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The battle to treat Syria’s survivors
The 6 February earthquake killed more than 4,500 people in northwest Syria, and health systems — already weakened by more than a decade of war — are overwhelmed with 8,500 injured people. “We have used the medications and serums that would have lasted us for four to six months in two to three days,” says maternity-hospital director Ikram Haboush. All of northwest Syria has just 64 X-ray machines and only a single magnetic resonance imaging machine. Doctors urgently need painkillers, antibiotics, orthopaedic-surgery equipment and dialysis machines to treat ‘crush syndrome’, which causes organ dysfunction such as kidney failure.
Food versus friends
A study in mice has revealed a surprising link between the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin and social behaviour. In male rodents, leptin suppressed feeding, as expected, but also promoted interactions with female mice. Leptin is normally produced when an animal’s energy needs have been met, so the hormone could tell the brain that it’s time to prioritize other activities — such as sex. The research could hint at why disordered eating in people sometimes goes hand-in-hand with social difficulties.
Reference: Cell Metabolism paper
Harsh sanctions for UCLA ecologist
Documents seen exclusively by Nature have revealed more about the controversial treatment of ecologist Priyanga Amarasekare at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). A committee found that Amarasekare had breached the faculty code of conduct when alleging racial discrimination by colleagues. But UCLA chancellor Gene Block issued much harsher penalties than the committee had recommended. He suspended Amarasekare without salary and barred her from accessing her laboratory — sanctions that are normally applied after only the most egregious wrongdoings, her supporters say. UCLA declined to discuss the documents, saying it is bound by confidentiality rules. The university also said it supports freedom of expression and does not condone retaliation.
China Initiative’s shadow looms large
Scientists of Chinese descent say that they are still being targeted unfairly, one year after the US government ended its controversial anti-espionage China Initiative. More than 150 people, nearly 90% of whom have Chinese heritage, were criminally charged for actions such as failing to disclose funding or partnerships with institutions in China. Few of the arrests led to convictions, and the programme was shut down under accusations of racial bias. “I am afraid of doing any research,” says physicist Xiaoxing Xi, who was arrested at gunpoint in front of his family over charges that were later dropped. “We always live in fear.”
Features & opinion
Credit: Neil Webb
Why AI needs to understand consequences
Artificial-intelligence (AI) systems can be trained to spot patterns in data that are so subtle that humans might miss them. But without a common-sense understanding of how the world works, machines are typically at a loss when it comes to cause and effect. For example, AI programs that can spot disease in lung X-rays have sometimes gone astray by zeroing in on the markings used to label the image. “Having a causal model of the world, even an imperfect one — because that’s what we have — allows us to make more robust decisions and predictions,” says computer scientist Yoshua Bengio. Now researchers are working on building causality into computing— a milestone that could bring AI to a whole new level of sophistication.
The challenges of mega-collaborations
Hyperauthorship — producing papers with more than 100 authors — is becoming more common (although maybe not quite on the scale of a record-setting 2021 COVID vaccine study with 15,025 authors). Big collaborations can tackle expensive projects and create statistical power, and a longer author list can recognize researchers who might have been overlooked in the past. At the same time, hyperauthorship distorts the metrics that evaluate a project’s impact. “[It] requires some pretty new thinking, from both researchers and journals, and the people who evaluate science,” says psychologist Nicholas Coles.
‘Zero-point energy’ transported from void
Researchers have shown that energy can be pulled out of empty space by taking advantage of random fluctuations in the quantum fields that fill the vacuum. Physicists exploited quantum entanglement to swap information about the fluctuations, gathered in one place, with energy hoovered up somewhere else. In one experiment, they used radio pulses to link two carbon atoms in a way that effectively teleported energy across microscopic distances for a few milliseconds. A separate experiment tested quantum energy teleportation using several of IBM's superconducting quantum computers.
Reference: arXiv preprint 1 & arXiv preprint 2
Source: Nature analysis of Scopus data.
A year into Russia’s war on Ukraine, its effects on global research collaborations might be showing up in the scientific literature. A Nature analysis of co-authorship patterns on papers in the Scopus database suggests that, in 2022, an increased share of Russia’s internationally collaborative papers had co-authors from China and India, whereas the proportion co-written with US or German authors fell. Ukraine, meanwhile, has sharply reduced its scholarly ties with Russia, and seems to have increased research connections with Poland. More will become clear as papers that were submitted to journals over the past year of war work their way through the publishing system. (Nature | 5 min read) (Nature analysis of Scopus data)
