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Ana María Morales uses a whistle to training a black-and-chestnut eagle, which is perching on her arm.

Ana María Morales trains Morgan, an unreleasable black-and-chestnut eagle (Spizaetus isidori) at the Eagles of the Andes Foundation in Pereira.Credit: Gilder González

Colombia considers animal-research ban

Lawmakers in Colombia are considering whether to ban almost all science and education using live animals. One piece of legislation was rescinded after backlash from scientists, but two others remain active:

• A draft constitutional amendment that would recognize animals as people, with commensurate legal protections.

• A pending Senate bill that would curtail animal research and overhaul the country’s ethical-approval process. The bill’s wording is vague, but it states that “the use of live animals in academic and scientific research, toxicity-testing studies, biological or related studies” is prohibited when the results can be obtained “by other means” or when using “live animals of a higher grade on the zoological scale”.

Nature | 6 min read

Redlining hobbles US bird data

A racist 1930s policy called ‘redlining’, which was used to define some urban neighbourhoods in the United States as high risk for real-estate investors, has had myriad lasting impacts. One of them is a dearth of ecological data from some places whose residents are mainly people of colour. Ecologist Diego Ellis-Soto has been teaching Black and Hispanic children in New Haven, Connecticut, how to birdwatch. “I could go there one day and double what’s been collected in the last 100 years,” says Ellis-Soto about one historically redlined neighbourhood. He has led research showing that “redlined neighbourhoods remain the most undersampled urban areas for bird biodiversity today, potentially impacting conservation priorities and propagating urban environmental inequities”.

Nature | 3 min read

Reference: Nature Human Behaviour paper

Features & opinion

Is it time to reboot cosmology?

Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that “we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the Universe”, argue astrophysicist Adam Frank and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser. JWST has revealed galaxies that formed much earlier than was thought possible. And it has confirmed measurements, made by the Hubble Space Telescope, that point to a flaw in the models that predict how fast the Universe is expanding. “Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong,” write Frank and Gleiser.

The New York Times | 8 min read

Futures: Head talk

A wiley character does what it takes to get ahead in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.

Nature | 6 min read

Podcast: human ancestors nearly died out

Our distant ancestors nearly went extinct around 900,000 years ago, according to genetic analysis. The unknown human-like species was reduced to just 1,280 breeding individuals, creating a genetic bottleneck that is still detectable in the DNA of modern-day humans.

Nature Podcast | 13 min listen

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Quote of the day

“We do not want to say ‘let those guys pay because they are the polluters’, we are saying, ‘let’s all pay’, and then let’s have a mechanism where we invest these resources where we unlock the biggest value on decarbonisation.”

Kenyan president William Ruto and other African leaders at the first African Climate Summit called for the world to rally behind a global carbon tax. (The Financial Times | 4 min read)