Science

A lack of funding and academic freedom amid a political crackdown leave scientists feeling hopeless and pondering an exodus from the country.

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Scientists, some of whom spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution from the government, say that Venezuelan research was already censored and underfunded before the election, but that they anticipate things will get even worse. They point to a bill passed by Maduro’s administration last month that regulates non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which some researchers rely on for funding or to help publish their research. This latest chapter in Maduro’s reign could spell the end for independent science in the country, they say.

“I am afraid to talk to you,” retired biologist Jaime Requena told Nature as he nervously prepared to leave the country, fearing that his passport would be confiscated by authorities to prevent his departure. “Science here is going down the drain quickly.”

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The Nobel memorial prize in economics has been awarded to three U.S.-based academics who studied why some countries are rich and others poor and have documented that freer, open societies are more likely to prosper.

The work by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson “demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm.

Why are some countries richer than others?

In countries that were already rich, or were places where European settlers did not survive well because of illnesses or the climate, “colonial institutions were extractive”, Coyle says. “In contrast, in countries that were poorer to start with or had better climates, Europeans instead built more inclusive institutions similar to their own countries.”

“The laureates demonstrated that the places that were, relatively speaking, the richest at their time of colonization are now among the poorest,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

“When Europeans colonised large parts of the world, the existing institutions sometimes changed dramatically, but not in the same way everywhere. In some colonies, the purpose was to exploit the indigenous population and extract natural resources to benefit the colonizers. In other cases, the colonisers built inclusive political and economic systems.”

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

American Professor John Hopfield, 91, is a professor at Princeton University in the US, and Prof Hinton, 76, is a professor at University of Toronto in Canada.

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The Academy listed some of the crucial applications of the two scientists’ work, including improving climate modelling, development of solar cells, and analysis of medical images.

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Professor Hinton is sometimes referred to as the "Godfather of AI". [His] pioneering research on neural networks paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT [...] He also said he uses the AI chatbot ChatGPT4 for many things now but with the knowledge that it does not always get the answer right.

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Professor John Hopfield invented a network that can save and recreate patterns.

It uses physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to atomic spin.

In a similar way to how the brain tries to recall words by using associated but incomplete words, Prof Hopfield developed a network that can use incomplete patterns to find the most similar.

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The Nobel Prize committee said the two scientists' work has become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.

But Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said "its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future collectively".

Facilitated communication was created in 1977 by Australian disability advocate Rosemary Crossley, who died last year and left a complex legacy. To those who knew her, she’s remembered as champion for “people with little or no functional speech”.

But others say her communications invention - and her formidable defence of it - were misguided and harmful. It is still used worldwide, despite being widely criticised.

The first notable subject to use facilitated communication was Anne McDonald, a non-verbal Australian woman with cerebral palsy, a severe intellectual disability, and no control over her limbs.

At the time, Crossley claimed that McDonald - then 16 - could communicate by pointing at magnetic letters while Crossley supported her upper arm.

Within weeks McDonald was spelling out whole sentences and doing fractions, despite having no formal education and being institutionalised since age three.

Some of Crossley’s colleagues expressed surprise that McDonald, who’d never read, could suddenly write eloquent prose, and cite literary references, when her arm was held by the highly educated Crossley.

One who raised questions was the institution’s head paediatrician and psychiatrist Dr Dennis Maginn, who wouldn’t validate Crossley’s communication theory without independent testing.

Advocates insist it is a miracle tool, one which gives disabled people a voice.

But a growing chorus of experts, families and even former facilitators want it banned, due to research indicating that the likely author of the messages is the facilitator, not the communicator.

Appropriate levels of physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep (collectively termed movement behaviours) are essential for the healthy growth and development of preschool-aged children.

This was the impetus for creating the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years (birth to four years). Likewise, this is why the World Health Organization adopted the Canadian guidelines when creating the global guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under five years of age.

Considering the extensive benefits of movement behaviours, it is very alarming that a recent study found that only 14 per cent of preschoolers around the world are meeting movement behaviour guideline recommendations.

Over the past 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49 year olds have increased in 24 different countries, including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway and Argentina.

The investigation's early findings, presented by an international team at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) congress in Geneva in September 2024, were as eye-catching as they are concerning.

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Breast cancer is one form of cancer where the trend is apparent. A new report from the ACS found that while deaths from breast cancer in women have dropped by around 10% in the past decade, incidence rates are rising by 1% per year overall – and 1.4% per year for women under the age of 50.

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Cancer specialists say that patients presenting with diseases like pancreatic cancer, an illness where most people are diagnosed in their early 70s, are sometimes decades younger than would usually be expected.

