Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
At the US National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, 192 lasers (beamlines shown here) run into a target chamber (highlighted in blue) and focus on a capsule containing hydrogen isotopes.Credit: Damien Jemison/NIF/LLNL
Nuclear-fusion lab ushers in new era
This year, the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) has lived up to its name by achieving ignition using lasers — not once, but four times. Ignition is a nuclear reaction that creates more energy than it consumes, similar to the hydrogen-fusion process that powers the Sun. The success created buzz at the COP28 climate conference this month and led to US$42 million of funding for three new US research centres dedicated to the dream of practically limitless clean energy. But the NIF was never designed to generate power (it’s for studying fusion reactions as they relate to nuclear weapons). “We now know it will work,” says physicist Carmen Menoni. “What will take time is to develop the technology to a level where we can build a power plant.”
DeepMind AI beats humans at maths game
An artificial intelligence (AI) system, called FunSearch, has improved on mathematicians’ previous solutions to problems inspired by the card game Set. Until now, researchers have used AI to solve mathematics problems with known solutions. This time, FunSearch went further than what had already been solved by humans in combinatorics, a field of mathematics that studies how to count the possible arrangements of sets containing finitely many objects. “I don’t look to use these as a replacement for human mathematicians, but as a force multiplier,” says co-author Jordan Ellenberg.
Bullying scandal forces department closure
The 350-year-old Lund University astronomy department in Sweden is no more after the drawn-out response to a 2020 survey revealing that 70% of its staff members had witnessed bullying and harassment. Earlier attempts to deal with complaints against two senior astronomers led nowhere, so by January the university will move them to other departments and the remaining staff to the physics department. Administrators have been criticized for taking too long to deal with the complaints, some of which date to 2008. “It’s done a lot of damage,” says former Lund astrophysicist Paul McMillan. “It’s going to take time to rebuild.”
Features & opinion
New ways to tackle water scarcity and purity
By some estimates, roughly two billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Researchers are finding solutions to water scarcity and purity. For arid areas, new technologies and materials could extract fresh water from what looks like dry air. And among the worst water contaminants are ‘forever’ chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances: chains of carbon and fluorine atoms held together by some of the strongest chemical bonds in nature. They are usually impossible to break down, but engineers are devising new methods to make them disappear.
Nature | 11 min read & Nature | 10 min read
These articles are part of Nature Outlook: Water, an editorially independent supplement produced with financial support from Future Investment Initiative Institute.
Why hidden xenophobia breaks out
By using a survey technique that provides “permanent, absolute anonymity”, sociologist Mathew Creighton studies xenophobic opinions that people usually hide. His research prepared him for events that some others found shocking, such as the rise of anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. “What’s the most anonymous act? It’s voting,” he notes. Anonymity is essential for democracy, but Creighton suggests that increased transparency should be incorporated in domains outside the ballot box, such as hiring. “The key check on rising xenophobia is to limit the options for the xenophobe to enjoy the cover of anonymity.”
GLP-1 is Science breakthrough of the year
Game-changing anti-obesity medications — semaglutide (sold under the brand names Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro) — that mimic the hormone GLP-1 are Science’s breakthrough of the year. Originally developed to treat diabetes, GLP-1 treatments are, for some, a holy grail: a diet drug that actually works, with manageable side effects. The drugs are also affecting how we think about obesity — as an illness — and raise questions about the cultural obsession with thinness.
