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NASA's Apollo 17 mission to the Moon collected rock samples that scientists hope to unseal for study in the coming year. Credit: NASA
Deadly cyclone displaces millions
Cyclone Idai is the second deadliest cyclone to hit the Southern Hemisphere. Since it made landfall two weeks ago, the storm has killed more than 750 people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, and flooding has affected another 1.85 million in low-lying Mozambique alone. More people are likely to die from malnutrition and infectious diseases. “All of those will happen six months from now. And six months from now, people lose interest,” says epidemiologist Debarati Guha-Sapir.
Clinical trials still aren’t reported on time
Many leading US universities are breaking the law by failing to make the results of clinical trials public within 12 months. Of the 40 universities that sponsor the most trials, 25 have trial results missing from the ClinicalTrials.gov site. The good news is that reporting has improved since the law came into effect. And the United States is not alone: an analysis published in September found that 89% of trials sponsored by academic institutions in the European Union were not reported within a year, as is required by EU law.
Antarctic project drills deepest
An international team of scientists is set to drill for the oldest-ever ice core. The bottom of the 2.75-kilometre-thick ice in East Antarctica is likely to have formed at least 1.5 million years ago. Trapped inside will be samples of Earth’s ancient atmosphere that could illuminate Earth’s glacial cycles and how the climate has changed over millennia.
‘Godfathers of AI’ win Turing Award
Three pioneers of artificial intelligence have won one of the most prestigious awards in computer science, the US$1-million Turing Award. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun won for work they did independently and together on deep neural networks. The three brought the concepts out of the scientific wilderness around the turn of the millennium, when “it had a bad rep”, says LeCun. Now, anyone with a smartphone might take advantage of features such as natural-language processing, thanks to their work.
FEATURES & OPINION
The joy of stats
Statistician David Spiegelhalter’s new book The Art of Statistics “shines a light on how we can use the ever-growing deluge of data to improve our understanding of the world — and of some of the pitfalls we encounter in the attempt”, writes reviewer Evelyn Lamb. The result is a useful study on how to use statistics with an understanding about what we can and cannot learn from data.
Attend a conference — or pay the rent?
Conferences can help your career progress, but few early-career researchers have the spare cash to pay the costs up front — and universities can take months to reimburse them. Science communicator Jennifer Tsang outlines the changes that institutions can make to clear the way for everyone.
Why a life-saving drug isn’t reaching women
A cheap, robust, out-of-patent drug has been found to significantly cut the risk of death from postpartum haemorrhage — the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide. But lack of infrastructure, poor access to health care and patchy knowledge about the drug’s benefits mean that the women who need it most can’t always get it.
