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Daily briefing: We are exceeding the limits of Earth’s ability to support us
Humanity has crossed eight of nine ‘Earth-system boundaries’ for a healthy and fair world. Plus, the brain’s wrinkles help to drive how it works and an infinite tiling pattern that could end a 60-year mathematical quest.
Our brains’ walnut-like wrinkles have a large effect on brain activity, in much the same way that the shape of a bell determines how it sounds. The discovery challenges the paradigm that brain function emerges from the intricate web of connections between specialized brain-cell populations, called the connectome. Researchers used mathematical models that predict how waves travel across surfaces, and found that the shape of the brain’s outer surface was a better predictor of brainwave data than was the model of the connectome.
Text and images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are complicating publishers’ efforts to tackle paper mills, companies that produce fake scientific papers to order. ‘Milled’ papers are a growing problem: the publisher Taylor & Francis saw instances of potential misconduct increase more than tenfold from 2019 to 2022, and half of the cases were because of paper mills. Some publishers are already using paper-mill detection software. Asking authors to provide raw experimental data, potentially with digital watermarks, could be another strategy to confirm that research is genuine.
After 60 years of searching, mathematicians might have finally found a true single aperiodic tile — a shape that can cover an infinite plane and never make a repeating pattern. In March, a team of hobbyist and professional mathematicians found a shape that, together with its mirror image, could be used to build infinite aperiodic tilings. The same team has now modified the shape so it doesn’t need its mirror image to create the never-repeating pattern.
In 2009, a seminal paper in Nature showed that humanity had crossed three of nine ‘Earth-system boundaries’: the limits of what the planet can support before human activities make it uninhabitable. Now, there’s a reboot of the extraordinarily influential concept that takes into account how changes to climate, ecosystems and other factors disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. We have crossed seven of the eight safe and just boundaries. Only air pollution was inside dangerous limits globally, despite it causing an estimated 4.2 million deaths annually. If our planet got a check-up, “our doctor would say that the Earth is really quite sick right now, and it is sick in terms of many different areas or systems, and this sickness is also affecting the people living on Earth”, says climate-policy researcher and co-author Joyeeta Gupta.
“If seven of the eight thresholds have been crossed, what does that mean for our still-feeble efforts to move to a more sustainable path?” asks a Natureeditorial. Researchers vary widely in their views on how this question should be addressed — from those who advocate working within the current economic system (known as green growth) to those arguing to transform it (known as post-growth or degrowth). And, in an accompanying News & Views article, law and social-justice researcher Stephen Humphreys acknowledges the difficulty of setting numerical values when integrating ideas from the natural and social sciences.
Elizabeth Holmes has begun her 11-year prison sentence for fraud against investors in her blood-testing company, Theranos. Theranos claimed it could run more than 200 health tests on just a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick — but the claims were exaggerated. Last year, observers told Nature that the debacle is a cautionary tale for scientific entrepreneurs: share your data early on, and participate in some kind of peer-review process.
Gender made little difference for people living 9,000 years ago in Çatalhöyük, in modern-day Turkey: men and women had identical diets and did similar kinds of work. So what changed? History points to patriarchy beginning not with agriculture, work that requires physical strength, but with those in power. “Person power is the key to power in general,” explains anthropologist James Scott. The elites in the first states needed people to produce resources for them and to defend the state. Women were expected to focus on having more babies and were eventually pushed into the domestic shadows.
This crocodile hatchling is one of more than 2,000 anatomical specimens in the Hunterian Museum in London. The collection has reopened after a six-year refurbishment. The treasure chest of medical specimens, both fascinating and ghoulish, was started by eighteenth-century surgeon John Hunter. But drastically different ethics now underpin Hunter’s artefacts, how they were collected and their display — uncomfortable facts that the reimagined museum explicitly acknowledges, writes reviewer Nisha Gaind, Nature’s bureau chief for Europe. (Nature | 6 min read)
Neuroscientist Ignacio Muñoz-Sanjuan founded Factor H, a charity in Colombia and Venezuela that strives to connect researchers with families who have exceptional rates of Huntington’s disease. Many people have gone without diagnosis or treatment since a long-running research project in the area was abandoned. (The New York Times | 11 min read)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01821-4
Today I am revelling in the launch of the European Sleeper, which aims to revive languishing overnight rail links on the continent — and, if its lushly illustrated multimedia feature on the new night train is any indicator, Politico is equally excited.
While I plot my future trundling from London to Berlin tucked up under a duvet, why not share with me your favourite low-carbon travel routes — plus any feedback on this newsletter — at briefing@nature.com.