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The 6.5-metre-wide primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope is folded up for launch.Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
Why we can’t wait for the JWST
Three decades after it was conceived, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is set for launch on 22 December. When the telescope lifts off — after many delays and some controversies — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will carry with it the hopes of thousands of astronomers around the world. Discover what this mind-blowing telescope will do, if it launches successfully. “Webb has such transformative capabilities that — to me — it’s going to be the ‘before’ times and the ‘after’ times,” says astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who serves as Webb’s operations project scientist.
Replication chaos in cancer biology
An eight-year-long effort to replicate key cancer-biology experiments has found that fewer than half yielded similar results. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology attempted to replicate experiments from 53 high-impact papers. Ultimately, it managed to tackle only 23, and results from 5 of those could be fully reproduced. “None of the 193 experiments were described in sufficient detail in the original paper to enable us to design protocols to repeat the experiments,” said the authors of the reproducibility effort, and fewer than half of the original authors were very helpful in untangling things. But critics argue that one-time replication attempts don’t tell the whole story.
Read more: Five keys to writing a reproducible lab protocol (Nature | 7 min read, from 2021)
Reference: eLife paper 1 & paper 2
Wake up! Time to get creative
Interrupting sleep after a few minutes helped volunteers to solve a tricky maths problem. Researchers set people the challenge and then gave them the opportunity to take a nap. Most of those who reached the state called hypnagogia (also called N1), which is often characterizsed by vivid dreams, worked out a hidden shortcut to solve the problem. The success rates for those who stayed awake or progressed to deeper sleep were lower. The same approach was used by Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali to boost creativity.
Reference: ScienceAdvances paper
Features & opinion
Life after the Nobel Prize
Neuroscientist Eric Kandel offers a coda to his prizewinning work in his new book, There Is Life After the Nobel Prize. In it, he considers connections on an ever-grander scale. Kandel relates how, following the prize, he built a new relationship with his country of birth, Austria, which the Nazis forced him to flee he had been forced to flee as a child by the Nazis. Kandel guides readers through the cultural history of German and Austrian modernism and describes how the neuroscience of perception explains so much of our intuitive understanding of art.
C&EN’s molecules of the year
Grab a hot toddy (or a cold bevvy — I see you, Southern Hhemisphere!) and cosy up with the coolest non-COVID-related molecules that were reported this year, as chosen by Chemical & Engineering News. From an eight-coordinate complex made with einsteinium — the heaviest element stable enough for conventional chemistry experiments — to RNA molecules decorated with sugars, these molecules (and their accompanying diagrams) are the perfect reminder of the delights of discovery.
News & views
Megastudy finds out what makes us tick
It’s tricky to predict which interventions will encourage behaviours that make us happier and healthier — going to the gym, for example. Researchers have shown that a ‘megastudy’ can help to overcome some of the limitations that exist even in gold-standard randomized controlled trials. The idea behind a megastudy is to have multiple small groups of researchers all study the same problem at the same time — but from different angles — and then compare their results. Teams of scientists tested 53 ways to induce people to keep returning to the gym, such as sending text messages offering redeemable points or giving monetary payments. The most effective: very small cash rewards (just 9 cents) for attendance.
Nature News & Views | 6 min read (Nature paywall) & The New York Times | 5 min read (free)
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