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Nature, Published online: 09 December 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-04007-8
Preliminary study suggests possible link between long-term heat exposure and molecular markers of ageing.
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Human body’s ageing ‘clock’ ticks faster after heat stress
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This fearless science sleuth risked her career to expose publication fraud
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Early this year, Anna Abalkina found out that her name was on a watch list for Roskomnadzor, a Russian agency that tracks online and social-media activity. Abalkina, a Russian citizen now working in Berlin, tries not to worry about it. There shouldn’t be a risk if she were to return to Russia, she reasons. “But the problem is, you never know.” Her colleagues advise against it.
The reason that she has come under the watchful eye of the Russian state is that she has spent 13 years rooting out fraud in the scientific literature. Her work on plagiarism and on uncovering businesses that sell fake papers — called paper mills — has focused most heavily on Russia and ex-Soviet countries, and more recently on Iran and India.
Globally, she’s also tracked hijacked journals, which are scam websites that clone authentic journal titles to con authors out of publication fees. Abalkina showed that the hijackers launder their way into respectability by becoming indexed in research databases such as Scopus. Last December, Scopus’s owner Elsevier deleted all of its links to journal home pages to counteract the problem — acknowledging Abalkina’s work. But this June, she reported that several hijacked journals continue to infiltrate Scopus.
“Cases of journal hijacking can be complex and ever-changing,” a spokesperson for Elsevier said, adding that the publisher was continually adjusting its processes so that Scopus indexed only high-quality, trusted content.
Then, this November, Abalkina flagged an unusually bold effort to clone journal sites from major publishers. They say they’re looking into the scam.
Abalkina is one of a growing cohort of sleuths working to decontaminate the literature. But she’s unusual in studying activity in Russia, in being funded to do some of this work — at the Free University of Berlin’s Institute of East European Studies — and in her focus on how fraud systems operate.
“She has considerable skills in doing the sorts of analyses that allow her to explore networks of people,” says Dorothy Bishop, a neuropsychologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who collaborated with Abalkina to document a paper mill that got six illegitimate papers published in a psychology journal (which were subsequently retracted). “She is doing very important work,” Bishop adds.
Abalkina’s introduction to research misconduct came in the early 2010s, when she was at Moscow’s Financial University, working in international economics. She was shocked to find that a PhD student had plagiarized two of her papers, copying large parts of the works. When she complained, the journal issued only a correction, saying that the author forgot to reference her work. (The student later gave up their degree after Abalkina applied pressure to their university.)
Abalkina then got involved in Dissernet, a grass-roots network of academics and journalists that examined Russian PhD theses en masse for plagiarism in 2013. It got hundreds of degrees revoked and implicated many high-profile Russian politicians.
During that time, Abalkina left Russia to pursue an economics PhD in Italy on Russian banks. She thought that she had left behind the peculiar distortions of research she’d seen in the Russian system. But instead she encountered a barrage of international research fraud, including fake studies, bribed journal editors and paper mills. Now in Berlin, Abalkina is funded to study Russian governance, plagiarism and how paper mills and other bad actors in the research publishing world operate.
Abalkina estimates that her work has led to hundreds of retractions — in particular resulting from her 2021 investigation into how a company called International Publisher, headquartered in Russia, seems to sell authorship slots on papers.
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I work to protect South Korea’s people against earthquakes
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“In this photo, I’m examining a previously hidden active fault line between two geological blocks. I discovered it with other researchers working for the Korea Active Fault Research Group (KAFRG). The site is on a ridge in a forested valley about an hour’s drive from my office at Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea. It’s part of the Hwalseongri fault, situated just south of Gyeongju National Park.
In 2016 and 2017, large earthquakes occurred in this area, causing great concern in our country. Until the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011 caused the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in nearby Japan, people in South Korea had not paid much attention to active faults. We’ve become more worried about seismic risks since then.
In 2017, South Korea’s government founded KAFRG to create the country’s first active-fault map. I’m one of around 60 scientists working as part of the group, which is based at Pukyong National University in Busan. My mission is to identify active faults that have the potential to cause earthquakes.
To do this, I collect evidence known as geomorphic markers. My tasks include analysing such linear features, together with fault-related landforms and the structural correlation of faults. Using the information I provide, geologists and geophysicists can conduct more detailed studies of these faults.
