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The Mexican government has worked with members of its Air Force to disperse particles into clouds with the aim of increasing precipitation. (Spanish translation: El gobierno mexicano ha trabajado con miembros de su Fuerza Aérea para dispersar partículas dentro de las nubes con el objetivo de incrementar la precipitación.)Credit: Jesús Bustamante/Reuters
Mexico is seeding clouds to make rain
Mexico’s agriculture ministry has kicked off a cloud-seeding operation in some drought-affected regions. The idea is that particles — usually crystalline silver iodide — that have a crystal structure similar to ice will cause water droplets to form around them and eventually drop as precipitation. But scientists warn that the evidence that cloud seeding works is scant. “I can modify [a cloud]. What I don’t know is whether I’m going to increase rainfall or even suppress it, because that can happen too,” says cloud physicist Fernando García.
Nature | 6 min read (también en español)
Dawn of the COVID ‘wavelet’ era
There are signs that SARS-CoV-2 infections are on the rise, but scientists say that explosive, hospital-filling COVID-19 waves are unlikely to return. Instead, countries are starting to see frequent, less deadly waves, characterized by relatively high levels of mostly mild infections and sparked by the relentless churn of new variants. These smaller waves suggest that COVID-19 is unlikely to settle into a flu-like rhythm of seasonal surges anytime soon.
Reference: medRxiv preprint (not peer-reviewed)
China’s smog is clearing
Air pollution in China has steadily fallen over the past decade, thanks mostly to technologies that reduce emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. Since 2013, exposure to fine particulates — the most worrying form of air pollution — has steadily dropped to below the national target of 35. But that’s still too high: the World Health Organization recommends that average annual exposure be limited to 5 micrograms per cubic metre. Easy gains from upgrading power-plant smokestacks will be strengthened only by deeper policy changes, say researchers.
Canadian academics walk out over pay
Graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and their supporters at institutions across Canada walked out in protest yesterday because pay for government-sponsored fellowships and scholarships hasn’t risen in 20 years. “The government is losing talent during a labour shortage, because they are not investing in research in Canada,” says Samy-Jane Tremblay, president of the Quebec Student Union. “People are leaving research or going to the US or Europe.”
Institute aims for diversity in brain research
The Centre for Equality Research in Brain Sciences opened its doors at University College London in April, with the goal of making all aspects of its neuroscience and psychology research inclusive. Scientists working at the centre will hail from diverse backgrounds, as will study participants. Inequality in sampling can affect how conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are understood, diagnosed and treated. That’s a problem that the centre aims to address by developing best-practice inclusivity guidelines to help others working in the field.
Features & opinion
Giant study finds inequalities in journals
Scientists from minority ethnic groups hold fewer editorial board positions, and their papers spend more time under review and receive fewer citations. The findings come from an analysis of more than one million papers published in more than 500 journals between 2001 and 2020. An algorithm was used to infer people’s race or ethnicity. Many publishers have started to take steps to combat discrimination. Individual scientists can take action, too, for example by:
• Curating resources for diverse sourcing
•Tracking citation diversity
• Including diversity and citation statements in papers
• Acknowledging contributions from people in marginalized groups
Synthetic data could be better than real data
Machine-generated data sets can get around privacy problems and make data less biased. At the same time, there’s a catch-22: working out whether a synthetic data set actually reflects reality means comparing artificial-intelligence systems trained on synthetic and original data. “To me, it’s about making data this living, controllable object that you can change towards your application and your goals,” says computer scientist Phillip Isola. “It’s a fundamental new way of working with data.”
This article is part of Nature Outlook: Robotics and artificial intelligence, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of FII Institute.
How solar power saved an ancient fruit
Farmers in Italy have turned to agrivoltaics — the counter-intuitive method of growing crops under a canopy of solar panels — to revive the fortunes of the citron (Citrus medica). The ancient citrus fruit, which is prized for perfumes and Jewish practices, almost went extinct because of increasingly extreme weather, changing habits and cheaper synthetic substitutes. The shade from solar panels reduces the trees’ water needs by 70% and protects them from frost. And generating clean electricity gives farmers an alternative source of income — with lessons for many climate-stressed crops.
