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Tech News
The IPCC announced in March it is developing AI systems to assist with literature reviews and processing reviewer comments for its climate assessments. A commentary in Nature warns these tools could influence which studies are surfaced, how evidence is clustered, and what signals reach report authors, long before any text is drafted.
Governments are increasingly stepping in to curb youth social media use after years of relying on parents, schools and platform self-regulation, which proved insufficient. Australia became the first country to enact a nationwide ban on social media accounts for children under 16, covering ten platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, while exempting messaging and gaming services like WhatsApp, Discord and Roblox. The law requires platforms to take reasonable steps to verify age and prevent account creation, though it does not restrict viewing public content without logging in.
Researchers at UC San Francisco tested a surgically implanted 253-electrode array that reads brain activity to simultaneously produce on-screen text and animate a personalized avatar's movements. The system, tested with two participants with severe paralysis, is described as the first brain-computer interface to handle verbal and non-verbal communication together within seconds of intent.
Researchers examined how warming temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns are affecting conifer forests, finding measurable impacts on tree growth and physiological function. The changes appear to be reducing the ability of these forests to absorb and store atmospheric carbon as effectively as before.
Paul Kammerer, once hailed as a successor to Darwin, killed himself in 1926 weeks after herpetologist Gladwyn Noble revealed evidence that his celebrated experiment on inherited traits had been faked. The scandal, combined with his flair for public self-promotion and unconventional theories like universal coincidence patterns, led many scientists to dismiss his entire body of work. A century later, new scientific findings suggest some of his underlying questions about heredity may deserve renewed attention.
A Nature Briefing Chat episode examines the widely taught story about the Bunsen burner's origins and finds the popular version doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The discussion revisits the historical record to clarify who actually contributed to the device's development and how the myth took hold.
A multi-country trial found that weekly 20-minute phone calls from teachers, combined with text messages, significantly boosted children's math progress when schools were closed. Text messages alone, without calls, also produced measurable learning gains compared with children who received no outreach at all.
New research measuring microplastic transport in rivers found that the amount of plastic particles flowing into the ocean is significantly higher than previous estimates suggested. The findings indicate that existing models have been undercounting how much plastic debris rivers actually deliver to marine environments.
Researchers have discovered a specific population of neurons that act as a natural brake on the growth of a nervous-system cancer, according to new findings published in Nature. The study details how these neurons interact with tumor cells to slow disease progression, offering fresh insight into the biology of nervous-system tumors.
The authors of a Nature paper on PIEZO2's molecular force selectivity have corrected several figures after discovering errors in their imaging and MINFLUX analysis pipelines. Issues included a duplicated data channel in a resolution macro, mismatched analysis thresholds between cells, and molecules that should have been filtered out but were mistakenly kept in the dataset. These corrections update puncta counts, FWHM measurements, and median distance values across Figures 1 through 4.
Scientific instruments positioned far from the epicenter picked up early signals of a major tsunami as it formed, according to a report on nature.com. The detection relied on distant sensors capable of registering the disturbance well before its full force reached coastlines.
Researchers studying the remains of an ancient city in Asia have found evidence of sophisticated engineering and social organization, according to a report highlighted by Nature. The findings point to coordinated planning and construction techniques that allowed the settlement to function as a complex urban center.