Nature
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Citizenship privilege harms science
[ad_1] Imagine you want to attend a research conference in the United States this autumn. If you are from most nations in the global north, there’s probably still plenty of time to make arrangements. But, according to our analysis, citizens from 132 of the 134 countries in the global south need a visa to visit the United States, whereas this…
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Lethal dust storms blanket Asia every spring — now AI could help predict them
[ad_1] Dust storms turned skies yellow on 27 March 2024 in Erenhot, Inner Mongolia.Credit: VCG via Getty With the arrival of the Northern Hemisphere spring, many Asian countries are facing an annual problem: dust storms. Late last month, people living in parts of China’s Inner Mongolia saw their skies turn murky yellow, according to state media. Residents were told to…
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An exoplanet is wrapped in glory
[ad_1] When looking down on a cloud from an aeroplane, you can sometimes spot an iridescent aura surrounding the plane’s shadow. It is a ‘glory’, a phenomenon reminiscent of a rainbow but arising through a different mechanism. Astronomers could now have made the first sighting of a glory outside the Solar System1. Access options Access Nature and 54 other Nature…
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physicist who predicted boson that explains why particles have mass
[ad_1] Credit: Toni Albir/EPA/Shutterstock During a few weeks in the summer of 1964, Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, wrote two short papers outlining his ideas for a mechanism that could give mass to fundamental particles, the building blocks of the Universe. His aim was to rescue a theory that was mathematically appealing but ultimately…
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Scientists discover first algae that can fix nitrogen — thanks to a tiny cell structure
[ad_1] A Braarudosphaera bigelowii cell magnified 1,000-fold.Credit: Tyler Coale Researchers have discovered a type of organelle, a fundamental cellular structure, that can turn nitrogen gas into a form that is useful for cell growth. The discovery of the structure, called a nitroplast, in algae could bolster efforts to genetically engineer plants to convert, or ‘fix’, their own nitrogen, which could…
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This fMRI technique promised to transform brain research — why can no one replicate it?
[ad_1] It was hailed as a potentially transformative technique for measuring brain activity in animals: direct imaging of neuronal activity (DIANA), held the promise of mapping neuronal activity so fast that neurons could be tracked as they fired. But nearly two years on from the 2022 Science paper1, no one outside the original research group and their collaborators have been…
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what we saw and what scientists learnt
[ad_1] Heber Springs, Arkansas “It makes your heart want to skip a beat — and you cannot really describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it in person,” said Lynnice Carter on Monday, after watching the total solar eclipse that crossed North America. Carter, a retired educator from Blue Springs, Mississippi, travelled about 230 miles (370 kilometres) to Heber Springs,…
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How two PhD students overcame the odds to snag tenure-track jobs
[ad_1] Researching the institutions you’re applying for can help you personalize your application.Credit: Getty Academic careers are meant to follow a set trajectory: PhD student, postdoctoral researcher, tenure-track job. But when we were thinking about what to do after our PhDs, we decided to skip the postdoc stage and go straight for tenure-track jobs owing to visa restrictions (Q.L., an…
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Long-lost photos reveal details of world’s first police crime lab
[ad_1] A photographic archive has been discovered in Lyon, France, that adds precious detail to what we know about the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in 1910 and its creator, Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science. The huge collection, which comprises more than 20,000 glass photographic plates that document the laboratory’s pioneering scientific methods, crime scenes…
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what scientists are learning from Rwanda
[ad_1] Kigali, Rwanda The church at Ntarama, a 45-minute drive south of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, is a red-brick building about 20 metres long by 5 metres wide. Inside are features seen in Catholic churches around the world: pews for congregation members, an altar, stained-glass windows and a cross adorning the entrance. Then there are the scars of the unimaginable: piles…
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