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Philae’s final secret
The Philae lander’s unfortunately bumpy arrival on comet 67P six years ago, bouncing across the surface and landing on its side, made it impossible to sample the comet’s icy interior. When Philae went into hibernation, that seemed to be the end of the story. Now, a painstaking investigation has reconstructed Philae’s final journey and discovered data that allow scientists to measure the strength of the ice inside the comet — the first time this kind of direct measurement has been made.
Go deeper with planetary scientist Erik Asphaug in the Nature News & Views article.
Physicists hone in on the perfect clock
Physicists have measured the energy of a thorium-229 nucleus’s lowest excited state, called thorium-229m, to the highest precision so far. This tiny nucleus could make for the most accurate clock yet if we could count the tick-tocks of the transition between the ground state of the thorium-229 nucleus and thorium-229m — the lowest of all nuclear excited states. A nuclear clock would be less affected by external electromagnetic fields than today’s atomic clocks are, which lose a frankly unacceptable one second every 13 billion years.
COVID-19 coronavirus update
Tables and chairs remained empty today at a coffee stand in Quedlinburg, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. Germany implemented a new lockdown on 1 November at 11 p.m.Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/DPA/ZUMA)
“Europe is at the epicenter of this pandemic once again,” said World Health Organization regional director Hans Kluge last week — it has surpassed the United States in cases per capita. Germany, France and the United Kingdom are responding with second lockdowns — but the big unanswered question is what comes next. Without the will to successfully implement strategies that have been shown to keep the virus from resurging, countries might face an exhausting, economy-shredding scenario of repeated closures while hoping for a vaccine.
How to set up an academic testing lab
Evolutionary geneticist Alan McNally and his colleagues outline in detail how they set up an academic COVID-19 testing laboratory at the University of Birmingham, UK. Establishing the lab took 3 months, and it is capable of processing 3,800 tests in 12 hours. The authors link to all their protocols and supporting documentation. “We hope that our experiences and the materials we provide in Figshare help others to set up rapid-response diagnostic centres in academic laboratories around the world,” they write.
PODCAST MINISERIES
‘Stick to the science’: when science gets political
A new three-part podcast series, Nature explores the question: ‘Why does a journal of science need to cover politics?’ We look at the history of the knotty relationship between science, politics and power, what it means for the objective ideals of science, and the danger of politicization in an increasingly divisive political landscape.
Features & opinion
CRISPR primer skirts the quagmires
In Editing Humanity, Kevin Davies maps the twists and turns of the CRISPR journey, with an all-star cast of scientists and an intimate understanding of the tale. But Davies leaves some thorny ethical issues uncharted, writes reviewer Natalie Kofler, the founding director of Editing Nature, a platform to support responsible decisions about genetic engineering.
Breakthrough nears for black-hole paradox
The word is out: information does escape a black hole. Theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the long-standing black-hole information paradox that has bedevilled the field for decades. Current theories about black holes say that the information carried by anything that had previously fallen into the hole would be lost to the Universe. This clashes with laws of physics that say that information, like energy, is conserved — thus, the paradox. Now, building on insights from string theory, theoreticians have shown that information seeps out in an encrypted form thanks to quantum entanglement. The findings imply that space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, leading to yet another mystery. “All this reinforces many physicists’ hunch that space-time is not the root level of nature, but instead emerges from some underlying mechanism that is not spatial or temporal,” reports Quanta.
