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Artist's concept of exoplanet Kepler-186f orbiting a distant star

China is planning its first space mission to survey the skies for exoplanets similar to Kepler-186f, an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star (artist’s impression). Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

China’s plan to find Earth 2.0

Scientists in China will soon release detailed plans for the country’s first exoplanet mission. Its goal is to discover the first Earth-like planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to the Sun. The Earth 2.0 satellite is designed to carry seven telescopes that will observe the sky for four years. Six of the telescopes will work together to survey the Cygnus–Lyra constellations — the same patch of sky scoured by NASA’s Kepler telescope, which discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets. “The Kepler field is a low-hanging fruit, because we have very good data from there,” says astronomer Jian Ge.

Nature | 5 min read

Declassified data confirm interstellar rock

Declassified US government data confirm that a small meteorite that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 came from far beyond our Solar System. In 2019, researchers argued that the object’s high speed and trajectory suggested that it originated from another star system. But the study was never peer-reviewed because the data needed to verify the calculations were classified. The confirmation by US government officials makes the meteorite the first interstellar object to be detected in our Solar System, spurring scientists to consider a search for shards of the object that might have settled on the sea floor.

Live Science | 4 min read

Reference: arXiv preprint

Features & opinion

Time to rethink the scientific CV

In December, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the largest public funder of UK science, announced that it was abandoning the use of the conventional CV — curriculum vitae — in funding applications. The funding body said it would adopt a new type of CV to “enable people to better demonstrate their contributions to research, teams, and wider society”. The UKRI is just the latest institution rethinking the CV — and in response, researchers are learning how to rework their CVs to emphasize quality over quantity, and to include narratives about their broader impact. Meanwhile, hiring panels and grant evaluators need to reassess how best to judge these documents.

Nature | 12 min read

How we made methane capture pay

Industrial chemists Guoping Hu, Eric May and Kevin Gang Li share lessons from commercializing their methane capture technology in ten years. “That sounds like a long time, but it’s actually fast,” they write. “Patents last for only 20 years, making it a race against time.” To spur others on, they share advice on how to speed along the path from development to testing and manufacturing.

Nature | 11 min read

Why I joined the climate protesters

Climate scientist Peter Kalmus has written a book about reducing his own emissions by 90%, lobbied the American Geophysical Union to reduce academic flying and co-founded a popular climate app. “Nothing has worked,” he writes. “It’s now the eleventh hour.” Kalmus was arrested last week for locking himself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in Los Angeles, California, as part of a Scientist Rebellion campaign to bring attention to the bank’s funding of fossil-fuel projects. “I hate being the Cassandra,” he writes. “I’d rather just be with my family and do science. But I feel morally compelled to sound the alarm.”

The Guardian | 7 min read

Where I work

Najat Saliba stands in a wood near the municipality of Btkhenay.

Najat Saliba is an associate professor of analytical chemistry at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and co-founder of the Environment Academy.Credit: Diego Ibarra Sánchez for Nature

Analytical chemist Najat Saliba studies air pollution in Lebanon, a country contending with environmental damage and political turmoil. The 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut — caused by incorrectly stored chemicals — was the world’s largest non-nuclear blast. “Surrounded by these disasters, I realized that I needed to get off the university campus and work with local communities to make a difference,” says Saliba. In 2019, she co-founded the Environment Academy, which matches researchers with communities to help with various projects. Here, she stands among the pine trees of Ras El Metn, where residents wanted advice about how to protect the forest from fires and regenerate what’s been lost to flames. (Nature | 3 min read)

See more shots from this story on the Nature Instagram account.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Facts alone — no matter how well-grounded — have never been able to defeat determined assaults on intellectual freedom at research universities. Instead, made forcefully, broadly and fully, arguments about quality have prevailed.”

Efforts in the United States to ban the teaching of critical race theory mirror a 1920s-era assault on teaching evolution, argues educational historian Adam Laats. (Nature | 5 min read)