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View from a lectern looking into a full lecture theatre, a computer monitor displays the words Higgs search update.

The CERN amphitheatre. Hundreds of Large Hadron Collider publications had been in limbo over how to list some of the authors’ affiliations.Credit: Denis Balibouse/AFP via Getty

LHC resolves Russian authors dispute

Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland have decided to stop listing Russian and Belarussian colleagues’ affiliations on co-authored papers. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian scientists were allowed to keep working at the LHC, but some researchers said that they did not want to continue sharing authorship with them. The dispute has kept hundreds of manuscripts in limbo between the preprint stage and formal publication as peer-reviewed articles.

Nature | 4 min read

How will AI change mathematics?

Artificial intelligence tools that specialize in maths are starting to change the field in ways that go beyond their contributions to mere calculations. Microsoft’s Lean has helped to confirm a mathematical proof so complicated that even its author was unsure of it. Google’s chatbot Minerva, which (like OpenAI’s headline-grabbing ChatGPT) is based on machine learning, might eventually be able to converse with mathematicians to brainstorm solutions to difficult problems. Some researchers worry that once computers can judge what is interesting and worth proving, human mathematicians will become obsolete. Others are more sanguine: “An AI system is only as smart as we program it to be,” says computer scientist Erika Abraham.

Nature | 6 min read

Women more likely to join to US academies

Female mathematics, psychology and economics researchers are 3–15 times more likely to be honoured with election to one of the two most prestigious US scientific societies than are their male counterparts. The boost doesn’t seem to be due to an analogous increase in the number of potentially qualified female candidates, although the study didn’t examine accomplishments beyond publications and citations. It could be a result of survivorship bias — there is evidence that women face greater barriers in the scientific enterprise, so those who make it to the top of their field are probably more accomplished than are male candidates.

Nature | 3 min read

Reference: PNAS paper

Features & opinion

Icebergs for drinking water?

If a small, 113-million-tonne iceberg were to be towed from Antarctica to Cape Town in South Africa, it could supply 20% of the city’s water needs for a year. What’s not to like? Quite a lot, perhaps, writes Matthew Birkhold in Chasing Icebergs. Birkhold is engagingly honest about potential pitfalls of transporting water trapped in icebergs to drought-plagued regions, writes reviewer Josie Glausiusz, although he doesn’t delve much into alternatives such as recycling municipal wastewater, tapping brackish water for crop irrigation, or fog harvesting.

Nature | 5 min read

Indian women face fieldwork challenges

Female researchers face challenges participating in fieldwork in India — from trained local residents refusing to work with women to objections from family members over travel, prejudices surrounding the type of work considered appropriate for women, and a lack of role models. Although the extent of the effect is hard to measure, women in the country are under-represented in fields that require extensive fieldwork such as geology, evolutionary biology and environmental studies. “Changing that image of what a scientist and a field researcher should look like, should be the first step. Let’s start there,” says evolutionary biologist Ashwini Mohan.

Rukhmabai Initiatives (via Indo-Asian News Service) | 6 min read

Hydrogen might be hiding underground

There might be vast natural reserves of clean-burning hydrogen gas hidden underground. Researchers at the US Geological Survey estimate that there might be enough to meet rising global demand for thousands of years. An added benefit of underground hydrogen is that it’s renewable, being constantly replenished by reactions between water and rock deep below Earth’s surface. Why didn’t anyone spot it before? It’s not found in the same places as oil and gas reservoirs, and no one was looking for it, say proponents.

Science | 20 min read

Reference: US Geological Survey conference presentation

Quote of the day

“When the full-scale war started, it was the first and only moment in my life when I regretted I was no longer young and could not be among those scientists who joined the army fighting for fundamental values most readers of this journal take for granted: freedom and independence.”

Ukrainian geneticist Svitlana Arbuzova recounts how she and her research centre survived adversities that began long before the Russian invasion in 2022. Now, she says, redoubled international support is needed to renew science in Ukraine. (Nature | 5 min read)