Carola Vinuesa helped to overturn the conviction of a mother jailed for killing her children.Credit: Michael Bowles/Francis Crick Institute Working scientist profiles This article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests. Carola Vinuesa’s story lies at the intersection of an unusual Venn diagram: her…

A painting by an unknown artist showing the interior of the Madras Observatory. Credit: John Goldingham/The Royal Society Archives, London India’s efforts to build diverse science archives are hindered by a lack of trained professionals, long-term positions, and relevant academic programmes, science historians and archivists say.They fear that in the absence of standardized preservation protocols,…

George Hibbert, an eighteenth-century English merchant who profited from the slave trade and fought abolition, lends his name to a genus of flowering shrubs.Credit: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru – The National Library of Wales Plant scientists are set to decide on whether to rid their field of offensive names. This week, the group that sets the…

One summer evening in 2004, around the campfire during a rock climbing trip to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, Doug Benn, a glaciologist at the University of St Andrews, UK, shared a photo with Jason Gulley. It was a picture of a 6-metre-deep hole, shaped like an upside down ‘L’ in the walls of…

In particular, the weak force can change one quark type into another. Protons and neutrons are made of two quark varieties, up and down. The weak force can turn a down quark in a neutron into an up quark, which would change the neutron into a proton and switch its electric charge from neutral to…

Abstract The discovery of scientific formulae that parsimoniously explain natural phenomena and align with existing background theory is a key goal in science. Historically, scientists have derived natural laws by manipulating equations based on existing knowledge, forming new equations, and verifying them experimentally. However, this does not include experimental data within the discovery process, which…

Join Texas Science & Natural History Museum to celebrate the prehistoric titans who still have so much to teach us millions of years after they roamed the planet! Enjoy special educational and interactive activities and bring fossils for in-person identification by a paleontologist (ID sessions take place from 10am-12pm and 1-3pm) . Learn about extinct…

Abstract To study stratification among scientists, we reconstruct the career-long trajectories of 8.2 million scientists worldwide using 12 bibliometric measures of productivity, geographical mobility, collaboration, and research impact. While most previous studies examined these variables in isolation, we study their relationships using Multiple Correspondence and Cluster Analysis. We group authors according to their bibliometric performance…

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks wrote about two autistic men, twins who had an extraordinary relationship with numbers. Sacks recalled that during one of his sessions a matchbox fell from a table, disgorging its contents, and the twins cried out “111”, the exact number of matches that lay…

When Hollywood producers showed up a few years ago at Sean Waugh’s office, he couldn’t wait to show them his thunderstorm-tracking equipment. Waugh, a meteorologist at the US National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, is a big fan of the 1996 film Twister, which stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as leaders of a…