My fieldwork for KAFRG often uses drones to look for fault lines. However, for land covered by forest, lidar (laser imaging detection and ranging) technology is more important. Our research team uses aircraft to obtain lidar data for the areas we need to study. But because geomorphic markers are often hard to find, we also need to walk through forests and cross rivers. The best tool of all is my feet.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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How fast is the Universe expanding? This astronomer took cosmology closer to an answer
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For decades, scientists have disagreed about a fundamental question: how quickly is the Universe expanding? But this year, astronomer Wendy Freedman announced results that could help to put the controversy to rest.
The long-standing puzzle has been that two methods to measure the cosmic expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, give stubbornly different answers. Studies using fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the Big Bang — suggest that for every megaparsec (Mpc; or 3.2 million light years) farther out one looks, galaxies rush away 67 kilometres per second faster. But when scientists, including Freedman, measured the recession rate of far galaxies and estimated their distance, they got a larger Hubble constant: variously 72–74 km s−1 Mpc−1.
The method for estimating the distance of galaxies is crucial. It relies on observing the brightness of supernovae (exploding stars) in those galaxies. To calibrate how a supernova’s apparent brightness relates to its distance, researchers rely on comparisons to ‘standard candles’: well-studied stars found relatively nearby, in the Milky Way’s cosmic neighbourhood.
Analyses led by Adam Riess at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, use stars known as Cepheids and give the higher Hubble constant. So Freedman, at the University of Chicago in Illinois, worked with collaborators to perfect two other types of standard candle that would serve as a cross-check. “She really started building up this independent path,” says Kristen McQuinn, an astronomer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. That is courageous, says McQuinn, because it requires a lot of telescope observations and painstaking analysis.
This year, Freedman revealed her findings, which used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As she announced at conferences in April, and in a preprint posted in August, when she combined the two newer standard candles with supernova data, both analyses put the Universe’s expansion rate within the error margin of the 67 km s−1 Mpc−1 cosmic microwave background results (W. L. Freedman et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/nq36; 2024).
But the puzzle is far from solved. Freedman found that the Cepheid-based technique still mysteriously gives a value higher than she found with the other standard candles. Then, later in August, Riess published his own team’s analyses — arguing that all three standard candles show a higher Hubble constant (A. G. Riess et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/nq4g; 2024).
The reason for that difference seems to be that scientists don’t agree on which sets of galaxies to include in their analyses. But there is hope that more JWST observations, or different methods, such as using gravitational waves, might sort out the issue.
If so, it will be one more fundamental aspect of the Universe that Freedman has helped to illuminate. She first established her name in the 1990s, when she led what Riess calls a “transformational” study with the Hubble Space Telescope, called the Key Project. At that time, different groups gave measurements of the Hubble constant that disagreed by a factor of two — and the age of the Universe itself could only be estimated as between 10 billion and 20 billion years. Using Cepheids and supernovae, Freedman’s work vastly improved distance estimation and, combined with Nobel-winning discoveries by Riess and others, improved estimates for the Universe’s age.
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This doctor raised the alarm about a deadly mpox outbreak that went global
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Early this year, cases of mpox erupted across Central Africa, killing hundreds. Seeing the events unfold so soon after the still-simmering outbreak of 2022 “felt like scientific amnesia”, says Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Mbala led a team of researchers who sounded the alarm about the latest outbreak when they spotted a suspicious cluster of mpox cases among young adults and sex workers in an eastern region of the DRC. The team predicted that the disease would move quickly and urged health officials both in the DRC and in neighbouring countries to devise plans to contain the monkeypox virus’s spread.
He and his colleagues analysed the genome of the virus (E. H. Vakaniaki et al. Nature Med. 30, 2791–2795; 2024), revealing that it was a new strain, capable of passing from human to human and distinct from the virus that caused the 2022 outbreak and other previous outbreaks in the DRC. It has since been detected in Sweden, Thailand, India, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and six African countries that had never before reported mpox infections.
Mbala has been instrumental in leading these research projects, says Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, who collaborates with Mbala. Furthermore, Mbala has “been coordinating response and community-engagement activities across the country, and doing all this in the least selfish, most diplomatic and democratic ways”, Kindrachuk adds.
