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From petrol to plastics, oil-derived products define modern life. A bold plan to change that comes with huge costs — but researchers and policymakers should take it seriously.
Efforts to develop an electronic newspaper providing information at the touch of a button took a step forward 50 years ago, and airborne bacteria in the London Underground come under scrutiny, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.
Food insecurity is ‘off the scales’ in universities, say researchers. Plus, the mission to grab rocks from the far side of the Moon has launched and the letter that jump-started Alzheimer’s research.
An algorithm trained on electrocardiograms reduced deaths among high-risk patients by 31%. Plus, an AI transcription tool seems to hallucinate harmful text and a robot that efficiently combines bouncing and flying.
A type of qubit that has inherent resistance to bit-flip errors has been manipulated with a bit-flip time of more than 10 s without losing that error protection.
Water loss to space late in Venus history is shown to be more active than previously thought, with unmeasured HCO+ dissociative recombination dominating present-day H loss.
Cardiovascular disease claims more lives each year than do the two next-deadliest diseases combined. An ultrasound technique that tracks tiny gas-filled bubbles could pave the way towards improved early detection.