A study of almost 70,000 ratings showed that racial discrimination could be eliminated from an online platform by switching from a five-star rating system to a thumbs up or down. The platform connected customers to workers who performed home repair jobs, and prior to the shift people categorised by the study authors as ‘non-white’ had lower ratings and got paid less than their white counterparts. Through follow up studies the authors also showed that the five-star system allowed people to impart their personal opinions, whereas a thumbs up or down just focused them on whether a job was good or bad. The team hopes this could be an easy-to-implement shift to tackle racial discrimination.

Research Article: Botelho et al.

News and Views: Racial bias eliminated when ratings switch from five stars to thumbs up or down

Experimental evidence that cockatoos like flavouring their food, and the harsh climate of sixteenth century Transylvania.

Research Highlight: Gourmet cockatoos like to fancy up their food

Research Highlight: Transylvanian diaries reveal centuries-old climate extremes

A Nature investigation has revealed where the most retractions come from, with hospitals in China and institutions in India and Pakistan topping the list. Retractions are a normal part of science and may be a sign of necessary scrutiny, but they can also signal misconduct and use of paper mills. Features Editor Richard Van Noorden joins us to discuss what this means for science and tackling sloppy research.

Nature: Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles

Layoffs in the US’s Environmental Protection Agency, reactions to the DEI purge at NASA, and what RFK Jr.’s role as secretary of Health and Human Services could mean for health research.

Nature: ‘Targeted and belittled’: scientists at US environmental agency speak out as layoffs begin

Nature: NASA embraced diversity. Trump’s DEI purge is hitting space scientists hard

Nature: Vaccine sceptic RFK Jr is now a powerful force in US science: what will he do?

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In this episode:

An enormous array of detectors, deep under the Mediterranean Sea, has captured evidence of the highest-energy neutrino particle ever recorded, although researchers aren’t sure exactly where in the cosmos it originated. Calculations revealed this particle had over 30 times the energy of previously detected neutrinos. The team hopes that further study and future detections will help reveal the secrets of high-energy phenomena like supernovae.

Research Article: The KM3NeT Collaboration

How bonobos adjust their communication to account for what other individuals know, and the discovery of a huge collection of beads adorning the attire of the powerful Copper Age women in Spain.

Research Highlight: Bonobos know when you’re in the know ― and when you’re not

Research Highlight: Record-setting trove of buried beads speaks to power of ancient women

A judge has blocked a policy that would have slashed billions of dollars of funding for US research institutions, which come as part of President Donald Trump’s controversial crackdown on government spending. We discuss the reasoning behind the proposed cuts and the impacts they may have if enacted. We also look at the effects that President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and funding are having across the US.

Nature: ‘Devastating’ cuts to NIH grants by Trump’s team put on hold by US judge

Nature: Have Trump’s anti-DEI orders hit private funders? HHMI halts inclusive science programme

Nature: Scientists globally are racing to save vital health databases taken down amid Trump chaos

Why the latest odds on asteroid 2024 YR4’s chance of impacting Earth are so hard to calculate, and how the latest version of DeepMind's AlphaGeometry AI has reached the gold-medal level in geometry.

New York Times: Why the Odds of an Asteroid Striking Earth in 2032 Keep Going Up (and Down)

Nature: DeepMind AI crushes tough maths problems on par with top human solvers

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In episode 2 of 'What's in a name' we look how choosing names can help, or hinder, attempts to communicate important messages.

Categorizing things is central to science. And there are dozens of systems scientists have created to name everything from the trenches on the sea bed to the stars in the sky.

But names have consequences. In our series What’s in a name we explore naming in science and how names impact the world — whether the system of naming species remains in step with society, how the names of diseases can create stigma, or even how the names of scientific concepts can drive the direction of research itself.

In episode two, we're looking at how the names chosen by scientists help, or hinder, communication with the public.

Well chosen names can quickly convey scientific concepts or health messages — in emergency situations they can even save lives. We'll hear how the systems of naming tropical storms and Covid-19 variants came to be, and how they took different approaches to achieve the same outcome.

