Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
The Psyche spacecraft launched successfully from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 13 October.Credit: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty
Psyche mission will visit huge metal asteroid
On Friday, a NASA spacecraft successfully began its journey to a rare and mysterious asteroid called Psyche — the largest metallic object in the Solar System. Of the million-plus asteroids in our Solar System, only a few are made mostly of metal (the rest are rock, or rock and ice). Psyche could be the exposed core of an ancient protoplanet — so it might reveal some of the secrets of Earth’s similar iron-rich core.
Hundreds of analysts get different results
More than 200 ecologists analysed the same data sets and got widely divergent results. The exercise shows that “we really can’t be relying on any individual result or any individual study to tell us the whole story”, says ecology meta researcher Hannah Fraser. None of the answers are wrong, Fraser points out — the spread of results reflects factors such as participants’ training and how they set sample sizes.
Reference: EcoEvoRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
Feral horses need ‘urgent’ control
Soaring numbers of feral horses — known as brumbies — are helping to drive vulnerable species to extinction in the Australian alps, concludes a government inquiry. The report recommends reversing a ban on aerial shooting to cull horses in New South Wales — the first time that the federal government has weighed in on the issue. But it doesn’t go as far as saying that the state should repeal legislation that grants the horses protections as part of Australia’s cultural heritage.
Reference: Australian parliamentary report
Major US museum pledges: no more bones
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City will remove all human bones on public display as part of a pledge to address the legacy of its collection of some 12,000 human remains. This includes the bodies of Indigenous and enslaved people taken from their graves, and the remains of hundreds of New Yorkers whose bodies were given to medical schools as recently as the 1940s.
The New York Times | 9 min read
Features & opinion
The side effects of new weight-loss drugs
Gastrointestinal problems are some of the side effects of the new hormone-mimicking anti-obesity drugs semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro). Outside the controlled conditions of clinical trials, semaglutide increased the risk of pancreas inflammation and gastroparesis (food moving from the stomach to the intestines slower than it should) compared with an older weight-loss medication. There are concerns that tirzepatide could occasionally lead to low skeletal muscle mass that results in muscle weakness.
‘Research is too detached from our society’
“Uganda has, as a legacy of colonialism, built bits and pieces of a scientific system but it has not comprehensively linked results to socio-economic transformation,” says epidemiologist Monica Musenero. As Uganda’s science minister, she pushes for science that fixes local problems and creation of a supportive system for research, including industrial parks and national grants.
AI makes a mockery of grant applications
When robotics researcher Juan Manuel Parrilla used the artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT to write parts of a grant proposal, it cut the workload from three days to three hours. Some people might see this as cheating, Parrilla says, but it actually highlights a much bigger problem: “What is the point of asking scientists to write documents that can be easily created with AI?”
Why assembly theory got us all riled up
What is life and how did it arise? A recent paper grappled with these eternal questions using a method called ‘assembly theory’ — and kicked a hornet’s nest in the scientific community. Assembly theory is a framework for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature, before biological building blocks arise. Its attempts to bridge physics and biology tap into “a longstanding tension” between the fields, writes science journalist Philip Ball. “There is an inglorious history of other scientists (physicists in particular) barging into biology only to contribute very little.”
Get to grips with the new paper on assembly theory in the Nature News & Views article by physicist George Ellis (8 min read, Nature paywall) or read Philip Ball’s own survey of the idea in Quanta from May (11 min read).
Image of the day
An annular eclipse treated parts of the United States, Central America and South America to a ‘ring of fire’ as the Moon partially blocked the Sun’s light. Astronomy writer Jeff Kanipe captured this stunning image in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. (Jeff Kanipe)
