The Parker Solar Probe (artist’s rendering) has swooped closer to the Sun than any other human-made object.Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SPL
On 24 December, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew closer to the Sun than any spacecraft has before — a mere 6.1 million kilometres from the surface. The probe survived temperatures around 980 °C and reported back that its scientific instruments had successfully collected data, which should reach Earth in the next few weeks.
Nature | 5 min read
Researchers have launched ‘WithdrarXiv’ — a database of more than 14,000 studies that have been withdrawn from the preprint server arXiv. They hope to spur the creation of automated tools that flag potential errors to researchers before they submit manuscripts, says Delip Rao, computer scientist and co-author of a preprint describing the tool. But don’t conflate these with retractions in peer-reviewed journals: for one thing, almost all cases of withdrawals on arXiv are initiated by the authors themselves. “The impetus to publish on preprint servers is to be the first, and not necessarily to be completely correct,” says human-anatomy researcher Vedran Katavić.
Nature | 4 min read
Reference: arXiv preprint
Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024, with temperatures rising further than expected on the basis of previous trends and modelling. A mysterious reduction in cloud cover, combined with an El Niño weather pattern, could be responsible for temperature increases in 2023. However, scientists expected temperatures would decrease again in June 2024 when the El Niño subsided, which didn’t happen. Now they are racing to work out whether this sudden spike is just a blip in the climate data, or an early indicator that the planet is heating up at a faster pace than they thought.
Nature | 6 min read
Reference: Science paper
Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service/European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
Features & opinion
A group of female statuettes found in Romania, dating to early in the history of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture.Credit: Constantin Preoteasa, Cucuteni Culture: Apogee of European Prehistoric Art. Exhibition Catalogue (C. Matasă Publishing House, 2023)
Around 6,000 years ago, a group known as the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture built giant settlements of thousands of homes in what is now Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. These cities were notably egalitarian — all the houses were the same size, furnished similarly with beautifully crafted pottery, with no palaces, no grand temples and no signs of centralized administration. Then, after two millennia, the Cucuteni–Trypillia vanished. Scientists are starting to piece together the complex reasons why, from a cooling and drying climate to the rise of nomadic lifestyles brought by peoples from the eastern steppes — and perhaps a breakdown of the social equality that had served Cucuteni–Trypillia people for centuries.
Nature | 12 min read
“Even though post-secondary institutions are known to be, in theory, progressive, when it comes to our own struggles as academics, there’s an expectation that we should not show any sign of weakness,” says addiction researcher Victoria Burns, who is in recovery from alcohol-use disorder. Burns and other academics in recovery spoke to Nature about their experiences and the need for open conversations about substance-use disorders to encourage people to seek the help they need. “We need to create more awareness around and normalize the recovery identity, so others know that there are people in recovery who are also doing well,” says Burns.
Nature | 12 min read
“In many respects the acknowledgements section is a genre unto itself,” writes chemist Michelle Francl. (Indeed, science writer Tabitha Carvan built a collection of found poetry from the acknowledgment sections of PhD theses.) The references are often oblique or even whimsical: in one of her papers, Francl thanked ‘Patrick Ryan’ — the name on a marble bust that watched over her favourite spot in the library. “It has been suggested that we could track the acknowledgements in the same way that we count citations and number of publications, creating an ‘influmetric’,” says Francl. “I contend that we need to leave this small space open to the authorial voice.”
Nature Chemistry | 7 min read
Super-accurate clocks could help make planet-sized telescopes, hunt for dark matter or even monitor the shape of the planet from the air. So researchers are working on a nuclear clock — a device that would harness the energy levels of the nucleus of an atom to act as a timekeeper. Now, they’re closer than ever, after making extremely accurate measurements of the frequency of light required to push thorium nuclei into a higher energy state — potentially defining the tick of a future nuclear clock.
Nature | 3 min video
Reference: Nature paper
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Physician Josh Green, the governor of Hawaii, saw first-hand how misinformation spread by anti-vaccine activists such as US health-secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr can fuel outbreaks that kill children. (The New York Times | 6 min read)
Good news for moppers and moseyers: even light exercise “such as typical house chores and casual, slow walking” will do you lots of good. Researchers have been gleefully analysing the influx of data from Fitbits and other wearables, which — though imperfect — are a big improvement on those lies I told about how much I worked out today. These data show that, while ‘more is better’ up to a point, gentle activities still handily reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia and dropping dead. We should update health guidelines, say researchers in Nature Medicine, to encourage people to pursue the benefits of playing with their pets, strolling and taking way less than 10,000 steps per day.
While I ponder whether very fast typing counts as exercise, why not send me your feedback on this newsletter? Stroll into my inbox at briefing@nature.com.
Thanks for reading,
Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing
With contributions by Jacob Smith
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Publish date : 2025-01-06 16:00:00
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