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Ahmadreza Djalali has been sentenced to death in Iran.Credit: Belga via ZUMA Press
Execution looms for scientist in Iran
A medical researcher who was sentenced to death in Iran three years ago on a charge of spying — which he denies — is under threat of imminent execution, Nature has been told. Ahmadreza Djalali, a scholar in disaster medicine who has dual Iranian–Swedish nationality, was arrested during a visit to Iran in 2016. The global scientific community has widely condemned the ruling and sentence: a campaign led by 153 Nobel laureates supports him. In a statement published by the BBC, Iran’s government says media reports are incorrect and warns countries not to interfere in what it says is an independent judicial process.
Nature | 4 min read & BBC | 3 min read
The Arecibo telescope is lost
The 900-tonne instrument platform that was suspended above the huge main dish of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico has collapsed. Last month, the US National Science Foundation announced that the iconic telescope would be permanently closed after two cables supporting the structure suddenly and catastrophically broke, one in August and one in early November. Ramon Lugo, director of the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida, which manages the telescope, told Science that wires in the remaining cables had been breaking daily over the past week.
COVID-19 coronavirus update
Countries jockey for COVID vaccine doses
The makers of the three vaccines that seem closest to widespread distribution — AstraZeneca-Oxford, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna — estimate that their total production capacity for 2021 is 5.3 billion doses. That could cover between 2.6 billion and 3.1 billion people, depending on whether the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is administered in two doses or one and a half. But most of these doses have already been purchased by wealthy countries. So analysts estimate that many people in low-income countries might not get vaccinated until 2023 or 2024. “Now that we are seeing really good results, everyone is feeling more optimistic. They are starting to make deals,” says Andrea Taylor at the Duke Global Health Innovation Center in Durham, North Carolina. “But it’s quite a scary picture at the minute, because so many countries are missing.”
Source: data from Airfinity, up to 19 November
How China early days of COVID
Documents leaked from Hubei province, the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak, reveal a series of missteps by local and central Chinese government agencies, reports CNN. The agency in charge of disease response, the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was underfunded and mired in bureaucracy. Numbers of cases and deaths were lowballed when presented to the public. Tests were inaccurate, diagnosis was slow and early cases might have been counted as flu. “It was clear they did make mistakes — and not just mistakes that happen when you're dealing with a novel virus — also bureaucratic and politically-motivated errors in how they handled it,” said global-health expert Yanzhong Huang. “These had global consequences…. [But] It would probably not have stopped this developing into a pandemic.”
Vaccines and ‘superhuman’ immunity
Vaccines for some pathogens — tetanus, for example — generate stronger immune responses and more-effective protection than does natural infection. Dennis Burton and Eric Topol at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, explore whether a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 might cause such ‘superhuman’ immunity. More research is needed, but considering the interim results for the leading vaccines and the huge ongoing efforts, they’re optimistic that it’s an achievable goal.
Features & opinion
Why scientists are turning to Rust
An annual Stack Overflow poll of nearly 65,000 programmers has ranked Rust as the “most loved” programming language for 5 years running. ‘Rustaceans’ say Rust blends the performance of languages such as C++ with friendlier syntax, a focus on code safety and a well-engineered set of tools that simplify development. But that power comes at a cost: the Rust learning curve is steep. Explore what the language can do for scientists and give it a try with our free application that will get you parsing a GenBank-formatted file, counting the genes and translating them.
The postdoc’s lament: what’s next?
Highly trained and highly educated, postdoctoral researchers often face difficulty in turning temporary positions into full-time, stable careers — a struggle that is now made even more daunting by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature’s first survey of postdocs drew responses from more than 7,600 respondents in 93 countries. It found that many despair about the dwindling number of academic positions. But others find optimism in a world that increasingly depends on scientific expertise.
‘America’s Amazon’ faces destruction
Alabama has the most aquatic diversity of any US state. It has more species of flesh-eating pitcher plant than anywhere else on Earth. It is the home of the Mobile River Basin, “America’s Amazon, far and away the most biodiverse river network in North America”, writes Alabamian journalist Ben Raines. But industry, urban growth and lax environmental regulation are putting this neglected wilderness at risk, argues Raines. “The rate of aquatic and terrestrial species extinctions in Alabama is roughly double that seen anywhere else in the continental United States,” he writes.
