Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
Early voting is already taking place in the 2024 US presidential election. Here, voters mark their ballots at a location in Virginia.Credit: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty
Nature’s survey of around 2,000 readers finds that 90% of respondents — around one-half of whom say they are based outside the United States — think that the US election could have big impacts on everything from climate change to public health and science policy. Respondents overwhelmingly favour Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, and one-third of the researchers rooting for her said it might affect their plans for where they live or study if the Republican candidate Donald Trump wins next week. “A country that doesn’t believe in facts is not a safe place to build a career in science,” wrote one respondent.
Source: Nature survey.
An ancient Maya city has been found “hidden in plain sight” beneath the jungle canopy in the Mexican state of Campeche. Archaeologists used a laser technique called LiDAR to scan the area, “accidentally” discovering the forgotten complex, which contains pyramids, amphitheatres and sports fields. They think the site, which they’ve named Valeriana, might have housed up to 50,000 people, which supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages, says archaeologist Elizabeth Graham.
NASA has identified nine potential landing regions for its upcoming Artemis III mission, the first crewed Moon landing since 1972. The regions are all near the lunar South Pole, an area of the Moon that has never been explored. Selection criteria included terrain suitability, lighting conditions and communication capabilities with Earth. “The Moon’s South Pole is a completely different environment than where we landed during the Apollo missions,” says Sarah Noble, Artemis lunar science lead. “It offers access to some of the Moon’s oldest terrain, as well as cold, shadowed regions that may contain water and other compounds.”
Reforms introduced by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) to support young scientists to get research funding might actually be making it more difficult. The NSFC is based in Beijing and oversees several programmes that provide funding through competitive grants. The reforms scrapped a rule whereby applicants who had been rejected for two consecutive years had to sit a year out before applying again. This year saw more than 380,000 applications made, but only 13% of those were successful, compared with 16% in 2023. “The competition is very, very intense,” says Cong Cao, a science-policy researcher.
Features & opinion
More than 2 million people were affected by devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, earlier this year. Of those, 500,000 people were displaced as a combination of torrential rains and infrastructure failures ravaged 96% of the state’s cities. Extreme weather events leave lasting damage to people’s mental health, along with their homes and possessions. Research on how to help people facing mental-health challenges in the wake of these disasters is scarce, but lessons have started to emerge from studies conducted immediately after the Rio Grande do Sul crisis, such as how community members can support each other during the initial response to a disaster to prevent trauma.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Sources: Flooding: DEE-SPGG; land cover: ESA, HydroSheds, OSM; GuaÍba river basin: I. Possantti et al. Preprint at https://zenodo.org/records/13227745 (2024)
John Hopfield shared the Nobel Prize in Physics this year for his work on the ‘Hopfield network’, a building block of machine learning, which that underpins modern artificial intelligence (AI). Now aged 91, Hopfield, who has jumped from physics to chemistry to biology over the course of his career, spoke to Nature about how knowledge from one discipline can help you approach another from a new angle, whether his prizewinning work was really physics and why we should worry about AI.
The past year has seen bans on the use of smartphones in schools in some 60 countries amid worries that social media can harm children’s mental health. Natalia Kucirkova, Director of the International Centre for EdTech Impact, doesn’t want to see educational technology (edtech) caught in the crossfire. She knows first-hand that educational apps can help children learn, particularly in low-income areas. However, any apps marketed as ‘educational’ must be able to back that claim with evidence, which researchers and developers should work together to gather, to avoid disrupting proper learning.
Today I’m booking a train to the Scottish Highlands to see the UK’s Tree of the Year, the Skipinnish Oak. The tree, named after the Scottish Celtic band, beat 11 competitors to take the title, and will now go on to represent the UK in the European Tree of the Year competition. Go Skipinnish Oak!
Have your own favourite tree (or any feedback on this newsletter)? Let us know at briefing@nature.com.
Thanks for reading,
Jacob Smith, associate editor, Nature Briefing
Want more? Sign up to our other free Nature Briefing newsletters:
• Nature Briefing: Careers — insights, advice and award-winning journalism to help you optimize your working life
• Nature Briefing: Microbiology — the most abundant living entities on our planet — microorganisms — and the role they play in health, the environment and food systems
• Nature Briefing: Anthropocene — climate change, biodiversity, sustainability and geoengineering
• Nature Briefing: AI & Robotics — 100% written by humans, of course
• Nature Briefing: Cancer — a weekly newsletter written with cancer researchers in mind
• Nature Briefing: Translational Research — covers biotechnology, drug discovery and pharma