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Daily briefing: Babies make memories — so why don’t we recall them?
Babies as young as one year old can form memories, our adult brains just can’t access them. Plus, US-funded researchers outside the United States are being grilled about ideology and physicists suggest a ‘crazy’ new way we could generate electricity.
Babies as young as one year old can form memories, a new study reveals — the hard part is recalling them. Researchers used MRI scans to measure the brain activity of children aged 4 months to 2 years. The team found that the greater the activity in a toddler’s hippocampus when shown a certain image, the longer they looked at it when shown it again, which suggests they could remember it. Why we can’t recall those memories as grown-ups might be down to a mismatch between how the memory was stored and what your adult brain is looking for, says cognitive psychologist Nick Turk-Browne.
Physicists have put forward controversial but intriguing evidence of a tantalizing phenomenon: generating electricity from the energy of Earth rotating through its own magnetic field. Researchers built a prototype device that they report demonstrates the effect, but the voltage generated was so small that it’s hard to verify the mechanism. “It seems crazy,” admits astrophysical scientist and study co-author Christopher Chyba. “It has a whiff of a perpetual motion machine.”
A measles outbreak in the United States is growing — and specialists tell Nature that it’s hard to predict how big it could become. Most people born after 1989 in the US are protected with two doses of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. Those born before 1963 probably had the disease as children, so they’re protected too, as are people who received a very effective live-virus vaccine between 1963 and 1989. But a small number of people who received an inactive-virus vaccine between 1963 and 1967 should consider getting re-vaccinated.
Researchers in Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and Canada who receive US funding have been sent a detailed survey asking whether their US-funded projects relate to topics denounced by President Donald Trump’s administration, such as diversity, equity and inclusion; and climate and environmental justice. It also asks whether the researchers’ institutions work with communist, socialist or any parties that espouse anti-American beliefs, and receive funding from China. The survey “is at the extreme end of foreign influence in a way that we have never seen from any of our research partners”, says Vicki Thomson, chief executive of the Group of Eight consortium of Australia’s leading research universities.
Did you receive a survey? If you would like to share your experience, contact Nature reporter Smriti Mallapaty securely through Signal (Signal is encrypted): sfm.100
Academic institutions are responding to federal-funding cuts with hiring freezes, lay-offs and restricted graduate-student admissions. Dozens of campuses are also facing additional censure as Trump’s team accuses them of antisemitic harassment related to pro-Palestinian protests, or criticizes them for supporting transgender athletes. “The academic model on which the universities relied to conduct their research, to fund their students, to fund postgraduate students — all this is in crisis,” says political scientist Aseem Prakash
Bioethicist Arthur Caplan outlines the myriad ways in which diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) matters to science — from improving the accuracy of clinical research to expanding the contributions of the scientific workforce — and urges scientists to push back against Trump’s efforts to quash it. (Nature | 5 min read)
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a “history through monsters” such as Frankenstein’s creature and the xenomorph from Alien, and an anthropologist’s case for letting rivers run free.
A tiny satellite has enabled quantum-encrypted information to be sent between China and South Africa, the farthest distance yet achieved for quantum communication. “This does seem to be a milestone,” Nature reporter Elizabeth Gibney tells the Nature Podcast. “A step on the way towards actually having a quantum network that connects up the whole globe.”
Chemist Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science, was diagnosed with autism as an adult. He says that his experience can help make sense of a large uptick in autism spectrum diagnoses (and the reason is certainly not vaccination): stigma is lessening, awareness is growing, and there’s a broader understanding of what autism can look like. (The New York Times | 7 min read)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00941-3
Do you know a champion of science (or maybe you are one)? Nominations are now open for the 2025 John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science. The €5,000 award recognizes the work of any individual who promotes science and evidence on a matter of public interest in the face of hostility. There is also a prize for early-career individuals. The closing date is 30 April — find out more or nominate someone here.
Leif Penguinson is on a well-earned break this week, but will be returning refreshed and revitalized (along with Briefing photo editor and penguin wrangler Tom Houghton) next week.
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