GoKawiilWhy, if sleep has so many benefits, humans as a species sleep so little. Plus, universities attempt to save a world-leading weather and climate research lab in Colorado, and Elsevier has joined a class-action lawsuit against Meta.
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Protesters gathered late last year in Boulder, Colorado, to oppose the dismantling of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).Credit: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite.com
One of the leading climate-science institutions in the world — the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado — is fighting for its life in a US courtroom. The universities that manage the research centre are suing the administration of President Donald Trump, which has said that it will dismantle NCAR because it is a source of “climate alarmism”. At the heart of the case is whether the US National Science Foundation is moving too quickly and without authority to hand off pieces of NCAR — including a supercomputing centre in Wyoming — to public and private institutions. Whatever the ruling, the broader battle over the future of NCAR — including its aeroplane fleet, space-weather studies and climate-modelling teams — will probably continue to play out.
Nature | 8 min read
Mega-publisher Elsevier has joined a class-action lawsuit against technology company Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that its copyrighted works were used to train Meta’s AI models. The lawsuit claims that Meta drew on databases, such as Sci-Hub, that contain unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Meta has suggested that it will argue that AI training is ‘transformative’ and allowed under the ‘fair use’ exemption.
Nature | 6 min read
At a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) wellness summit attended by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, speakers raised concerns about the quality of mental-health treatment in the United States, pointing to issues of overdiagnosis, overmedication and withdrawal. But the true problems are “underdiagnosis and undertreatment”, says Timothy Wilens, a clinical psychiatrist and president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), who notes that at least one-half of US children with mental-health conditions are not getting the care they need. When it comes to withdrawal, clinicians don’t have enough information because researchers have struggled to find funding for large-scale discontinuation trials, says psychiatrist and AACAP president John Walkup.
Nature | 9 min read
An estimated 9,000 educational institutions — including universities across the United States, Canada and Australia — have been affected by a breach of the Canvas software platform. Students and teachers — including some who were in the middle of exams — were greeted with a ransomware message when they attempted to use the system. Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, says the platform is mostly up and running again, but some institutions have suspended its use.
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