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A recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reveals that Colorado River has dried up by twenty percent, and may lose approximately one-fourth of its natural flow by 2050 as temperature increases. Scientists point to the melting of snowpack due to warmer temperature and lack of precipitation as the culprit of the river’s decreasing flow. The

A computer simulation of a pair of supermassive black holes. Hints of a trio of black holes have been seen in radio observations. Credit: NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/ESA/GAIA/DPAC/SPL Astronomy and astrophysics 27 February 2020 Radio signals suggest a grouping of two large black holes and one small one. A distant source of radio signals

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak Pangolins are often smuggled into China, where there is demand for their meat and scales.Credit: Shutterstock • Three weeks ago, on the basis of genetic analyses, pangolins became the prime suspect as the

Air pollution knows no border. A new study published in Nature revealed that air pollution crosses state borders, causing half of  air pollution-related death in the US.  Irene Dedoussi, an aerospace engineering professor at the Delft University of Technology and lead author of the research said that air pollution, which kills between 90,000 to 360,000 people in

1. Chen, Y., Zhang, Y., Graham, D., Su, S. & Deng, J. Geochemistry of Cenozoic basalts and mantle xenoliths in northeast China. Lithos 96, 108–126 (2007). 2. Wang, X.-C., Wilde, S. A., Li, Q.-L. & Yang, Y.-N. Continental flood basalts derived from the hydrous mantle transition zone. Nat. Commun. 6, 7700 (2015). 3. Chen, C.

Men have a higher risk of death than women if they contract the new strain of coronavirus, a recent study reveals. Coronavirus is reported in 28 countries, as of this writing, but little is known about the demographic factor of the disease especially how it has affected the patients from China, where the virus emerged. The

A published paper is all well and good, but it is hard for it to have much impact on the wider world if nobody is reading it. Download MP3 Pippa Whitehouse recalls seeking advice and media training from colleagues in her university press office when her first paper was published. “I recorded some soundbites and

1. Meseguer, A., Puche, C. & Cabero, A. Sex steroid biosynthesis in white adipose tissue. Horm. Metab. Res. 34, 731–736 (2002). 2. Kamat, A., Hinshelwood, M. M., Murry, B. A. & Mendelson, C. R. Mechanisms in tissue-specific regulation of estrogen biosynthesis in humans. Trends Endocrinol. Metab. 13, 122–128 (2002). 3. Luo, L. & Liu, M.

Hurricane aftermath left the mangroves of Everglades National Park battered, yet it helped the mangrove forests   by bringing in nutrient-rich soil from sediments and added elevations, making it more resilient to sea level rise.  This sums up the findings of scientists in its study report to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last February

More open science is more likely to settle the debate over the existence of hidden rooms behind Tutankhamun’s tomb.Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty The discovery of possible hidden rooms behind the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings generated many headlines last week. A team of researchers used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to scan the

Seen from a monitoring tower above the treetops near Manaus in the Brazilian Amazon, the rainforest canopy stretches to the horizon as an endless sea of green. It looks like a rich and healthy ecosystem, but appearances are deceiving. This rainforest — which holds 16,000 separate tree species — is slowly drying out. Over the

Many of the world’s hardest problems can be tackled only with data-intensive, computer-assisted research. And I’d speculate that the vast majority of research data are never published. Huge sums of taxpayer funds go to waste because such data cannot be reused. Policies for data reuse are falling into place, but fixing the situation will require

Peer review is the defining feature of scholarly communication. In a 2018 survey of more than 11,000 researchers, 98% said that they considered peer review important or extremely important for ensuring the quality and integrity of scholarly communication1. Indeed, now that the Internet and social media have assumed journals’ original role of dissemination, a journal’s

You wouldn’t expect coral-reef research to be taking place in a broom cupboard. But that’s what we’re doing at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London. The museum was built in 1901 and has botanical gardens, collections devoted to natural history, anthropology, music — and a tiny aquarium space that I can sprint around in

The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.Credit: Shutterstock For the past few years, graduate students applying for a prestigious summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in the harbourside town of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, have been quietly warned about the course’s co-director — Richard Schneider. In 2013, an investigation at his institution, the

The Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest is in a nineteenth-century building called the Ludovica Academy.Credit: Julian Pottage/Alamy A battle is under way between scientists in Hungary and the nation’s government over Budapest’s 200-year-old natural-history museum. The government wants to move the valuable collection, which contains more than 10 million items that are important for

(Photo : Pixabay/mariamichelle)Coral reefs need urgent attention as a huge percentage of it has been destroyed, risking underwater life. Scientists suggest that 70- 90% of all existing coral reef habitat will be eliminated over the next 20 years due to rising sea temperatures and acidic waters. To curb this, some groups are transplanting live corals

Researchers first spotted this rocky outcrop in Pine Island Bay, West Antarctica, in early February.Credit: Gui Bortolotto A scientific expedition off the coast of Antarctica earlier this month spotted an island that appears on no maps — a finding that demonstrates how quickly the continent is changing as a result of climate change. “I think

A research platform floats above the Yongle blue hole, whose 130-metre-wide mouth is surrounded by coral reefs. Credit: P. Yao et al./JGR Biogeosciences Ocean sciences 23 February 2020 The Yongle marine cavern provides a window onto unusual ocean chemistry. Carbon more than 8,000 years old lies deep inside a yawning sinkhole in the South China

