Category: Selected work

Oldest known burial site in Africa uncovered by archaeologists

Just over 78,000 years ago, a three-year-old child was laid to rest in a small pit at the entrance of Panga ya Saidi, a leafy cave located 15 kilometres from Kenya’s south-east coast.

They then gently placed the child’s body on its right side in the freshly dug pit, laying their head on a supportive pillow.

The mourners scattered soil collected from the nearby cave floor over the body, and the burial site was left undisturbed for thousands of years.

Now, an international team of archaeologists have discovered that the child’s remains represent the oldest known modern human burial in Africa.

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Graveyards are surprising hotspots for biodiversity

Two weeks after the spring equinox, farmers in China’s Hebei province pay a visit to deceased loved ones in tiny graveyards among the vast wheat fields to mark Qingming Jie, an annual festival for remembering ancestors. After burnt offerings turn to ash and the incense smoke clears, these private family graveyards are left largely undisturbed until next year, quietly allowing nature to take its course.

It turns out that such graveyards in crop fields are more than peaceful places for people to pay their respects; they also function as miniature botanical preserves, a new study finds. Even the tiniest burial sites support a diverse array of native plants, helping to conserve patches of relatively untouched habitat in the study area—one of the most heavily farmed regions in China.

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How COVID-19 could make science kinder

In March 2020, several journal publishers introduced fast-tracked peer review for papers related to COVID-19, cutting the time from submission to publication in half.

While concerns over the move’s impact on research quality were predictable, the flow-on effect of a kinder peer review process was less so.

A new study has found that reviewers of COVID-19 papers provided more constructive feedback, such as suggestions to tone down conclusions rather than go back to the lab to do more time-consuming experiments.

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Can a cold water bath save the Great Barrier Reef?

In early 2020, Australia was in the grip of its second hottest summer on record. As catastrophic bush fires turned the sky black, sea temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef soared above 29 °C, causing more than a quarter of the corals on the reef to turn a ghostly white. It was the third mass coral bleaching event to hit the UNESCO World Heritage Site in just five years.

In light of the ever-increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising ocean temperatures, scientists are scrambling to find ways to halt the reef’s rapid decline, from artificially brightening clouds to reflect more sunlight, to bolstering coral populations using in vitro fertilization.

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Rise of the zombie ants

When Jean-François Doherty first dipped into research papers on parasitic host-manipulation five years ago, he felt as though he was reading science fiction.

The technical jargon was peppered with colourful words and phrases such as ‘zombie’, ‘hijack’ and ‘mind control’. Even ‘puppeteer’ was used to describe host manipulation, whereby a parasitic organism significantly alters the appearance or behaviour of its host.

The “ample use of anthropomorphisms and words borrowed from science fiction” bothered Doherty, a PhD student studying host manipulation by hairworms at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “I knew these words were objectively inaccurate.”

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Three reasons to share your research failures

Science is often a one step forward, two steps back process, but most journals and researchers are reluctant to air the failures and drawbacks that precede success.

That’s where the new Journal of Trial and Error (JOTE) comes in. Launched in July 2020, its remit is to publish and discuss non-significant findings, technical and methodological flaws, rejected grant applications, and failed experiments.

Founded by a team of early-career researchers in the Netherlands, the journal is open access and multidisciplinary, and aims to “close the gap between what is published and what is researched”.

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Post-pandemic, fieldwork faces a remote future

When Richard Primack, a biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, realised that many of his students would be unable to learn new fieldwork skills this year, he switched to teaching them how to analyse existing datasets more creatively.

In March, he and co-leader Amanda Bates launched the PAN-Environment working group to explore how lockdown measures are affecting the environment.

To date, 150 researchers have contributed more than 70 datasets collected in 47 countries, including turtle hatchling counts on deserted beaches in India and illegal deforestation rates in the Amazon rainforest.

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These materials scientists are a ‘power couple’ in the physical sciences

Two decades ago, Takashi Taniguchi had one goal: to produce a flawless piece of cubic boron nitride (c-BN), an ultra-hard material with a similar crystal structure to diamond, so he could explore the material’s potential as a semiconductor.

While Taniguchi spent hours trying to produce pure c-BN crystals without defects in his lab at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, it was the by-products of his work that caught the attention of his research partner, Kenji Watanabe.

These tiny crystals of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) would soon become the material that Taniguchi and Watanabe are today renowned for. Since publishing their first paper on the material’s ultra-violet properties in 2004, the pair have worked together to produce high-quality h-BN crystals that are coveted by materials scientists around the world, as reported by Nature in August 2019.

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What’s wrong with the h-index, according to its inventor

Love it or hate it, the h-index has become one of the most widely used metrics in academia for measuring the productivity and impact of researchers. But when Jorge Hirsch proposed it as an objective measure of scientific achievement in 2005, he didn’t think it would be used outside theoretical physics.

“I wasn’t even sure whether to publish it or not,” says Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. “I did not expect it to have such a big impact.”

The metric takes into account both the number of papers a researcher has published and how many citations they receive. It has become a popular tool for assessing job candidates and grant applicants.

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