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The formal announcement of the winners followed a leak earlier in the day.Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty
Quantum dots win chemistry Nobel
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov for their work on quantum dots. These tiny semiconductor crystals, just a few atoms in size, are molecules that have some properties of single atoms. This allows them to be tuned to emit specific wavelengths of light — handy for applications that need this precision, from brighter television displays to biological imaging.
The names of the winners were leaked before the official announcement. A press release was accidentally e-mailed to Swedish media outlets — but because the three winners are based in the United States, it seems that the leak didn’t ruin the surprise.
AI beats people at finding dodgy images
Are you better than artificial intelligence (AI) at spotting problematic images in papers? Probably not, an experiment suggests. Scientific sleuth Sholto David spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an AI tool. Working at two to three times David’s speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he’d missed.
Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer-reviewed)
Global approval for second malaria vaccine
The World Health Organization has endorsed a second vaccine to prevent malaria in children. The vaccine, R21, has an efficacy of about 75%, similar to that of the first approved malaria vaccine, RTS,S. But R21 is easier to manufacture on a large scale and will cost less than half the price per dose. “There’s going to be enough of it to actually give out to children,” says malaria researcher Jackie Cook.
Maybe volcanoes doomed the dinosaurs
A machine-learning algorithm suggests that volcanic activity, rather than an asteroid, killed the dinosaurs. The algorithm simulated 300,000 scenarios of different amounts of volcanic gases until it found one that matched data from fossils. The gases would have started to cause dinosaur-dooming climate chaos long before the asteroid impact. “You can actually recreate the environmental conditions that could cause a dinosaur extinction solely by volcanism, as if the asteroid weren’t there,” says computational geologist and study co-author Alexander Cox. “But of course, we can't discount the fact that the asteroid definitely didn't cheer up the dinosaurs.”
Features & opinion
How mRNA is transforming medicine
On Monday, biochemist Katalin Karikó and immunologist Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries that enabled the development of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines against COVID-19. And the field shows no signs of slowing down: mRNA-vaccine developers are setting their sights on mpox, influenza and cancer. Synthetic mRNA can be designed and manufactured in days, which allows vaccines to be reformulated quickly. And the technology could be a game-changer for pathogens that have eluded vaccine makers, such as cytomegalovirus, which causes birth defects.
A ‘user’s manual for the female mammal’
In her new book Eve, Cat Bohannon offers a refreshing and lively corrective to a story that has focused mainly on male evolution, tracing the development of female bodies back 200 million years. Her seven ‘Eves’ range from Morganucodon, the first animal to feed milk to its offspring, to Purgatorius, Earth’s earliest known primate, all the way to Homo sapiens. “Bohannon doesn’t shy away from the complex question of gender identity,” writes reviewer and science journalist Josie Glausiusz. It is our “huge, lumpy, terribly intelligent brain” that produces an experience of identifying as a woman, Bohannon writes, and not the presence or absence of specific genitalia.
