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The prototype nappy house in Indonesia, built with concrete made by mixing cement, sand, gravel and shredded nappies.Credit: Muhammad Arief Irfan
A house built from concrete and nappies
Washed and shredded nappies can replace up to 40% of the sand in concrete without reducing its strength. A small house in Indonesia built using the concrete diverted around 1.7 cubic metres of waste from landfill. The downside: shredded nappies decrease compressive strength, so columns and beams would require a smaller proportion than do architectural elements, such as walls. Unfortunately, “there’s no supporting system in the municipal waste management to separate diapers”, notes civil engineer Siswanti Zuraida, who led the project in Indonesia.
Reference: Scientific Reports paper
Thousands protest Mexico’s new science law
A new law in Mexico that consolidates government power over science has been condemned by many researchers: more than 14,000 people have signed a protest letter, and others are preparing a march. Critics worry that the legislation will harm basic science by prioritizing projects on the basis of their potential to solve national problems. And some say that Mexico’s ruling party didn’t follow normal parliamentary procedures — few of the planned discussion forums happened before the law was rushed through.
Citation bump from turning up for talks
Conference attendees cite work discussed in talks 52% more often when they could go to the corresponding presentation in person than when they couldn’t attend owing to scheduling conflicts. These results come from an analysis of data from more than 2,400 people who had used a personal scheduling app at 25 computer-science conferences held between 2013 and 2020. The citation bump from in-person attendance accrues even for talks that the scientists hadn’t planned on listening to; this benefit accounted for nearly 22% of information dissemination brought about by conference talks.
Reference: arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
China overtakes US in Nature Index
For the first time, China has overtaken the United States in the Nature Index’s Share metric, which takes into account the percentage of authors from a given nation on each paper published in 82 prestigious scientific journals. Since the Nature Index was first introduced in 2014, China has rapidly gained ground on the United States and trails in Share in only one natural-sciences category — life sciences. On “simple bibliometrics like productivity and citations, China has outperformed expectations”, says science and policy researcher Caroline Wagner. But it still “significantly trails” behind other nations “in its capacity to absorb and apply knowledge”.
Features & opinion
What 1.5 ℃ of global warming really means
Last week, meteorologists predicted that the global average temperature for a single year is likely to hit 1.5 ℃ above pre-industrial levels within the next five years. The landmark evokes the Paris climate agreement’s aspirational goal: to keep global warming below 1.5 ℃. But the two milestones are not the same.
• The Paris goal is defined as the midpoint of the first 20-year period when the average global surface air temperature is 1.5 ºC warmer than the 1850–1900 average.
• A global stocktake in preparation for the next United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting (COP28), in November, found that, for a 50% chance of achieving the goal, global greenhouse-gas emissions need to peak before 2025; this hasn’t happened yet.
• Because global warming is uneven, more than one-fifth of the world’s population currently live in regions that have already exceeded 1.5 ºC of warming in at least one season.
• More important than when Earth will hit 1.5 ºC is what amount of warming the planet will peak at, and when that will happen. “With every tenth of a degree above 2 ºC, you’re looking at more-sustained, more-systemic impacts,” says geographer William Solecki. Those numbers won’t be apparent for decades.
Digital tech needs intergovernmental panel
“As a society, we are failing to adequately address the use of digital information technologies as a global challenge that affects nearly every aspect of modern life,” argue computational social scientist Joseph Bak-Coleman, biologist Carl Bergstrom and four colleagues. “The use of these technologies has difficult-to-predict consequences that span generations and continents.” And efforts to understand the risks are hampered by secretive corporations, which wield the threat of legal action against scholars who try to dig deeper. The authors argue for an independent body, analogous to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to inform evidence-based policy and exert influence on behalf of humanity.
How science can fuel disinformation
Science is its own worst enemy when it comes to assisting the spread of disinformation, argues economist Gary Smith in Distrust. The book is a veritable page-turner, says reviewer and methodologist Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. It contains many educational and distressing examples of bad science that are the result of cherry-picking, P-hacking and other ways to squeeze out non-existent effects from data. “But the focus is too much on the disease, and too little on the potential cures,” Wagenmakers stresses. Discussions of ways to counteract questionable research practices remain superficial, and the book lacks proper scientific referencing.
When scientists must run
When war broke out in Yemen in 2015, environmental researcher Hassoni Alodaini began a three-year journey to sanctuary in the Netherlands, much of it on foot. Geoinformation scientist Fares el Hasan dodged snipers during his daily commute to the University of Aleppo, in Syria, before he too relocated to the Netherlands. They join Stephen Wordworth, executive director of the Council for At Risk Academics, in the Nature Careers Podcast to discuss how best to support displaced researchers.
