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Credit: Karim Bouchetata/Bav Media
Best science images of the month
Mid-January saw snowfall in the Sahara Desert in northwestern Algeria as overnight temperatures plummeted to below freezing. Snow is rare but not unheard of in the region: it also fell in 2021, 2018, 2017 and 1979. During the summer months, average daily temperatures can reach 37 °C.
See more of the month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.
World hits ten billion COVID vaccinations
In little more than a year, ten billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally, in what has become the largest vaccination programme in history. Many nations began rolling out vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021. Since then, more than 60% of the world’s population — 4.8 billion people — is at least partially vaccinated with one of the more than 20 approved COVID-19 vaccines. “The world has never seen such rapid scale-up of a new life-saving technology,” says Amanda Glassman, with the Center for Global Development. But — as researchers warned last year when the first one billion doses had been administered — there are still huge inequities in access, with just 5.5% of people in low-income nations having received 2 doses.
Wolf hunt is ‘huge setback’ for science
The killing of nearly 20% of the wolves that roam Yellowstone National Park in the United States will disrupt a multi-decade study on how wolves help to shape ecosystems. Looser hunting restrictions in the areas around the park have led to the killing of about 500 wolves (hunting within the park boundaries is still banned). Yellowstone had “one of the best models for understanding the behaviours and dynamics of a wolf population unexploited by humans,” says wildlife biologist Doug Smith, who leads the park’s wolf restoration and study project, which began in 1995. Researchers will “do what we can to keep the science going — what we have left of it”.
Features & opinion
How to fix your coding errors
When it comes to software, bugs are inevitable — especially in academia, in which the responsibility of writing code tends to fall on graduate students and postdocs who were never trained in software development. But simple strategies can minimize the likelihood of bugs and ease the process of recovering from them.
How to support lip-reading researchers
When Denis Meuthen was a baby, his parents were told that his education would be truncated and he would have to live in an institution because of his hearing loss. Today, he is an evolutionary ecologist who can speak and lip-read in both English and German. He offers insight into how he accomplishes scientific collaboration and how academics can support their deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues.
The physics of N95 masks
N95 masks block small particles, just like regular cloth or paper face masks. They also use an electric charge to trap tiny respiratory droplets. If you’re curious how this works, physicist Rhett Alain explains using videos and demonstrations you can try at home. N95s (and KN95 and KF94 masks) are made of ‘electret’ material made up of plastic fibres that are permanently electrically charged. These fibers attract passing particles so they can be trapped in the material.
