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People get relief from a water hose on 25 June in Cologne, Germany, as a record-setting heatwave pummels the nation.Credit: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty
A record-breaking heat wave is baking Europe, hot on the heels of unprecedented temperatures in May. “Heatwaves are here to stay, until we turn the tap off to global emissions,” says Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “They’re more frequent, they’re more intense and they’re lasting longer.” Europe is heating up twice as fast as the global average, and scientists are trying to understand the complex factors that will determine whether this year’s sweltering heat should be considered ‘the new normal’.
Nature | 7 min read
Source: Zeke Hausfather/Berkeley Earth
A Chinese supercomputer called LineShine has shot to the top of the world’s fastest computers list — the first China-based system to achieve this ranking in almost a decade. LineShine combines conventional computer processing with artificial-intelligence capabilities, but doesn’t use graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that are usually required to handle the concurrent calculations needed for AI computation. Instead, the machine draws its computing power from 14 million processing cores, including specialized units to shoulder some of the burden of calculations that usually require GPUs.
Nature | 5 min read
Scientists are raising the alarm about proposals from the ascendent far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) that they say could severely limit academic freedoms at German universities and research institutes. For example, in Saxony-Anhalt — where recent polls have seen the party’s support exceed 40% — the AfD’s manifesto proposes sweeping reforms to the state’s university system. “The AfD’s election programme explicitly proposes restrictions on, or even the prohibition of, research in certain fields,” and constrains the mobility of researchers in and out of the state, says Bettina Rockenbach, president of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, which has its headquarters in the state.
Nature | 7 min read
Hundreds of grant applications to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are being held up at any given time by unprecedented scrutiny after peer review. Some have been flagged by an algorithm for using terms, such as ‘gender’ and ‘climate change’, that have been deemed not to conform with the priorities of the administration of US President Donald Trump. These new layers of review have delayed delivery of funds, and have even resulted in the outright rejection of some applications that had been approved by outside and agency scientists — a situation unheard of before 2025, officials say.
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