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Academic clinician–scientists risk becoming an endangered species
Barriers to their training and retention threaten medical research Download PDF Concerns about the future of the clinician–scientist have been expressed for many decades. In 1984, Gordon Gill wrote of ‘the end of the physician scientist’ as he observed academically oriented US doctors move into basic science labs to learn the new techniques of molecular…
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What the Ottomans did for science — and science did for the Ottomans
The open court of the mosque of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, seen in 1880.Credit: Alamy The Ottoman Scientific Heritage Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (trans. Maryam Patton) Al-Furqān (2023) Empires have long used science and engineering to power their expansion and survival. Advances in medicine have helped to keep armies in a state of battle readiness. Innovations in…
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COP28: the science is clear — fossil fuels must go
Arguments over phasing out fossil fuels dominated COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.Credit: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters Sultan Al Jaber, the host and president of COP28, this year’s United Nations climate conference, sparked an outcry before the meeting kicked off in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. At an online event on 21 November, he said that there is…
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Robot chemist sparks row with claim it created new materials
An autonomous laboratory assistant that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to cook up new materials has come under fire from researchers who dispute its discoveries. When scientists unveiled the A-Lab in Nature on 29 November1, they reported that it had produced 41 new materials in 17 days, promising to speed up the discovery of…
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‘Unluckiest high-speed rail’: Mother Nature bends human will in infrastructure
According to Chinese media and public data, most of the reasons for suspension of the high-speed railway relate to once-vaunted tunnel projects. The railway crosses the Qilian Mountains on the northeastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The enormous folds and fault structures formed by crustal movement make the geology in the mountains extremely unstable. Chinese…
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The best science images of 2023
Images selected by Nature’s visuals team, text by Emma Stoye, Nisha Gaind, Katharine Sanderson and Carissa Wong NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continued to dazzle in 2023, with some of the most spectacular images of space ever seen. Closer to home, photographers and researchers captured unknown species and hidden microscopic scenes. From cosmic dust to…
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Surge in number of ‘extremely productive’ authors concerns scientists
Thailand experienced the biggest relative jump in extremely productive researchers between 2016 and 2022.Credit: Lauren DeCicca/Getty Up to four times more researchers pump out more than 60 papers a year than less than a decade ago1. Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw the sharpest uptick in the number of such scientists over the past few years,…
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Spatial redundancy transformer for self-supervised fluorescence image denoising
Abstract Fluorescence imaging with high signal-to-noise ratios has become the foundation of accurate visualization and analysis of biological phenomena. However, the inevitable noise poses a formidable challenge to imaging sensitivity. Here we provide the spatial redundancy denoising transformer (SRDTrans) to remove noise from fluorescence images in a self-supervised manner. First, a sampling strategy based on…
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‘Biocomputer’ combines lab-grown brain tissue with silicon hardware
Part of a brain organoid, in which stem cells (pink) are differentiating into neurons (purple).Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library Researchers have built a hybrid biocomputer that combines a laboratory-grown human brain tissue with conventional circuits, and can complete tasks such as voice recognition. The technology, described on 11 December in Nature Electronics1, could one day…
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Nature walk to save the Ontario Science Centre
Crosstown LRT construction: Tour inside Eglinton station Metrolinx and Crosslinx officials provided a rare, below-ground tour to show the progress and challenges facing the ongoing Eglinton Crosstown project. Construction, testing and commissioning work is expected to go well into 2024.