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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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the DeepMind researcher making faster, more accurate forecasts
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Rémi Lam had heard about San Francisco’s microclimates, but he didn’t realize how idiosyncratic they could be until he moved there this year. “The street I live in can be foggy, and it’s sunny two blocks down,” he says. Weather forecasts for the city can be wildly incorrect depending on the location. Even state-of-the-art weather forecasts can’t predict the city’s microclimates and how they will vary.
Lam has spent a lot of time thinking about weather and how to forecast it. As a researcher at Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm based in London, Lam has been pioneering the use of machine learning to improve weather prediction. This field has made rapid advances in the past few years, and Lam and his colleagues have been at the forefront of these efforts.
They’re not alone. A number of groups are racing to develop AI-aided weather forecasts, including those at Microsoft, Nvidia, Huawei and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, UK. But for much of this year, the leading AI in terms of accuracy was a project called GraphCast, led by Lam (R. Lam et al. Science 382, 1416–1421; 2023).
“GraphCast raised the bar up in terms of skill of forecasting,” says Matthew Chantry, who leads research on AI-based weather prediction at the ECMWF.
Conventional weather forecasts are sophisticated programs that simulate the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere on the basis of known physics of how air, heat and water vapour move around the planet. GraphCast is an artificial neural network that is shaped like a grid covering the globe. Lam and his collaborators ‘trained’ it with data based on real atmospheric measurements, but without giving it any explicit knowledge of physical laws. Still, the AI forecasts were by many measures better than the conventional ones. “I was surprised it outperformed the physics-based forecasts so quickly — I thought it would take longer,” says Lam.
And although the training is computationally intensive, the forecasts take less than a minute on an advanced desktop computer — versus the hours of supercomputer running time for conventional ones.
Lam was born in a suburb of Paris in 1988, and trained as an aerospace engineer in France and the United States. He then realized that his understanding of the statistical modelling of fluid mechanics could be helpful to those using AI. DeepMind, with a culture focused on solving scientific problems, turned out to be an ideal fit. “There’s just no better place to do machine learning,” he says.
Maria Molina, an atmospheric scientist who applies AI to weather and climate modelling at the University of Maryland in College Park, gives credit to corporations such as Google for making their weather models available for anyone to download and run on their computers — at least so far. “At some point, when does that goodwill run out?” It could be worrying if those companies some day came to monopolize the best-available forecasts, she adds, especially when it comes to extreme weather events. “We should never expect the public to pay for access to life-saving information.”
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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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Will humans ever speak wolf? A scientist unravels the complexities of animal chatter
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Download Nature hits the books 09 December 2024
Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum has spent his career studying animals and how they communicate in the wild. In his book Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, Arik takes a deep dive into the various forms of communication, from wolf howls to gibbon songs, to look at how different species get their points across, why they do it the way they do, and what insights they provide into our own use of language.
Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication Arik Kershenbaum Penguin (2024)
Music supplied by SPD/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images
Wolf howl via NPS & MSU Acoustic Atlas/Jennifer Jerrett
Slowed down dolphin whistle via Arik Kershenbaum
Hyrax song via Arik Kershenbaum
Pileated gibbon song via Rushenb CC BY-SA 4.0
Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too.
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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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A 60-minute guide to landing your next job in science
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What’s next for Syria’s science: a view from <i>Nature</i>’s reporter who was a refugee
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Nature, Published online: 09 December 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-04056-z
Syria might now have an opportunity to rebuild its scientific community, says Miryam Naddaf who fled her country a decade ago.
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How fast is your brain ageing? Proteins in blood offer clues
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Magnetic resonance imaging scans showing the brain of a 25-year-old (left) and a 74-year-old (right).Credit: Zephyr/Science Photo Library
Researchers have identified 13 proteins in the blood that predict how quickly or slowly a person’s brain ages compared with the rest of their body.
Their study1, published in Nature Aging on 9 December, used a machine-learning model to estimate ‘brain ages’ from scans of more than 10,000 people. The authors then analysed thousands of scans alongside blood samples and found eight proteins that were associated with fast brain ageing, and five linked to slower brain ageing.
Dementia risk linked to blood-protein imbalance in middle age
“Previous studies mainly focused on the association between the proteins and the chronological age, that means the real age of the individual,” says study co-author Wei-Shi Liu, a neurologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.
However, studying biomarkers linked to a person’s brain age could help scientists to identify molecules to target in future treatments for age-related brain diseases. “These proteins are all promising therapeutic targets for brain disorders, but it may take a long time to validate them,” says Liu.
Brain age gap
Using machine learning to analyse brain-imaging data from 10,949 people, Liu and his colleagues created a model to calculate a person’s brain age, using hundreds of structural features such as the overall brain volume, thickness of the cortex and amount of white matter. The difference between the brain age and the chronological age, known as the brain age gap, can help to indicate brain health.
On average, the brain ages of participants differed from their chronological ages by around three years either way — meaning that most people had a brain that was biologically slightly ‘younger’ or ‘older’ than they were.
The researchers wanted to identify proteins that are associated with large brain age gaps, so they analysed the levels of 2,922 proteins in blood samples from 4,696 people, more than half of whom were female, and compared them with the same people’s brain ages according to their brain scans. They identified 13 proteins that seemed to be connected with large brain age gaps, some of which are known to be involved in movement, cognition and mental health.
What accelerates brain ageing? This AI ‘brain clock’ points to answers
One key protein was brevican (BCAN), which helps to form and maintain the network of molecules around cells and is involved in learning and memory. Higher levels of BCAN were associated with slower brain ageing. Brain cells in people with Alzheimer’s disease also express less BCAN than do those in healthy people.
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The first rocks from the Moon’s far side are in this geologist’s hands
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On 25 June, Li Chunlai watched eagerly as a capsule carrying the first pieces of the far side of the Moon landed on Earth. “Sample, I finally got you,” he thought, as if speaking to an adversary he had spent years trying to outwit.
That moment capped decades of hard work for Li, deputy chief designer for China’s Chang’e-6 mission, which blasted off to the Moon on 3 May. The 3,200-kilogram lander — about as heavy as a pickup truck — spent two days drilling and scooping material on the lunar surface before sending the samples back to Earth.
Li was central to deciding where on the Moon the spacecraft would land and was among the first to analyse the rocks it ferried back. He and his team of 70 or so staff members oversee the data collected during China’s space missions, and that includes storing and distributing samples. “What he is really good at, is coordination,” says James Head, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has collaborated extensively with Li.
When he was a young researcher studying geology and cosmic chemistry, Li says he never imagined holding samples from the Moon. But he has been involved in determining the science objectives of China’s lunar exploration programme since its inception, when Chang’e-1 was sent to orbit the Moon in 2007. This is Li’s second sample-return mission for the China National Space Administration. He had a similar role during the Chang’e-5 mission, which brought back soil and rock from the Moon’s near side.
The latest shipment, containing almost two kilograms of lunar material from the hemisphere hidden from Earth’s view, could unravel many mysteries about the Moon’s early evolution, and the planets beyond, say researchers.
“We have been dreaming of having samples from the far side of the Moon,” says Patrick Pinet, a planetary scientist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France.
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