Rare diseases are often hard to spot. They can evade detection until irreversible organ damage or disability has already set in. Last month, in the hope of preventing just this type of harm, the UK’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, announced a 10-year plan to make genetic testing for hundreds of rare conditions part of standard…
A large population may enable innovation and economies of scale PHILIPPE MONTIGNY/iStockphoto/Getty Images After the SpikeDean Spears and Michael Geruso (Bodley Head (UK); Simon & Schuster (US)) Four-Fifths of all the humans who will ever be born may already have been born. The number of children being born worldwide each year peaked at 146 million…
The last time you interacted with ChatGPT, did it feel like you were chatting with one person, or more like you were conversing with multiple individuals? Did the chatbot appear to have a consistent personality, or did it seem different each time you engaged with it? A few weeks ago, while comparing language proficiency in…
Nearly 2 million years ago, one of our hominin ancestors developed bone cancer in their foot. The fate of this individual is unknown, but their fossilised remains leave no doubt that cancer has been a part of our story for a very long time. It is also clear that, when threatened by our own normally…
Japan Wires the Ocean with an Earthquake-Sensing ‘Nervous System’ Japan’s new earthquake-detection network lengthens warning times, and researchers in Wales have harnessed nuclear blast detectors to gauge tsunami risks. But the U.S. lags in monitoring the massive Cascadia megathrust fault By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Dean Visser Aerial view of the devastated along the…
Imagine a map of the world, divided by national borders. How many colours do you need to fill each country, plus the sea, without any identical colours touching? The answer is four – indeed, no matter what your map looks like, four colours will always be enough. But proving this required a schism in mathematics….
In a remote desert, scientists have discovered one of Earth’s oldest asteroid impacts. It dates to well over a billion years ago, to a time when our planet was inhabited solely by single-celled life. The impact happened at what’s now called North Pole Dome in northwest Australia, its presence hidden within ragged, red rocks made…
‘Science Fair’ of Lost Research Protests Trump Cuts A protest at a congressional office building highlighted future research findings that vast cuts to science will erase By Jenna Ahart & Nature magazine Capitol Hill, Washington D.C. | A few dozen scientists protested the cancelling of their research grants by the US government at a ‘science…
A surgical robot operating on a dead pig Juo-Tung Chen/Johns Hopkins University An AI-powered robot was able to remove a gall bladder from a dead pig in what researchers claim is the first realistic surgery by a machine with almost no human intervention. The robot is powered by a two-tier AI system trained on 17…
H5N1 bird flu isn’t going away. In fact, the virus continues to spin off new versions that outcompete their predecessors, posing a challenge for keeping it from jumping into people, poultry and other animals. “These viruses are becoming more fit, in the sense that we’re seeing more progeny viruses … [and] that these viruses seem…
