Daily briefing: What the end of Twitter’s free API means for research

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Twitter’s API charge could upend research

Twitter has announced, on short notice, that it will start charging for access to its application programming interface (API), which researchers use to extract and process large amounts of data from the platform. Thousands of projects, from studying online extremism to collecting real-time data during disasters, rely on the service. “Twitter is a global platform, and this decision has global ramifications,” says social-media researcher Renee DiResta. “Discontinuing free access will break free tools developed to democratize research.”

Nature | 5 min read

The global toll of chicken and salmon

Farmed chicken and salmon are among the most sustainable meats available, but they still exert intense environmental pressures on the hotspots where farming is concentrated. The first study to map their impact on a global scale found that, by some metrics, chicken farming is more efficient than salmon farming: it yields 55 times more food per year because chickens grow to full size faster. But the study notes that marine wildlife disturbed by farming tend to recover, whereas habitats and species affected by farming on land generally don’t. And fishmeal that is used to make chicken feed is taken from the ocean, anyway.

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: Current Biology paper

Sleeping volcanoes leak more sulfur

Thanks to ‘passive degassing’ from dormant volcanoes, the atmosphere in pre-industrial times contained many more climate-cooling sulfur particles than we thought. Researchers examined Greenland ice cores to study the pristine Arctic atmosphere. They found that volcanoes are a major source of sulfur emissions, even during decades without major eruptions — in fact, dormant volcanoes belch out a lot more sulfur over those time spans than do active ones. Sulfate aerosols have a net cooling effect, but adding more gives diminishing returns. So, if natural levels are higher than we thought, we might have overestimated the cooling caused by human particulate pollution, perhaps by as much as half.

ScienceAlert | 4 min read

Reference: Geophysical Research Letters paper

Features & opinion

Pioneering diabetes drug inspires more

When the antibody treatment teplizumab became the first drug that can delay the onset of type 1 diabetes (T1D), it was “a huge, huge step forward for the field”, says Aaron Kowalski, leader of a T1D research organization. Teplizumab stops T cells from destroying insulin-producing pancreas cells, which helps people who have not yet developed symptoms. Now scientists are looking for similar drugs to treat other autoimmune disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Identifying people who might benefit from such therapies remains one of the biggest challenges: pre-symptomatic signs of these diseases aren’t yet well defined, and there’s no consensus on the best way to screen people.

Nature | 11 min read

We need research into sun-blocking tech

Many climate scientists think that solar-geoengineering research comes with unacceptable risks, but we must engage with it anyway, argues Katharine Ricke. “Shunning this research is riskier than studying it,” she writes. Private companies are already conducting rogue experiments, despite the fact that we have little evidence on efficacy or the risks to weather, agriculture, human health or other living things.

Nature | 5 min read

How scientist duos marry work and home

“We are a complete mobile research unit,” says pollution researcher Steve Allen about his long-term collaboration with his wife, Deonie Allen. Working together with a romantic partner has clear benefits: you share the same passion for science and understand each other’s challenges and stresses. At the same time, finding two jobs in the same location can be difficult, particularly when you share a speciality. “It’s true we wake up talking science and go to sleep talking science,” says Steve. “But we wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Nature | 10 min read

The missing link in teen mental health

Why is there no scientific consensus on how social-media use affects young people’s mental health? What researchers might be missing is that sensitivity to online content changes depending on a person’s developmental stage, say psychologists Amy Orben and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. In their study of more than 17,000 adolescents aged between 10 and 21, they found that spending more time on social media predicted decreased life satisfaction a year later — but only in participants entering puberty and at the age when they first left home.

Nature | 9 min read

Infographic of the week

Grass-roots action is doing something India’s country-wide forecasts can’t: collating local knowledge to warn people of deadly rainstorms. South Asian weather is becoming increasingly difficult to forecast as monsoons grow more erratic, and climate change is raising the risk that the storms pose to people. (Nature | 14 min read)