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The Thirty Meter Telescope could join the already crowded mountaintop at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma island.Credit: Klaus Rose/ullstein bild via Getty
Major telescope might have a new home
The Thirty Meter Telescope, a major international project long slated for construction in Hawaii, might be getting a new home. The Spanish government has pitched to bring the giant facility to La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands — and backed up the effort with a pledge to contribute €400 million. The move comes after US president Donald Trump’s administration announced plans to abandon further support for the telescope, which had been expecting funding from the US National Science Foundation.
Penguins choose energy-saving routes
Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) are masters of energy efficiency: instead of taking a straight-line route to their destination, they’ll ride curved currents that are headed roughly in that direction when possible. The currents can make their trips slightly longer, but that has an upside — it allows them more time to hunt for food. Researchers found that by using currents, the penguins consistently returned to within 300 metres of their homes. The findings suggest that the birds keep track of the changing tidal cycle and use it to their advantage.
Reference: PLOS Biology paper
AI’s problem-solving rivals top students
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by Google DeepMind and OpenAI have cracked a set of maths problems at the level of the world’s top high-school students, achieving a gold-medal score on questions from the International Mathematical Olympiad. DeepMind models have previously reached silver-medal level, but these tools required human experts to first translate the problems’ statements into something similar to a programming language, and then to translate the AI’s solutions back into English. The tool they used this year is “natural language, end to end”, says DeepMind computer scientist Thang Luong.
The end of an arsenic-life era
The microbe at the centre of the controversy over arsenic life was collected from sediment in California’s highly saline Mono Lake (pictured).Credit: Getty
In 2010, researchers reported that they’d identified a microorganism at Mono Lake, California that could use the toxic element arsenic in place of phosphorus in its biological molecules. (Getty)
‘Arsenic life’ paper retracted after 15 years
A controversial paper claiming that a microorganism can thrive on arsenic has been retracted by the journal Science, nearly 15 years after its original publication. The decision has been praised by some scientists, who say it’s been a long time coming. The paper’s authors disagree — they stand by their data and argue that the retraction isn’t merited.
When the paper was published, Science mostly reserved retractions for cases of misconduct, says the journal’s editor-in-chief Holden Thorp in the paper’s retraction statement. Since then, the publication has expanded its criteria for what warrants a retraction. “If the editors determine that a paper’s reported experiments do not support its key conclusions”, as is the case for this paper, a retraction is now appropriate, Thorp writes.
In an open letter, all but one of the authors of the paper have suggested that Science has gone beyond the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics, an advisory group that recommends best practices in academic publishing. Representatives of NASA, the agency that funded the original work, have also expressed disappointment in the retraction.
Nature | 7 min read & Science | 7 min read
Reference: Science paper (retracted) & retraction statement
Futures: The last parliament
Representatives from the old and new world meet to discuss the end of the world in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.
Podcast: solid gold at 19,000 kelvin
Using a giant laser, researchers ‘superheated’ a thin strip of gold well beyond its melting point without it becoming a liquid. The team suggests that the speed at which they heated the gold allowed them to shoot past this limit, but there is scepticism about whether they actually achieved the level of heating they report. Luckily, it could be relatively easy to clear up any doubts. “This is something that we can exactly model in a computer, because it's such a well-defined problem,” says computational physicist Artur Tamm, who reviewed the paper.
Nature Podcast | 35 min listen
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