The petroleum-based adhesives used to make plywood could be replaced by a soya-based formula. Credit: Alamy Organic chemistry 21 February 2020 Chemists have borrowed a strategy from plant cell walls to produce a high-strength wood adhesive. An element that props up plants’ cell walls can turn soya protein into a strong and eco-friendly glue. The

Civets are thought to have be the source of the virus that causes SARS.Credit: Marc Anderson/Alamy China’s top law-making body is expected to permanently tighten rules on trading wildlife in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, which is thought to have originated in a wild-animal market in Wuhan. Scientists speculate that this could include a

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here Escherichia coli bacteria, coloured green, in a scanning electron micrograph.Credit: Stephanie Schuller/SPL A machine-learning approach has spotted powerful new types of antibiotic from a pool of more than 100 million molecules, including one that works against

Methane bubbles trapped in ice. Methane that has long been stored in frozen ground is unlikely to be released in sufficient amounts to accelerate climate change. Credit: Alamy Climate change 21 February 2020 Bubbles in Antarctic ice suggest that warming will not result in massive release of long-buried methane. Runaway global warming driven by the

Parallel to the rapid spread of coronavirus from Wuhan China to 25 countries across the globe, spread of myths and even scientific studies with no peer reviews or ‘preprints’ on the novel virus has become viral and is contributing to fear and panic across the globe. Even public health scientists have issued a statement condemning

Researchers taught a neural network to recognize a type of knot called a 31, which can be modelled as a string of beads (left) or a string of rods (right). Credit: O. Vandans et al./Phys. Rev. E Physics 21 February 2020 After training, an artificial-intelligence program can distinguish between five types of knot with 99%

The deserted streets of Wuhan, China.Credit: Getty The outbreak of a new coronavirus is wreaking havoc worldwide. In China, the epicentre of the epidemic, the virus has infected tens of thousands of people and killed more than 2,100. Unprecedented measures meant to contain the spread have brought millions of daily lives to a halt, and

It’s a great feeling when your manuscript is accepted, but the peer-review process after that can be tough, particularly for first-time authors. In the second episode of this four-part series on publishing a paper, Adam Levy asks four researchers and a manuscript editor how best to respond when your paper is rejected or subjected to

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here Tutankhamun’s burial place in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt.Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Archaeologists claim to have discovered hidden chambers behind the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb in a radar survey. The find resurrects a controversial theory that

A robotic submersible surfaces near the Nathaniel B. Palmer ice-breaker at Thwaites Glacier.Credit: Johan Rolandsson Taking advantage of rare ice-free waters in West Antarctica last February, scientists got their first look underneath Thwaites Glacier, a massive and increasingly unstable formation perched at the edge of the continent. What they saw only increased fears of a

Researchers want to know how many people with the coronavirus don’t have symptoms.Credit: Stringer/Getty Researchers are concerned that China’s official reports on the number of coronavirus infections have not been including people who have tested positive for the virus but who have no symptoms. They fear the practice is masking the epidemic’s true scale. But

The thousands of islands in the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey have inspired countless myths and works of literature. This region is also where the word archipelago, which means a group of islands, has its roots. Archipelagos and their constituent islands have long been viewed as natural ‘laboratories’ for developing and testing theories that

The fine-structure splitting of the n = 2 states of hydrogen is the separation of the 2P3/2 and 2P1/2 levels at zero magnetic field. This splitting, predicted by the Dirac theory of relativistic quantum mechanics11, originates from the spin–orbit interaction between the non-zero orbital angular momentum (L = 1) and the electron spin. The ‘classic’ Lamb shift is defined

Cured Jeffrey Rediger Flatiron (2020) An experienced physician who is also a skilled, driven and compassionate writer is a winning combination. This pioneering book by psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger analyses unexplained spontaneous recoveries from potentially fatal medical conditions, including cancer. From interviewing patients over nearly two decades, Rediger concludes that each recovery was “unique” and only

River systems, such as this one in China, need better protection from encroaching industrialization.Credit: Costfoto/Barcroft Media/Getty Most measures of biodiversity suggest that things are going badly wrong. Some one million plant and animal species face extinction, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). And French President Emmanuel Macron last week

Credit: Adapted from Getty The day after she submitted a grant proposal last November, Sarah McNaughton listed all the tactics she could think of to boost her chances of success next time. “I expect to be rejected,” says McNaughton. “It is the exception to get funded, not the rule.” Publishing key papers and forging new

Officials want to know roughly when the outbreak will peak so they can prepare hospitals.Credit: SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Coronavirus infections in China continue to swell by thousands a day, prompting epidemiologists to estimate when the outbreak will peak. Some suggest the climax, when the number of new infections in a single day reaches its highest point,

1. Tentzeris, M. M., Georgiadis, A. & Roselli, L. Energy harvesting and scavenging. Proc. IEEE 102, 1644–1648 (2014). Article Google Scholar 2. Abowd, G. D. & Mynatt, E. D. Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing. ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. 7, 29–58 (2000). Article Google Scholar 3. Parida, B., Iniyan, S. &

As a marine ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, I make about 150 dives a year, looking for threatened marine species. I focus on animals and plants that go largely unnoticed: small crustaceans and fish species such as gobies and blennies that grow 3 or 4 centimetres long. I’m trying to illuminate

Credit: New York University Archives After the Second World War, mathematics in the United States flourished owing to a convergence of interests. Mathematicians had shown their worth to military and industry patrons, who underwrote far-reaching empires of theories and people, including the consummate problem-solver Louis Nirenberg. One of the world’s most cited and productive mathematicians,