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Hello Nature readers, |
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Philae’s final secretThe Philae lander’s unfortunately bumpy arrival on comet 67P six years ago, bouncing across the surface and landing on its side, made it impossible to sample the comet’s icy interior. When Philae went into hibernation, that seemed to be the end of the story. Now, a painstaking investigation has reconstructed Philae’s final journey and discovered data that allow scientists to measure the strength of the ice inside the comet — the first time this kind of direct measurement has been made. Nature | 5 min videoGo deeper with planetary scientist Erik Asphaug in the Nature News & Views article. Reference: Nature paper |
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Physicists hone in on the perfect clockPhysicists have measured the energy of a thorium-229 nucleus’s lowest excited state, called thorium-229m, to the highest precision so far. This tiny nucleus could make for the most accurate clock yet if we could count the tick-tocks of the transition between the ground state of the thorium-229 nucleus and thorium-229m — the lowest of all nuclear excited states. A nuclear clock would be less affected by external electromagnetic fields than today’s atomic clocks are, which lose a frankly unacceptable one second every 13 billion years. Physics World | 7 min readReference: Nature paper |
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Notable quotable“We leaned forward and bowed our heads in order to redirect the flow of tears. We couldn’t risk touching our faces and we need them to fall onto our scrubs. We couldn’t ruin our masks.”Intensive-care physician Rana Awdish shares a deeply personal reflection on the trauma, grief and shame experienced by health-care workers during the pandemic. (Intima | 11 min read) |
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CRISPR primer skirts the quagmiresIn Editing Humanity, Kevin Davies maps the twists and turns of the CRISPR journey, with an all-star cast of scientists and an intimate understanding of the tale. But Davies leaves some thorny ethical issues uncharted, writes reviewer Natalie Kofler, the founding director of Editing Nature, a platform to support responsible decisions about genetic engineering. Nature | 5 min read |
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Breakthrough nears for black-hole paradoxThe word is out: information does escape a black hole. Theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the long-standing black-hole information paradox that has bedevilled the field for decades. Current theories about black holes say that the information carried by anything that had previously fallen into the hole would be lost to the Universe. This clashes with laws of physics that say that information, like energy, is conserved — thus, the paradox. Now, building on insights from string theory, theoreticians have shown that information seeps out in an encrypted form thanks to quantum entanglement. The findings imply that space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, leading to yet another mystery. “All this reinforces many physicists’ hunch that space-time is not the root level of nature, but instead emerges from some underlying mechanism that is not spatial or temporal,” reports Quanta. Quanta | 21 min read |
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Quote of the day“Our goal should be more dramatic than just doing good science — although that’s important and wonderful and good. But we have the potential to do more. We have the potential to walk through darkness and spread light.”Neuroscientist Emile Bruneau, who spent his career studying the neuroscience and psychology of human conflict, died in September at the age of 47. (The New York Times | 6 min read) |
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