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Mathematician Andrew Wiles completed his proof of Fermat’s last theorem in 1994, more than 350 years after Pierre Fermat proposed it.Credit: AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast/Alamy
An advanced prototype of the artificial-intelligence chatbot Claude has produced a 13-million-line, computer-checked proof of Fermat’s last theorem in just 11 days. That a machine could formalize the landmark proof — a project that was expected to take humans around a decade — “just completely blew my mind”, says number theorist Alex Kontorovich. The result shows that AI will play an increasingly important part in creating algorithmically checkable versions of mathematicians’ work, and hints that such technology could soon scrutinize the entire library of mathematical knowledge.
Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Anthropic announcement
There are more than 400 million cases of unintentional, acute pesticide poisoning every year, finds a new estimate — meaning that an estimated 46% of farmers worldwide are being poisoned. The analysis suggests there are 11,000 pesticide-related deaths annually, with nearly 60% of these in India. And that’s not taking into account long-term health impacts that are not immediately felt, such as a possible link with Parkinson’s disease.
Reference: Frontiers in Public Health paper
Image of the week
This deep-sea fish, spotted by researchers in the northern South China Sea, can do a wicked moonwalk. The armoured searobin (Scalicus engyceros) “boasts a striking shrimp–fish hybrid body appearance”, says marine researcher and study co-author Han Tian. And it can walk sideways and even backward, a movement that has never been observed in other fishes. (The Independent | 5 min read)
Reference: Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research paper (Kedong Yin)
Features & opinion
In April, the UK Biobank — one of the largest and most comprehensive health-tracking studies in the world — fell victim to what appeared to be a massive data leak, with data on hundreds of thousands of participants available for sale on the internet. The open nature of this world-leading health-dataset has made it valuable to researchers, but also vulnerable. Now, as the resource plans to begin reopening, scientists are getting a glimpse of how it will try to tighten security, and what impacts that will have on the research.
Nature | 10 min read
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which launched on 30 August, is named after NASA’s first chief astronomer. The era that she led — the emergence of space astronomy in the 1950s and 1960s — created “arguably the most remarkable transformation” in the history of astronomy, writes historian Robert Smith. She set the wheels in motion for the triumph of the Hubble Space Telescope in the face of doubts, including those from ground-based astronomers and from NASA scientists who felt they’d been missold the scientific value of the Apollo Moon missions.
Nature | 7 min read
“A truly flourishing society is one that not only lifts people out of poverty today but also passes on the capital — produced, human and natural — that allows future generations to flourish, too,” writes economist Eoin McLaughlin. He argues that questions about how to revise measures of prosperity, such as gross domestic product (GDP), would do better to focus on whether governments are leaving behind more or less wealth for those who come after us.
Nature | 14 min read
