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    CHARTING INNOVATION ACROSS A TOUGH YEAR

    a10-a11页
    查看更多>>摘要：During 2023 persistent uncertainty took its toll on global innovation - interest rates and inflation soared, global conflicts raged and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic lingered. Yet despite the bleak economic landscape, the fourth offering from the Global Innovation Hubs Index (GIHI) has found unexpected bright spots and gained deeper insights into cities that have succeeded at innovation. "Innovation is key for growth, but it is a complex process integrating many social and economic activities, making it difficult to measure," says GIHI's chief scientist, Ling Chen, who leads the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. "We hope that the GIHI could help cities understand their potential and provide some direction for public policy to drive innovation." Led by Chen's team at Tsinghua, and supported by Nature Research Intelligence, the 2023 GIHI examined the performances of 119 cities and metropolitan areas, which collectively are home to about 11% of the world's population. Similar to prior years, the analysis was based on three key indicators of innovation: research innovation, the innovation economy, and the innovation ecosystem. Each metric was constructed with a wide range of data.
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    Weekly highlights

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    Antibiotics: the economics must support the science

    7-7页
    查看更多>>摘要：The bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii is a portrait of resilience. The microorganism causes a range of infections, and its ability to survive desiccation means it can persist for weeks on hospital air vents, computer keyboards and human skin. Its metabolic and genetic flexibility have allowed it to become resistant to the few antibiotics that can make it through its two protective cell membranes. Antibiotic-resistant microbes kill more than one million people each year. Theglobal threat posed by A. baumannii has put the microbe high on the list of priority pathogens drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO). Two studies published on 3January in Nature report a new class of drug candidates for tackling/1, baumannii infections.One of these compounds has already made it into clinical trials, but it is still a long way from being approved for clinical use. The obstacles for developing such compounds are not just scientific: the economic incentives are insufficient for many companies to take the risk. As the threat of resistance grows, the international community must do more to shepherd promising drugs from bench to bedside.
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    The high toll of organized crime in the Amazon

    Bram Ebus
    9-9页
    查看更多>>摘要：In the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, armed men wearing balaclavas and wielding firearms intimidated me and two other journalists on a remote riverbank near the Colombian border in February. We had ventured into the rainforest to investigate the surge in violence and illegal mininganddrugtraffickingthatthe Amazon has witnessed since 2016, and to map the presence of cross-border armed groups. We are part of Amazon Underworld, a media alliance comprising more than 30 professionals. We knew that the region harboured shotgun-carrying gold miners whoillegallydredgethe river with gargantuan barges, and Colombian guerrillas who cross into Brazil to shake the miners down forgold. But the armed individuals who stopped us were affiliated with the state - a rogue military police unit that oversees and shields illegal mining operations. Working outside the law, they amass millionsof dollars in gold payments annually. There, in their shadowy domain, no one who asks questions is welcome. The leader of the armed outfit demanded that we delete all the photos we had taken during two days of observing mining barges, before seizing our memory cards. Fortunately, we had a hidden backup.
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    US NUCLEAR-FUSION LAB ENTERS NEW ERA: ACHIEVING 'IGNITION'OVER AND OVER

    Jeff Tollefson
    11-12页
    查看更多>>摘要：In December 2022, after more than a decade of effort and frustration, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had set a world record by produc-inga nuclear-fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed - a phenomenon known as ignition. They have now proved that the feat was no accident by replicating it again and again, and the administration of US President Joe Biden is looking to build on this success by establishing a trio of US research centres to help advance the science. The stadium-sized laser facility, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, has unequivocally achieved its goal of ignition in four out of its past six attempts, creating a reaction that generates pressures and temperaturesgreater than those that occur inside the Sun. "I'm feeling pretty good," says Richard Town, a physicist who heads the inertial-confinement fusion science programme at the LLNL. "I think we should all be proud of the achievement."
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    DEEPMIND AI OUTDOES HUMAN MATHEMATICIANS ON UNSOLVED PROBLEM

