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Mount Everest is officially taller
The new official height of the highest spot on Earth is 8,848.86 metres, according to measurements of Mount Everest by separate teams from Nepal and China. That is 86 centimetres taller than a 1955 estimate by the Survey of India used by Nepal, and 4 metres taller than China’s previous 2005 estimate. Both teams used a combination of navigation-satellite measurements and trigonometric calculations of distances from the mountain’s lower peaks to a beacon on the summit. The achievement, which was fraught with diplomatic considerations, is a point of pride for Nepal. "Before this, we had never done the measurement ourselves," said Nepalese surveyor Damodar Dhakal. "Now that we have a young, technical team, we could do it on our own."
Leading AI-ethics researcher out at Google
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics is in turmoil after prominent researcher Timnit Gebru was fired by Google as the co-head of its ethics team. Although Gebru and Google are at odds over the reasons, Gebru’s exit seems to be the culmination of a conflict over a paper she co-authored, reports MIT Technology Review. More than 1,400 Google staff members and 1,900 other supporters have signed a protest letter over the loss of Gebru, who is also a leading advocate for diversity in the tech industry. MIT Technology Review looks at the paper, which focuses on the risks of AI trained to produce convincing text based on large language models.
MIT Technology Review | 9 min read
COVID-19 coronavirus update
How to understand vaccine trial data
The first raw data from the BioNtech–Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials are imminent. From samples sizes to side effects, Wired outlines the three tricky or misleading claims to watch out for.
Police raid whistle-blowing scientist’s home
Armed police raided the home of data scientist Rebekah Jones yesterday and seized her computer equipment. Jones was lauded by scientists when she created her own COVID-19 dashboard for the US state of Florida earlier this year. She had been in charge of the state’s official dashboard until she was fired by the Florida Department of Health. Jones says she was removed from her post because she refused to manipulate data to support a plan to loosen public-health restrictions. Law-enforcement officials said that Jones’s home was raided on the basis of a complaint by the Department of Health that its emergency messaging system had been hacked. “They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids,” wrote Jones on Twitter. “This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power.”
Tallahassee Democrat | 4 min read
Climate change spawning ‘pandemic era’
COVID-19 “is but the latest example of an unexpected, novel, and devastating pandemic disease”, wrote physician Anthony Fauci and medical epidemiologist David Morens in Cell in September. “We have entered a pandemic era.” Rolling Stone explores how climate change is encouraging the rise of new pathogens, expanding the range of existing diseases and increasing our vulnerability to old ones.
NOTABLE QUOTABLE
“At the very least, you buy some time so you don’t need to have a four- or five-week lockdown.”
Slovakia’s ambitious undertaking to test the whole country helped to bring down the COVID infection rate by about 60% in one week, say infectious-disease epidemiologist Stefan Flasche and colleagues from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. (The Guardian | 4 min read)
Features & opinion
Rescue Brazil’s burning Pantanal wetlands
Climate extremes, poor management and lax laws are making the Pantanal World Heritage Site prone to fierce fires. Researchers and governments must develop a plan to manage these risks together, argue climatologist Renata Libonati and four colleagues. “Neglecting the connections between climate, land use and fire management will make it impossible to restore the Pantanal to its former state, let alone protect the region in the future,” they write.
Source: Laboratory for Environmental Satellite Applications, Fed. Univ. Rio de Janeiro
How the billion-euro brain project imploded
Noah Hutton’s documentary In Silico captures a sense of what it was like behind the scenes of the Human Brain Project, writes reviewer Alison Abbott. The project had been hyped as a quantum leap in understanding how the human brain works. Instead, it left a trail of angry neuroscientists across Europe. And aspects of what went so expensively wrong still remain elusive.
Future cloudy for less-privileged researchers
For students and postdocs from less-privileged backgrounds — first-generation students, members of minority ethnic groups or those with financial stress — the pressures of the pandemic are, and will continue to be, particularly intense. The current crisis must be a call to action for the entire scientific community, especially those in leadership positions, says ecologist Bea Maas, the lead author of a June report on the precarity of early-career researchers during the pandemic’s first wave. Five early-career researchers from under-represented groups share what they’ve experienced in the pandemic and their thoughts about surviving in the research enterprise.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
BBC News health reporter Hugh Pym launches a million Shakespeare puns on Twitter. Are you ready for The Taming of the Flu?
