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Is astrobiology serious science?
Is the scientific status of astrobiology undermined by the lack of evidence for alien life, the problematic influence of science fiction, or the use of ‘astrobiology’ as a buzzword for attracting funding? Here we defend the emerging discipline. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access options Access through your institution…
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Climate change: Seasonal shifts causing ‘chaos’ for UK nature
By Justin Rowlatt and Harriet BradshawBBC News Climate and Science National Trust/Barry Edwards Changing seasons are affecting the reproductive cycle of animals like red deer The loss of predictable weather patterns is “causing chaos” for nature, according to the National Trust. It warns climate change is upsetting the regular rhythm of the seasons, making plants…
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Nature – One year. Ten stories.
One year. Ten stories. With 2023 drawing to a close, we look back on the past 12 months through the lens of Nature’s 10 — ten people who helped to shape science during the year. The cover takes its inspiration from one of the developments that dominated the year: artificial intelligence. The number ten is…
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These scientists aren’t using ChatGPT
Some scientists have chosen to steer clear of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.Credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Shutterstock Since its release a year ago, it has been impossible to escape the ChatGPT craze. The chatbot, which generates incredibly realistic human-like text and was released by OpenAI in November 2022, seems to have permeated every industry, including science.…
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Nature Machine Intelligence
Machine learning methods in cheminformatics have made great progress in using chemical structures of molecules, but a large portion of textual information remains scarcely explored. Liu and colleagues trained MoleculeSTM, a foundation model that aligns the structure and text modalities through contrastive learning, and show its utility on the downstream tasks of structure–text retrieval, text-guided…
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Lessons from nature to harvest energy
Nature and certain social behaviors provide solutions that science takes time to interpret and imitate. The lotus flower, for instance, is a work of natural engineering that has created a unique surface — one that repels the water wherever it lives. And scavenger animals are the great recyclers of the environment (like the people who…
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US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving ‘ignition’ over and over
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 producing a fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed — a phenomenon known as ignition. They have now proved that the feat was no…
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2023’s biggest breakthrough is not, unfortunately, in separating science from myth
In their year-end list of top scientific achievements and the people who made them, both Science and Nature have included the fight against “the obesity epidemic.” Science named GLP-1 drugs as its Breakthrough of the Year, while Nature included Svetlana Mojsov in its 2023 list of the year’s most important investigators. Mojsov is research associate…
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White Holes by Carlo Rovelli review
Black Holes: The End of the Universe? by John Taylor was the first book I bought with my own hard-earned cash from a poorly paid paper round. It was 1974, I was 11. It was the subtitle that grabbed my attention, since I’d never heard of black holes. At the time these mysterious cosmic objects were merely a theoretical possibility,…
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DeepMind AI outdoes human mathematicians on unsolved problem
In the game Set, players must identify combinations of cards based on the shape, colour, shading and number of symbols.Credit: Valery Voennyy/Alamy 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…