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A citizen science model turns anecdotes into evidence by revealing similar characteristics among Gifted Word Learner dogs
Abstract Dogs that have a vocabulary of object labels (Gifted Word Learner dogs—GWL dogs) have great potential as a comparative model for studying a variety of cognitive mechanisms. However, only a handful of studies, with a small sample size of 1 or 2 dogs, have examined this phenomenon. GWL dogs appear to share many of…
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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…
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Korean lunar mission provides a view into the Moon’s dark spaces
South Korea’s lunar mission, known as Danuri, launched in August 2022.Credit: Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty South Korea’s first lunar mission has revealed surprising information about the far side of the Moon, among a host of other insights, scientists reported this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California. The mission, known as…
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Nature’s 10
An AI pioneer, an architect of India’s Moon mission and the world’s first global heat officer are some of the people behind this year’s big stories. The Nature’s 10 list explores key developments in science over the past year and some of the individuals who helped to make amazing discoveries and bring attention to crucial…
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What a Murder of Crows Taught Me About Backyard Naturalism
“We need to stop thinking about how to separate ourselves from the natural world,” he said, and instead learn “how to integrate and regain and retain and foster a connection with that world.” Peters’ words resonated. As Western capitalism began to extract raw materials at shocking rates, Western philosophy extracted human consciousness from the web…
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Research in Chornobyl zone restarts amid ravages of war
In early 2022, ecologist Bohdan Prots was ready to begin a bold new project to restore ecosystems around the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. Prots and his team were preparing to recreate lost wetlands there in an effort to rewild them and cut the risks of wildfires that spread radioactivity. His first step…
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Amazon protector: the Brazilian politician who turned the tide on deforestation
Credit: Adriano Machado for Nature This story is part of Nature’s 10, an annual list compiled by Nature’s editors exploring key developments in science and the individuals who contributed to them. In a year that brought unrelenting bad environmental news, with record global warming, searing heatwaves and fires, Marina Silva delivered a hopeful message on…
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Malaria fighter: this researcher paved the way for a game-changing vaccine
This story is part of Nature’s 10, an annual list compiled by Nature’s editors exploring key developments in science and the individuals who contributed to them. In October, work and life collided for Halidou Tinto when his six-year-old daughter caught malaria. A director of clinical trials for malaria drugs and vaccines for more than a…
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Making mice with two dads: this biologist rewrote the rules on sexual reproduction
This story is part of Nature’s 10, an annual list compiled by Nature’s editors exploring key developments in science and the individuals who contributed to them. When Katsuhiko Hayashi and his colleagues announced in March that they had produced mouse pups from the cells of two male parents, the news literally floored some researchers. “I…
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From inception to current challenges in bioinformatics
Dr Paulien Hogeweg — professor of bioinformatics at Utrecht University, who in the 1970s, together with Ben Hesper, coined the term ‘bioinformatics’ — talks to Nature Computational Science about her work on the Cellular Potts model, the integration of spatial information in modeling approaches, and her ongoing research on multilevel evolution. My interest in the…