space, how they connect, and also how they segregate … Architects and urban planners can now take into account the civitas rather than just the urbs." Los Angeles Review of Books | 18 min read

Infographic

The discovery of the oldest fossilized reptile skin ever found sheds light on how scaly skin started to evolve at the dawn of life on dry land. The 285-million-year-old fossils of intricately patterned animal scales show that the innovation came about as aquatic vertebrates adapted for terrestrial survival, writes developmental biologist Maksim Plikus. (Nature News & Views article | 8 min read, Nature paywall — or read the Nature News article from January for free)

Quote of the day "Human impact goes much deeper into geological time. If we ignore that, we are ignoring the true impact, the real impact, that humans have on our planet." Earth scientist Mike Walker is among the scientists opposed to a proposal to formalize the Anthropocene — an epoch of geologic time marked by human-induced changes — as beginning in the early 1950s. An International Commission on Stratigraphy panel has voted down the proposal. (The New York Times | 7 min read) Read more: A process, not a moment: the Anthropocene will not get its golden spike (Nature | 5 min read)

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Don't chuck that cheddar or bin that Brie until you've read this handy guide to when you should throw out mouldy cheese — the answer is 'hardly ever'. "Even though we've been taught to fear mould, all of cheese is mould," says cheese specialist Anne-Marie Pietersma in a statement that will forever be burned into my mind. In a nutshell, the harder the cheese, the less you need to worry about just cutting off the bad bits and chowing down. While I indulge in some gorgeous gorgonzola, why not send me your feedback on this newsletter? Your e-mails are always welcome at briefing@nature.com. Thanks for reading, Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing With contributions by Gemma Conroy

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