It’s a role that Mbala has long trained for. After finishing medical school in 2006 and spending a year as a clinician in Kinshasa, he met Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, a microbiologist who directs the centre where Mbala works. Mbala was impressed by Muyembe-Tamfum’s work — in particular his dogged efforts to find the animal reservoir of Ebola, having co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976. Muyembe-Tamfum took Mbala under his wing, and in 2008 they worked to improve the country’s capacity for mpox testing and treatment. Later, Mbala helped to diagnose and confirm, through genetic sequencing, the first infections with the Ebola virus during the DRC’s 2014 outbreak.
“He’s leaving quite the legacy, and he’s really fitting the shoes of his mentor,” says Nicaise Ndembi, a virologist at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, who is coordinating the agency’s 2024 mpox response.
For Mbala, it is his personal mission to put an end to the scientific amnesia that allowed conditions such as mpox to linger and re-emerge. He says that the world knew what the monkeypox virus was capable of, and yet, once infections outside Africa dropped below a certain level, the disease became neglected once again. Vaccines and therapeutics that many high-income countries deployed to control the 2022 outbreaks remained out of reach of African nations until last September — when the strain had already spread aggressively throughout the continent.
Mbala aims to better understand how the disease spreads in the DRC and neighbouring countries. His team has found that the virus can spread rampantly in displacement camps and through non-sexual contact; previously, mpox in Central Africa caused small, localized outbreaks and was known to spread to people only through contact with infected animals (D. Mukadi-Bamuleka et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/g8dxrz; 2024).
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the state of H5N1 avian influenza risk
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Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
A fraud buster, a nuclear-clock maker and a virus hunter are just a few of the remarkable people chosen for this year’s Nature’s 10. The list, compiled by Nature’s editors, includes Kaitlin Kharas, a PhD student who helped to lead a campaign to get Canadian graduate students and postdocs their biggest pay rise in 20 years; and Muhammad Yunus, an economist and Nobel peace laureate who is now the interim leader of Bangladesh.
Nature | 10 profiles
The European Union (EU) has appointed Bulgarian politician Ekaterina Zaharieva as commissioner for start-ups, research and innovation in its five-yearly shake-up of its executive body. Zaharieva will help to shape their next multibillion-euro science programme, the follow-up to the Horizon Europe scheme. The inclusion of ‘start ups’ in Zaharieva’s title, a first for the position, reflects the increased focus on business. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to prioritize science during her second term, as the EU aims to become less dependent on US and Chinese technologies.
Nature | 5 min read
Clay bowls discovered in Iraq could be evidence of one of the world’s earliest governments. Residue in the bowls suggests they were used to serve meals, which researchers suggest were given out in exchange for labour — a form of centralized authority. Evidence that the site was later abandoned without any signs of violence or environmental pressures hints that local people might have rejected the authority and left. “Hierarchical forms of government were not inevitable in the development of early complex societies,” says archaeologist Claudia Glatz. “Local communities found ways to resist and reject tendencies towards centralized power.”
In a collection of nearly 3,400 papers from 2023 that included at least one bar chart, almost one-third distorted the data in some way, according to new analysis that has not yet been peer reviewed. Most issues related to failing to start the y axis at zero, or mistakes with logarithmic axes. The former can make small disparities look larger; the latter can minimize differences. On the other hand, these choices can be examples of ‘scientific shorthand’ that are well-understood within the biz. “These authors are correctly pointing out that many people could misunderstand what is being stated,” says data-visualization scientist Helena Jambor. “But that does not mean that it was necessarily incorrect or that two scientists talking about the data would misunderstand one another.”
Nature | 5 min read
Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
Features & opinion
Nature’s pick of nine books to shape your science career in 2025 includes an investigation of toxic workplaces and how to fix them, a guide to being more influential at work, and a rejection of ‘performative busyness’ in favour of working at a natural pace with a focus on quality.
Nature | 9 min read
For the best and safest results, academics and industry scientists must collaborate to guide the development of more powerful forms of AI, argues a Nature editorial. Much of the work to develop such AI is happening in private companies, which don’t always publish openly. Governments, companies, funders and researchers must identify their complementary strengths so that applications of AI research are robust, its risks are mitigated as much as possible, and tech companies’ claims can be verified independently.
Nature | 6 min read
Where I work
Jeong-Sik Oh is a geomorphologist at Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea.Credit: Dave Tacon for Nature
“Until the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011 caused the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in nearby Japan, people in South Korea had not paid much attention to active faults,” says geomorphologist Jeong-Sik Oh. “We’ve become more worried about seismic risks since then.” In 2017, South Korea’s government founded the Korea Active Fault Research Group to create the country’s first active-fault map. Oh and others in the group discovered the previously hidden active fault line, which he is examining in the picture, on a ridge in a forested valley. Researchers use drones and lidar to spot such rifts, but “the best tool of all is my feet”, says Oh. (Nature | 3 min read)
On Friday, Leif Penguinson was rock hopping on a stone run in East Falkland, Falkland Islands. Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.
