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A view from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou, China, which monitored pulsars to detect gravitational waves.Credit: NAOC of CAS
Monster gravitational waves spotted
Gravitational waves are back, and they’re bigger than ever. Researchers have spotted hints of space-time ripples that are light-years long, and thousands of times stronger and longer than the first gravitational waves ever found, in 2015. The first detection used the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detector — this time, scientists tracked changes in the distances between Earth and beacon stars called pulsars to reveal how passing gravitational waves stretch and squeeze space. “We can tell that the Earth is jiggling due to gravitational waves that are sweeping our Galaxy,” says astrophysicist and co-author Scott Ransom. The waves’ most likely source is the combined signal from many pairs of enormous black holes slowly orbiting each other in the hearts of distant galaxies.
References: The Astrophysical Journal Letters paper 1 & paper 2, Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics paper, arXiv preprint
Shot in the arm for TB vaccine
Two major funders — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome — have announced that they will pour US$550 million into taking a promising vaccine candidate for tuberculosis through a large clinical trial. If successful, it will be the first tuberculosis vaccine to be commercialized in more than a century. The vaccine aims to tackle latent infections of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in adults. The current BCG vaccine (short for Bacillus Calmette–Guérin) offers limited protection against latent infections, which affect one in four people globally. The phase III trial will recruit 26,000 participants in several countries across Asia and Africa.
Woman the hunter
Evidence from 67 hunter-gatherer societies going back to the late 1800s shows that women hunt in most of them, with little evidence for rigid rules about who did what. “If somebody liked to hunt, they could just hunt,” says biological anthropologist and co-author Cara Wall-Scheffler. The work overturns the last vestiges of the tenacious ‘man the hunter’ myth that says ‘men hunt and women gather’, which can still influence how archaeological sites are interpreted.
Bad childhood-cancer drugs still spreading
An unapproved, substandard cancer drug is being used in Italian hospitals, months after it was revealed to be flooding the world. Asparaginase is a treatment for the most common type of childhood leukaemia, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. In January, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that at least a dozen poor-quality brands of asparaginase had reached 90 countries. The cost of the gold-standard versions of the medication has ballooned past what many countries can afford, leaving them reliant on cheaper versions that they don’t realize can be ineffective — or even harmful. The latest revelations show that it’s still happening, with gaps in Italian and European Union regulations allowing imports that bypass the country’s drugs regulator.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism | 8 min read
Read more: The drug was meant to save children’s lives. Instead, they’re dying (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism | 22 min read, from January)
Features & opinion
Science can help to end extreme poverty
Ending poverty starts with agreeing on how to measure what it means, argues a Nature editorial in the second of a series of articles on how science can help to support the teetering United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ongoing conflicts and the effects of climate change have all played a part in reversing a decades-long decline in poverty. More than 700 million people now live under the extreme-poverty line, defined as a daily income of less than US$2.15. Economic expansion and basic social and health-care protections could help to address the problem. More fundamentally, a rethink of how to measure poverty is needed. The global figure calculated using an index that includes housing, child mortality, clean water, sanitation and electricity is nearly double that calculated on the basis of income.
Antacids in the ocean to try to gobble CO2
The first commercial experiments are underway to see whether ocean alkalinity enhancement — essentially using antacids to help the ocean digest CO2 — could slow global warming. The idea is to speed up a natural geochemical weathering process that ultimately transfers carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the deep ocean. Quantifying the technology’s real-world impact remains the biggest challenge. The newly alkaline seawater needs to remain at the surface for carbon sequestration to occur. “If it gets drawn down into the ocean, then we might not get the benefit for another 1,000 years,” explains oceanographer Katja Fennel.
‘The most successful failure in my life’
"We had spent two years killing ourselves for a drug that would never see the light of day,” says Laura Walker, who co-founded a start-up to develop a COVID-19 drug. When the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolved, the firm’s antibody was no longer effective. “But when I look back, it was the most successful failure in my life, because what the team had accomplished was extraordinary,” Walker says. “Remember that your scientific career is a long journey, so any individual setback is really just a blip.” She ultimately decided to walk away from the company she had helped to build and moved to big pharma: “I was very conflicted about leaving. But I was spending a lot of my time on non-scientific activities, which isn’t where I wanted to be.”
The fingerprint of the anthropocene
Researchers are deciding whether a tree-lined lake outside Toronto will become the ‘golden spike’ that defines a new, human-dominated geologic period: the anthropocene. This beautiful interactive feature shows how the lake’s unusual chemistry preserves perfect layers of everything that fell in that year, divided by a thin layer of calcite. From the signs of 200 years of Indigenous settlement, to the traces of radioactive plutonium from nuclear-weapon tests in the 1950s, “it is a permanent legacy of human impacts on the planet, written in the rock record”, says geologist Colin Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, convened by the International Union of Geological Sciences.