We'll also consider the language used to talk about climate change, and how the ways of describing it have been used to deliberately introduce uncertainty and confusion.

Listen to the first episode Should offensive species names be changed? The organisms that honour dictators, racists and criminals

For a list of sources please visit the the episode's webpage

Music credits

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Richard Smithson/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images

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Mathematics skills learnt in real-world situations may not translate to the classroom and vice versa, according to a new study. A team surveyed children in India who work in markets, to see whether the skills they learnt there transferred to the classroom. While proficient at solving market-based arithmetic problems, they struggled to solve problems typically used in schools. The reverse was seen for children enrolled in schools with no market-selling experience. The authors hope this finding could help adjust teaching curricula and bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths.

Research Article: Banerjee et al.

Wolverine populations rebound in Sweden and Norway, and why wobbly arrows launch faster than rigid ones.

Research Highlight: Who’s the new furry neighbour? It might be a wolverine

Research Highlight: How a wobbly arrow can achieve superpropulsion

A study has revealed that when packed crowds reach a certain density, large groups of people suddenly start to move in circular patterns — a finding that could be used to identify dangerous overcrowding. By assessing footage of the densely-packed San Fermín festival, a team observed this spontaneous phenomenon, and modelled the physics underlying it. Studying the movements of giant crowds has been difficult, and the team hope this work could help event organisers to identify and respond to situations where people could get hurt.

Research Article: Gu et al.

News and Views: Crowds start to spin when their densities hit a threshold

Sound effects:

Crowd Cheering - Ambience by GregorQuendel via CC BY 4.0

Cupinzano sounds by Europa Press - Footage News via Getty Images

An update on the US National Science Foundation’s scrutinizing of grants to comply with President Trump’s directives, and why scratching an itch may have unexpected antibacterial properties.

Nature: Exclusive: how NSF is scouring research grants for violations of Trump’s orders

Nature: Why it feels good to scratch that itch: the immune benefits of scratching

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The explosive improvement in artificial intelligence (AI) technology has largely been driven by making neural networks bigger and training them on more data. But experts suggest that the developers of these systems may soon run out of data to train their models. As a result, teams are taking new approaches, such as searching for other unconventional data sources, or generating new data to train their AIs.

This is an audio version of our Feature: The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?

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In this episode:

Analysis of samples taken from the asteroid Bennu reveal the presence of organic compounds important for life, and that its parent asteroid likely contained salty, subsurface water. Collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, these rocks and dust particles give insights into the chemistry of the early Solar System, and suggest that brines may have been an important place where pre-biotic molecules were formed. As brines are found throughout the Solar System, this finding raises questions about whether similar molecules will be found in places like Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Research Article: McCoy et al.

Research Article: Glavin et al.

News: Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed

How seaweed farms could capture carbon, and why chimps follow each other to the bathroom.

Research Highlight: Seaweed farms dish up climate benefits

Research Highlight: All together now: chimps engage in contagious peeing

Researchers have found evidence of intensive maize agriculture that could help explain how a mysterious South American society produced enough food to fuel a labour-force big enough to build enormous earth structures. It appears that the Casarabe people, who lived in the Amazon Basin around 500-1400 AD, restructured the landscape to create water conserving infrastructure that allowed for year-round production of maize. While this work provides new insights into how the Casarabe may have established a complex monument-building culture, these people vanished around 600 years ago, and many questions remain about their lives.

Research Article: Lombardo et al.

Research Article: Hermenegildo et al.

A new AI model from a Chinese company, DeepSeek, rivals the abilities of OpenAI’s o1 — a state-of-the art ‘reasoning’ model — at a fraction of the cost. The release of DeepSeek has thrilled researchers, asked questions about American AI dominance in the area, and spooked stock markets. We discuss why this large language model has sent shockwaves around the world and what it means for the future of AI.

News: China’s cheap, open AI model DeepSeek thrills scientists

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A huge analysis of hiring practices has revealed that criteria to get a promotion to full professorship is hugely variable around the world. The authors suggest that this variability results in researchers from countries that value one type of metric being locked out of professor positions in others. They hope that the database of hiring practices created in this study could help institutions adjust their hiring policies to create a more diverse science workforce.

