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| Physicist Ranga Dias was once a rising star in the field of superconductivity research. (Lauren Petracca/New York Times/Redux/eyevine) | |||||
Exclusive: How superconductivity was fakedRanga Dias, the physicist at the centre of the room-temperature superconductivity scandal, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, according to an investigation commissioned by his university. Nature's news team discovered the bombshell 124-page report in court documents. The report methodically documents how Dias deliberately misled his co-authors, journal editors and the scientific community. Nature | 12 min readRead more: Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star's physics lab (Nature | 18 min read, Nature paywall) Reference: Nature paper 1 & Nature paper 2 (both retracted) | |||||
First widespread bird flu outbreak in cowsH5N1, a virus that has killed hundreds of millions of wild and domestic birds, is spreading in US dairy cows for the first time. Researchers are closely monitoring the situation to see how the virus is infecting the animals. The overall threat to people remains low, but the outbreak in cattle could allow the virus to spread to humans. "There's always a worry that viruses will surprise us," says evolutionary virologist Daniel Goldhill. One dairy worker has been infected and is recovering. The viral strain isolated from the infected person is closely related to strains targeted by a candidate vaccine. Nature | 7 min read | |||||
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| A huge photographic archive, saved from mould and neglect, reveals the founding of the world's first police crime laboratory in France in 1910. The archive of more than 20,000 glass photographic plates includes the personal correspondence of Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science and founder of the lab. Locard is famous for his maxim, "Every contact leaves a trace," and trace selection remains the foremost challenge of modern forensic science. "There is a movement to look back to the past for guidance as to how to renew the science of policing," says historian Amos Frappa. (Nature | 6 min read) (Archives municipales de Lyon) | |||||
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Survival of the nicest'Survival of the fittest' doesn't require all species to be hardwired for competition, argues evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in Selfish Genes to Social Beings. His examples, from lichen to pirates, show that cooperation is ubiquitous — although it ultimately evolved for the 'selfish' reason that mutual benefits are better than working alone. "If this seems heartless, it's a reflection of the human tendency to apply human moral frameworks to biological phenomena," writes reviewer and public health researcher Jonathan Goodman. Nature | 6 min read | |||||
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Make kidney disease a public-health priorityDespite kidney disease being very common, and kidney failure being deadly and expensive to treat, awareness of the disease is low. Leaders from the major professional organizations working in kidney health want the World Health Organization to include kidney disease in its list of priority non-communicable diseases that cause premature deaths. Adding it alongside other big killers such as heart disease and cancer will, the authors argue, bring attention to the growing threat, which is particularly dire for people in low- and lower-middle-income countries, who already bear two‑thirds of the world's kidney-disease burden. Nature Reviews Nephrology | 49 min read | |||||
Dark energy might not be a constantThe first year of data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggests that dark energy — the force that's pushing cosmic expansion to accelerate — might be weakening over time. "It's exciting," says cosmologist Sesh Nadathur, who worked on the DESI analysis. "If dark energy is not a cosmological constant, that's going to be a huge discovery." But this intriguing result could disappear as DESI continues to measure the expansion of the Universe with unprecedented precision. Quanta | 12 min readReference: DESI Year 1 Results papers | |||||
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| Although only 2% of respondents to Nature's postdoc survey were based in Africa, their replies offer a tantalizing glimpse of an emerging part of the research workforce. Postdocs in Africa reported among the lowest pay and were three times more likely than respondents elsewhere to have a second job. At the same time, Africa-based postdocs were the most optimistic about their futures: 64% said that they felt positive about their future job prospects, compared with 41% globally. (Nature | 13 min read) | |||||
Quote of the day"Whole pages [of his book] are laughably like mine."Charles Darwin wrote to a friend after reading Histoire Naturelle by the French aristocrat Georges-Louis Leclerc. But this wasn't plagiarism: Leclerc wrote his book 100 years before Darwin published Origin of the Species in 1859. A new appraisal of Leclerc credits him with ideas of species change and extinction, and as a pioneer of natural ecology and geological timescales. (The Guardian | 5 min read) | |||||
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What matters in science | View this email in your browser Friday 2 February 2024 Hello Nature readers, Today we explore language-learning through a baby's eyes, explore why autoimmune disease is more common in women and discover an alternative to qubits called 'qumodes'. The artificial intelligence (AI) learned using video and audio from a helmet-mounted camera worn by Sam — here aged 18 months. (Wai Keen Vong) AI learns language through a baby's eyes ...
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