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Nature’s 10
Credit: Dee Dwyer for Nature
Ten people who helped shape science in 2022
A climate revolutionary, a monkeypox watchman and an abortion fact-finder are some of the fascinating people behind the year’s big research stories. One of them is Kyiv-based climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska, who became a campaigner both for climate action and for Ukraine. “This human-induced climate change and war against Ukraine have direct connections and the same roots: they are fossil fuels and humanity’s dependence on them,” she told the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) while missiles landed kilometres from her home. IPCC vice-chair Ko Barrett praises Krakovska’s decision to speak up: “We’re scientists, but we’re humans,” she says. “There’s nobody who stands where she stands who can tell the same story.”
JWST scrutinizes goldilocks planets
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has turned its incredible observing power onto one of the most exciting targets in space: the atmospheres of seven Earth-sized planets circling the star TRAPPIST-1. The planets lie in its ‘goldilocks’ zone, where temperatures are right for liquid water — and possibly life — to exist. The first results from two of the planets show that neither has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. That could mean that they have denser atmospheres that are made of molecules such as carbon dioxide or methane, or no atmosphere at all.
Satellite will track all of world’s water
A joint US and French satellite launching today will measure Earth’s seas, rivers and lakes in ground-breaking detail. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite promises to be a game-changer for research into climate change and global water supply. The US$1.2-billion satellite’s radar will track water height, extent and elevation change in nearly all 6 million lakes and reservoirs every 10 or 11 days. It will also estimate river flow rates with unprecedented accuracy and give scientists their first 3D view of ocean eddies.
COVID work spurs gene-sequencing boom
The increased gene-sequencing capacity built to track COVID-19 is being used to study other infectious diseases in laboratories across Asia and Africa. Before the pandemic, samples would often be sent abroad, taking weeks to months to be tested. COVID-19-related funding helped labs buy next-generation equipment, which they now use to track and respond to local public-health emergencies, such as cholera or Ebola. Researchers warn that if the funding that paid for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing dries up, the new machines will sit idle.
Features & opinion
COVID: we’ll never know how many died
COVID-19 probably killed around 14.8 million people — 2.7 times more than the official toll. The huge discrepancy shows that too many deaths around the world still go unrecorded, argues a Nature editorial. The figure comes from a World Health Organization-supported analysis of ‘excess mortality’ — deaths that exceed expected levels. Other analyses give different estimates, and we’ll probably never know the true number of people who died of the disease.
The promise and politics of rewilding India
In midlife, writer and filmmaker Pradip Krishen fell in love with trees. Now he is a leading advocate for rewilding in India, as one of the leaders of a group called the Ecological Restoration Alliance of India. Rather than quick-fix tree-planting projects — some of which are nothing more than a media stunts and have little long-term success — their restoration aims focus on the specifics of local ecosystems and the livelihoods of their people. But that approach is at odds with the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which push for rapid development that sometimes sweeps aside scientists’ warnings and Indigenous people’s resistance.
Geneticists wrestle with white supremacy
Geneticists are grappling with the fact that some of their common practices can be used to perpetuate the myth of race as a biological category. The reckoning was is partly prompted by the horror of seeing their peer-reviewed work misused in the manifesto of the shooter who murdered ten people in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, in May. Among the scientific conventions under debate is the use of continental categories, such as ‘African ancestry’ or ‘European ancestry’. Critics argue that these are just as problematic as race groupings — and that relying on them holds back science because they do not capture important variations in the human species. And, more fundamentally, focusing on genetic solutions to public-health and social problems could be distracting from their true drivers: socio-economic factors, and historical and contemporary racism.
Undark | 26 min read (Please be aware this article contains detailed descriptions of the Buffalo mass shooting.)