Thanks for reading,
Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing
With contributions by Jacob Smith
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The revolutionary economist who became the unlikely leader of Bangladesh
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After weeks of deadly demonstrations that toppled Bangladesh’s autocratic government in August, the students who led the revolution had one demand: invite Nobel Peace prizewinning economist Muhammad Yunus to lead the nation.
The task is the greatest challenge of Yunus’s life. In a career spanning six decades, he’s made a name for himself by testing ideas to fight poverty. Using research to inform decisions and understanding systems from first principles is at the core of how Yunus solves problems, say those who know him. “He is in his eighties, but has energy, physical and mental health. He has empathy and is a great communicator,” says Alex Counts, who has worked with Yunus for more than 30 years.
Yunus was born in Chittagong in British-occupied India. His birthplace became part of East Pakistan when India was partitioned in 1947. In the 1960s, he left for the United States and studied under Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, one of the founders of ecological economics, which aims to understand the interplay between economies and the natural world. He returned shortly after East Pakistan became Bangladesh, an independent nation, after the war of liberation against West Pakistan in 1971; he was determined to play his part in building the new country.
Yunus is best known for his innovative approach to microcredit, small loans often of less than US$100. Companies that lend small amounts have a reputation for exploiting the poor by charging exorbitant interest rates. But Yunus showed how small loans can also transform lives for the poorest in society if administered fairly.
As an economist at the University of Chittagong in the mid-1970s, he began testing whether these loans would be repaid and would provide measurable benefits to borrowers. He devised a model in which money was lent to women to improve their businesses. In the first trial, all of the borrowers were able to pay back what they owed. In 1983, he established Grameen Bank, which now provides microloans across Bangladesh. Yunus’s idea lit the spark on what has become a worldwide movement — one that also has its critics.
But there’s a difference between establishing and running an organization such as Grameen, and leading the reform of a country of 170 million people. The question that practically everyone in Bangladesh is asking is whether Yunus can deliver on the students’ demands to end corruption, protect civil rights and provide equal opportunity in employment and education — and secure justice for the families of those killed in the protests.
Before the August revolution, much of the country’s police and civil service and judicial system, along with many universities and even banks had become extensions of the ruling party, says Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Yunus and the students — a few of whom are in the interim cabinet — have set up expert working groups to ensure that public institutions are protected from political interference, whichever party is in power.
But institutional reform doesn’t happen quickly, says Fouzia Sultana, research director at the Bangladesh Academy of Rural Development in Comilla. “It’s a complex and gradual process.” Another tension is that some want to see change happen quickly, whereas others don’t think it appropriate for unelected technocrats such as Yunus to propose sweeping reforms while essentially in a ‘caretaker’ role.
The success of Yunus’s tenure as interim leader will depend, in large part, on the student protesters who helped to bring him to power. They are a powerful constituency, with a role similar to that of the young people who rose up against the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East during the Arab Spring that began in 2010. Those uprisings were violently suppressed, kicking off a wave of instability in the region and globally. So far, the story has been different in Bangladesh; both the military and Yunus are backing the students. But that places a large weight of expectation on one man to protect rights and deliver the opportunities that many of the students’ friends and colleagues did not live to see. “We want to read. We want to write. We want to sit exams and do research,” said Prapti Taposhi, an economics student at Jahangirnagar University in Dhaka, during a seminar at Yale in September. “The state needs to do its job.”
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The daring doctor behind a world-first treatment for autoimmune disease
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Huji Xu’s team was on tenterhooks after delivering the first treatments. “We couldn’t sleep, because all these cases are very sick patients,” says Xu, a rheumatologist at the Naval Medical University in Shanghai, China, who published the first results of a revolutionary cellular therapy for autoimmune diseases in September (X. Wang et al. Cell 187, 4890–4904; 2024).
Two weeks after receiving engineered immune cells, the first patient — a woman with a debilitating disorder characterized by extreme muscle weakness — told nurses that she had regained enough strength to lift her arms and comb her hair. Two other recipients, both men, with a different condition, said that their symptoms began fading within days. More than six months later, all three recipients were in remission, according to Xu. “We are a little bit more relaxed” now, he says.