    Davide Castelvecchi
    12-13页
    查看更多>>摘要：The card game Set has long inspired mathematicians to create interesting problems. Now, a technique based on large language models (LLMs) is showing that artificial intelligence (AI) can help mathematicians to generate new solutions. The AI system, called FunSearch, made progress on Set-inspired problems in combinatorics, a field of mathematics that studies how to count the possible arrangements of sets containing finitely many objects. But its inventors say that the method, described in Nature on 14 December, could be applied to a variety of questions in maths and computer science. "This is the first time anyone has shown that an LLM-based system can go beyond what was known by mathematicians and computer scientists," says Pushmeet Kohli, a computer scientist who heads the AI for Science team at Google Deepmind in London. "It's not just novel, it's more effective than anything else that exists today." This contrasts with previous experiments, in which researchers have used LLMs to solve maths problems with known solutions, says Kohli.
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    HOW CRISPR GENE EDITING COULD HELP TO TREAT ALZHEIMER'S

    Tosin Thompson
    13-14页
    查看更多>>摘要：Last November saw the first-ever approval of a gene therapy that uses the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool: a treatment for the blood conditions sickle-cell disease and p-thalassaemia that works by precisely cutting out a faulty gene in people's stem cells. Now, researchers in search of new treatments for Alzheimer's disease are hoping to deploy similar strategies against forms of the disease that are caused by genetic mutations. Although there are now some treatments that slow the progression of Alzheimer's, these often don't benefit people who are in its later stages or who have mutations that raise the risk of the disease. "CRISPR therapies could potentially be a one-and-done cure, which no other drug can match," says Subhojit Roy, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. But he adds that there is a long way to go before these therapies could be deployed against such a complex condition. "Cutting and pasting a gene is much harder to do in the brain using current technology."
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    NUMBER OF 'EXTREMELY PRODUCTIVE'AUTHORS CONCERNS SCIENTISTS

    Gemma Conroy
    14-15页
    查看更多>>摘要：In less than a decade, the number of researchers pumping out more than 60 papers a year has almost quadrupled. Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw the sharpest uptick in the number of such scientists over the past few years, according to a study published on 24 November. The increase in these 'extremely productive' authors raises concerns that some researchers are resorting to dubious methods to publish extra papers. "I suspect that questionable research practices and fraud may underlie some of the most extreme behaviours," says study co-authorjohn Ioannidis, a physician specializing in metascience at Stanford University in California. "Our data provide a starting point for discussing these issues across all science." Ioannidis and his colleagues examined articles, reviews and conference papers indexed in the Scopus database between 2000 and 2022. They excluded physics authors, who tend to publish large numbers of papers because authorship practices in this field differ from those of other subjects. The researchers tracked how extremely productive authorship haschanged over time in variouscountries and fields (see 'Hyper-productive fields').
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    AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS GENOMES ARE HIGHLY DIVERSE AND UNIQUE

    Bianca Nogrady
    15-16页
    查看更多>>摘要：Australian Indigenous communities from different regions in the north and centre of the country are some of the most genetically distinct people on the planet, according to a pair of studies published in Nature. Indigenous Australian communities have the highest rate of genetic variation outside people in Africa. Hundreds of thousands of human genomes have been sequenced since the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, yet very few are from Indigenous Australians. "The history of genetic research has not proven to be kind to the interests of Indigenous and other diverse communities around the globe," says study co-author Alex Brown, an Indigenous Australian from the Yuin nation and director of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at the Australian National University in Canberra. As a result. Indigenous Australians are under-represented in the genomic data sets that now underpin much research in medicine. "Those data sets don't contain any information about Indigenous peoples, and that creates bias in our interpretation of genomics," says Hardip Patel, a co-author of both papers and a bioinformatics researcher at the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics.
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    THESE MEGA-PROTEINS TURN BACTERIA INTO PREDATORS

    Ewen Callaway
    16-18页
    查看更多>>摘要：Jacob West-Roberts, a computational biologist at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, was scouring micro-bial DNA sequences for giant genes and discovered what he thought was a whopper: a gene encoding a protein made up of 1,800 amino acids. The average protein has just a few hundred. "Wait till you see this," responded his PhD adviser, UC Berkeley environmental microbi-ologist Jillian Banfield, and pointed out that proteins longer than 30,000 amino acids were already known from sequencing data. Their team has now found dozens of even bigger proteins, including what might be the longest ever: an 85,000-amino-acid behemoth. The mega-molecules could help an enigmatic group of environmental microorganisms to feed on other microbial cells, the researchers propose. They describe their findings in a preprint posted on bioRxiv. "It's a good study," says Brian Hedlund, a microbiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "They essentially doubled the size of the largest known predicted proteins from 40,000 to 85,000 amino acids, which are all insane."
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