Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
Darkened, pebbly scraps are the oldest known 3D fossils of the skin of amniotes, a group that includes birds, reptiles and mammals.Credit: Mooney et al./Current Biology
Oldest reptile skin pre-dates the dinosaurs
A tiny shred of reptile skin that was ‘pickled’ in oil 289 million years ago is the oldest ever found for a group of animals collectively known as amniotes, which includes reptiles, birds and mammals. Researchers were able to cut through the fossilized skin and examine a cross-section, in which distinct layers of epidermis and dermis were visible. It’s rare for soft, delicate skin to be preserved in the fossil record. This piece probably belonged to a small, lizard-like animal known as Captorhinus aguti.
Reference: Current Biology paper
Medical AI struggles with new patients
AI tools designed to predict how people with schizophrenia will respond to different antipsychotic drugs failed to adapt to new patients. The algorithms worked well for people who were part of the models’ training sample, but their performance dropped to little better than chance for subsets of the initial sample or for people who were part of an entirely different dataset. “It’s a huge problem that people have not woken up to,” says psychiatrist and study co-author Adam Chekroud.
Ancient Amazonian cities discovered
A civilization of interconnected cities — including houses, plazas, roads and canals — has been found hidden under vegetation in Ecuador. LIDAR imaging reveals settlements that are at least 2,500 years old and comparable in size to Mayan cities in Mexico and Central America. “This shows a very dense occupation and an extremely complicated society,” says archaeologist Michael Heckenberger. “For the region, it’s really in a class of its own in terms of how early it is.”
What counts as plagiarism?
The resignation of Harvard University president Claudine Gay following plagiarism allegations has sparked a debate about when copying text should be punishable. Gay’s dissertation and some papers contain passages copied without proper attribution, some suggest. Others argue that these are minor omissions. Some scientists are questioning the value of requiring fresh summaries of known facts in each new paper. “I think the idea that one should never ever copy somebody else’s words is a bit outdated,” says computational biologist Lior Pachter.
Features & opinion
How we can eradicate yaws
The skin infection yaws mostly affects children, and it is a “chronic, disfiguring and debilitating” disease, says Lydia Sahamie, a community health-care worker in Papua New Guinea, where the majority of cases are reported today. Researchers are cautiously optimistic that yaws could be wiped out by 2030, but antibiotic resistance and the existence of reservoirs of the disease in other primates are just some things that might get in the way. “The story has gotten a lot more complicated in the last five years,” says global public-health researcher Camila González-Beiras.
This article is part of Nature Outlook: Neglected tropical diseases, an editorially independent supplement funded by a grant from Merck Sharp & Dohme and with financial support from Moderna.
Source: WHO
Futures: MANNA
A delicious fungus-based food transforms the future of humanity in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.
Five best science books this week
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a compelling collection of handwritten scientific documents and the inspirational autobiography of Nobel-prizewinning biochemist Katalin Karikó, which describes her vital and moving struggle for success.
Podcast: Unmissable science of the new year
If you took a break from science news as the calendar changed, fear not — the Nature Podcast has done a round-up of five stories from the holiday period you won’t want to miss. In it, I give a special shout-out to all those Briefing readers who wrote in with suggestions on how to open the stuck lid of the OSIRIS-REx’s sample-return canister, which is stuffed with asteroid material collected during the NASA mission. Update from NASA: they did it!
Nature Podcast | 30 min listen
Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify, or use the RSS feed.