Research Article: Lim et al.

News: Want to become a professor? Here’s how hiring criteria differ by country

Lasers reveal hidden tattoos on ancient mummified-skin, and a new pill that cuts flu symptoms and viral levels in the body.

Research Highlight: Hidden tattoos on mummy skin emerge under a laser’s light

Research Highlight: Got flu? Promising drug shortens symptoms

Researchers have shown that cancer cells can slip their dysfunctional mitochondria into T cells, limiting the immune system’s cancer-fighting capabilities. Cancer cells are known to steal healthy mitochondria from immune cells to help tumours survive and thrive. Now, researchers have shown mitochondria can move in the opposite direction too, with the donor T cells showing signs of various stress responses that make them less effective when inside a tumour. The team showed that blocking this transfer limited this effect, and hopes that this mechanism could offer a new avenue for boosting the immune system’s response to cancer.

Research Article: Ikeda et al.

News & Views: Mitochondrial swap from cancer to immune cells thwarts anti-tumour defences

Noah Baker and Ehsan Masood turn to the war in Gaza, and discuss what comes next for science as a ceasefire comes into force.

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Researchers have shown that machine learning can quickly design antivenoms that are effective against lethal snake-toxins, which they hope will help tackle a serious public health issue. Thousands of people die as a result of snakebites each year, but treatment options are limited, expensive and often difficult to access in the resource-poor settings where most bites occur. The computer-aided approach allowed researchers to design two proteins that provided near total protection against individual snake toxins in mouse experiments. While limited in scope, the team behind the work believe these results demonstrate the promise of the approach in designing effective and cheaper treatments for use in humans.

Research Article: Vázquez Torres et al.

How male wasp spiders use hairs on their legs to sniff out mates, and how noradrenaline drives waves of cleansing fluid through the brain.

Research Highlight: ​​​​​​​Male spiders smell with their legs

Research Highlight: ​​​​​​​How the brain cleans itself during deep sleep

News broke last week that in 2024, Earth’s average temperature climbed to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Although this is only a single year so far, we discuss what breaking this significant threshold means for the 2015 Paris climate agreement and what climate scientists understand about the speed that Earth is heating up.  

Nature: ​​​​​​​Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?

NASA delays deciding its strategy for collecting and returning Mars rocks to Earth, and why papers on a handful of bacterial species dominate the scientific literature.

Nature: ​​​​​​​NASA still has no plan for how to bring precious Mars rocks to Earth

Nature: ​​​​​​​These are the 20 most-studied bacteria — the majority have been ignored

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In this episode of the Nature Podcast, we catch up on some science stories from the holiday period by diving into the Nature Briefing.

A much-critiqued study demonstrating the now-disproven idea that hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published.

Nature: Controversial COVID study that promoted unproven treatment retracted after four-year saga

Researchers have discovered that healthy skin — once thought to be a passive barrier — can actually produce antibodies that fight off infections. It’s hoped that the finding could one day lead to the development of needle-free vaccines that can be applied to the skin.

Nature: The skin’s ‘surprise’ power: it has its very own immune system

New estimates, based on data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, suggest that the ice on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa may be significantly thicker than previously thought. If these estimates prove accurate it could reduce the chances of Europa being habitable for extraterrestrial life.

Science: Surprisingly thick ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa complicates hunt for life

3D computer simulations of Australopithecus afarensis — an ancient hominin that lived more than three million years ago — reveals that while our relatives could run on two legs, they likely did so at a far slower pace than modern humans.

Nature: Humans evolved for distance running — but ancestor ‘Lucy’ didn’t go far or fast

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In this episode, reporter Miryam Naddaf joins us to talk about the big science events to look out for in 2025. We’ll hear about: the latest Moon missions, 30 years of the United Nations' COP climate summits, the return of Donald Trump, and more.

Nature: Science in 2025: the events to watch for in the coming year

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