The engineered cells are known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and have been designed to hunt down and eliminate B cells, a type of immune cell that sometimes runs amok in people with autoimmune disorders. CAR-T-cell therapy is widely used to treat blood cancers involving malignant B cells, but it has also shown some promise for autoimmune diseases.
Last year, teams in Germany revealed that they had used CAR T cells to treat at least 15 people with several autoimmune conditions, with stunning success. Xu’s trial differs from these because it used cells taken from an independent donor, whereas the German teams used cells taken from the person being treated. If successful, the donor strategy could allow for mass production of CAR-T-cell treatments, reducing their costs and extending their reach.
Xu trained as a medical doctor in Shanghai. In 1990, he moved to Adelaide, Australia, to start a PhD in immunology and rheumatology, looking at the role of a specific antibody in rheumatic diseases — inflammatory conditions that affect the joints, muscles and bones. Xu went on to research a broad range of subjects, from the biological mechanism of lupus and several types of arthritis, to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and malaria vaccines.
In 2008, he returned to Shanghai and established a large clinical and research centre for rheumatology. The CAR-T-cell trial was a good fit, says Xu, because of his interest in the underlying causes of rheumatic disease. The woman his team treated had refractory inflammatory myopathy. The men had a type of systemic sclerosis that causes the skin to harden and affects many organs.
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Google’s new quantum chip achieves accuracy milestone
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Researchers at Google have built a chip that has enabled them to demonstrate the first ‘below threshold’ quantum calculations — a key milestone in the quest to build quantum computers that are accurate enough to be useful.
The experiment, described on 9 December in Nature1, shows that with the right error-correction techniques, quantum computers can perform calculations with increasing accuracy as they are scaled up — with the rate of this improvement exceeding a crucial threshold. Current quantum computers are too small and too error-prone for most commercial or scientific applications.
Google uncovers how quantum computers can beat today’s best supercomputers
“This has been a goal for 30 years,” said Michael Newman, a research scientist at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, at a press conference announcing the feat. The achievement means that by the end of the decade, quantum computers could enable scientific discoveries that are impossible even with the most powerful supercomputers imaginable, said Charina Chou, the chief operating officer of Google’s quantum-computing arm. “That’s the reason we’re building these things in the first place,” Newman added.
“This work shows a truly remarkable technological breakthrough,” says Chao-Yang Lu, a quantum physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai.
Delicate states
Quantum computers encode information in states that can represent a 0 or a 1 — like the bits of ordinary computers — but can also use infinite possible combinations of several 0s and 1s. However, these quantum-information states are notoriously delicate, explains Julian Kelly, a physicist at Google who leads the company’s quantum-hardware division. To get a quantum computer to perform useful calculations, “you need quantum information, and you need to protect it from the environment — and from ourselves, as we do manipulations on it”, he says.
Aiming for such protection — without which quantum computing would be a non-starter — theoreticians began in 1995 to develop ingenious schemes for spreading one qubit of information across multiple ‘physical’ qubits. The resulting ‘logical qubit’ is resilient to noise — at least on paper. For this technique, called quantum error correction, to work in practice, it would be necessary to show that this spreading of information over multiple qubits robustly lowered error rates.
Over the past few years, several companies — including IBM and Amazon’s AWS — and academic groups have shown that error correction can produce small improvements in accuracy2,3,4. Google published a result in early 2023 using 49 qubits in its Sycamore quantum processor, which encodes each physical qubit in a superconducting circuit.
Google uncovers how quantum computers can beat today’s best supercomputers
The company’s new chip, called Willow, is a larger, improved version of that technology, with 105 physical qubits. It was developed in a fabrication laboratory that Google built at its quantum-computing campus in Santa Barbara, California, in 2021.
As a first demonstration of Willow’s power, the researchers showed that it could perform, in roughly 5 minutes, a task that would take the world’s largest supercomputer an estimated 1025 years, says Hartmut Neven, who heads Google’s quantum-computing division. This is the latest salvo in the race to show that quantum computers have an advantage over classical ones.
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Nine books to help shape your science career in 2025
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- CAREER FEATURE
Researchers seeking to banish workaholic behaviours, boost their pay, have more influence at work or quit academia will find plenty of advice in these books, all published this year.
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