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In May a huge iceberg broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf, drifted, and came to a stop - right in front of “maybe the world’s unluckiest” penguins. Like a door shutting, the iceberg's huge walls sealed off the Halley Bay colony from the sea.

It seemed to spell the end for hundreds of newly-hatched fluffy chicks whose mothers, out hunting for food, may no longer have been able to reach them.

Then, a few weeks ago, the iceberg shifted and got on the move again. Scientists have now discovered that the tenacious penguins found a way to beat the colossal iceberg - satellite pictures seen exclusively by BBC News this week show life in the colony.

But scientists endured a long, anxious wait until this point - and the chicks face another potentially deadly challenge in the coming months.

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A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells1. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.

“I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjing, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.

James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”

Here is the report: We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore’: Academic Freedom in Hong Kong Under the National Security Law (pdf)

• Academic freedom in Hong Kong has severely declined since the Chinese government imposed the draconian National Security Law on the city on June 30, 2020.
• Students and faculty accustomed to academic freedom must now tread carefully to avoid retribution for what they teach, research, and publish, and even with whom they associate.
• Concerned governments and foreign universities with partnerships with Hong Kong universities should speak up for affiliated academics and students, and review these partnerships to avoid becoming complicit in human rights violations.

Academic freedom in Hong Kong has severely declined since the Chinese government imposed the draconian National Security Law on the city on June 30, 2020, Human Rights Watch and Hong Kong Democracy Council said in a report released today.

The 80-page report, “‘We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore’: Academic Freedom in Hong Kong Under the National Security Law,” documents that long-protected civil liberties, including the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association, have been under assault in Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities. As these universities have become increasingly repressive, students and faculty widely self-censor, fearful of being targeted for harassment, retribution, and even prosecution for what they say and do both in the classroom and on campus.

Abstract (added emphasis and paragraphing):

Anthropogenic methane (CH4) emissions increases from the period 1850–1900 until 2019 are responsible for around 65% as much warming as carbon dioxide (CO2) has caused to date, and large reductions in methane emissions are required to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.

However, methane emissions have been increasing rapidly since ~2006. This study shows that emissions are expected to continue to increase over the remainder of the 2020s if no greater action is taken and that increases in atmospheric methane are thus far outpacing projected growth rates.

This increase has important implications for reaching net zero CO2 targets: every 50 Mt CH4 of the sustained large cuts envisioned under low-warming scenarios that are not realized would eliminate about 150 Gt of the remaining CO2 budget. Targeted methane reductions are therefore a critical component alongside decarbonization to minimize global warming.

We describe additional linkages between methane mitigation options and CO2, especially via land use, as well as their respective climate impacts and associated metrics. We explain why a net zero target specifically for methane is neither necessary nor plausible. Analyses show where reductions are most feasible at the national and sectoral levels given limited resources, for example, to meet the Global Methane Pledge target, but they also reveal large uncertainties.

Despite these uncertainties, many mitigation costs are clearly low relative to real-world financial instruments and very low compared with methane damage estimates, but legally binding regulations and methane pricing are needed to meet climate goals.

https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/academic-journals/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/09/16/scientists-file-antitrust-lawsuit-against-six-journal-publishers/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/academic-publishers-face-class-action-over-peer-review-pay-other-restrictions-2024-09-13/

"On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars who provided manuscripts or peer review, alleging that these publishers conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research."

"Deutsche Bank aptly describes the Scheme as a “bizarre” “triple pay system” whereby “the state funds most of the research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of the research, and then buys most of the published product.”"

Abstract

Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. It has captured the imagination of many owing to its archaeological record, which includes iconic megalithic statues called moai1. Two prominent contentions have arisen from the extensive study of Rapa Nui. First, the history of the Rapanui has been presented as a warning tale of resource overexploitation that would have culminated in a major population collapse—the ‘ecocide’ theory2,3,4. Second, the possibility of trans-Pacific voyages to the Americas pre-dating European contact is still debated5,6,7. Here, to address these questions, we reconstructed the genomic history of the Rapanui on the basis of 15 ancient Rapanui individuals that we radiocarbon dated (1670–1950 ce) and whole-genome sequenced (0.4–25.6×). We find that these individuals are Polynesian in origin and most closely related to present-day Rapanui, a finding that will contribute to repatriation efforts. Through effective population size reconstructions and extensive population genetics simulations, we reject a scenario involving a severe population bottleneck during the 1600s, as proposed by the ecocide theory. Furthermore, the ancient and present-day Rapanui carry similar proportions of Native American admixture (about 10%). Using a Bayesian approach integrating genetic and radiocarbon dates, we estimate that this admixture event occurred about 1250–1430 ce.

Fascinating, I like this kind of Magick.