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Environmental groups are unsatisfied with Green Brexit’s weaker regulations. The UK’s touted departure from the EU has led to a great reshuffling of regulations across the board. However, for many environmental advocacy groups, these changes are quickly proving to be not in the planet’s favor. Below are some of the primary concerns that they have raised:

Anti-vaccine protesters voice their disapproval outside pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s New York City headquarters. Credit: Matthew McDermott/Polaris/eyevine In March, Twitter put its foot down: users who repeatedly spread false information about COVID-19 vaccines will have their accounts suspended or shut down. It was a new front in a high-stakes battle over misinformation that could help to

The brain of an Indian jumping worker ant (above, guarding pupae and larvae) becomes smaller if she starts to lay eggs but can regrow to its old size if she stops reproducing. Credit: Martin Dohrn/Nature Picture Library Neuroscience 15 April 2021 Ants shrink their brains for motherhood — but can enlarge them when egg-laying ends

Scientists injected dozens of human stem cells into the embryos of monkeys that are still developing. The resulting hybrids remained alive for up to 20 days in lab dishes, according to Live Science. These embryos of human-monkey could one day become helpful models for aging, embryonic development, and human disease, the study authors noted in

People wait to receive a COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination centre in Mumbai.Credit: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP via Getty India, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of vaccines, is facing a COVID-19 vaccine crunch, partly due to an explosion of cases linked to new variants. This spells trouble for many countries relying on Indian-made vaccines supplied through

To achieve its target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, China must shut down nearly 600 coal-fired power plants in the next ten years and replace them with renewable energy production, according to a survey. (Photo : Getty Images) According to the research firm TransitionZero, replacing the 364GW of coal production with clean energy

A health worker in the Democratic Republic of the Congo prepares to care for people infected with Ebola virus during the 2018–20 outbreak, which prompted an extensive genomic analysis. Credit: John Wessels/AFP/Getty Genomics 15 April 2021 An unprecedented genomic analysis helped to curb an Ebola outbreak Despite extraordinary challenges, scientists managed to sequence a high

Listen to the latest science news, with Nick Petrić Howe and Shamini Bundell. Your browser does not support the audio element. Download MP3 In this episode: 00:45 How failing sanitation infrastructure is causing a US public health crisis In the US, huge numbers of people live without access to adequate sanitation. Environmental-health advocate Catherine Coleman

Most animals are misunderstood, tortured by fallacies about their behaviors and traits. Some falsehoods are centered on old legends. Others outcome of distortions, exaggerations, misunderstandings, and even intentional fabrications put together by self-serving humans. Yet even when scientific study reveals these misguided beliefs for what they are, many remain surprisingly difficult to eliminate. Chances are

The SLS boosters are stacked at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Credit: NASA NASA assembles powerful deep-space rocket Engineers have assembled the twin booster rockets for NASA’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) — the first deep-space rocket since Saturn V, which sent astronauts to the Moon. Since November, workers have been using a huge crane

The proliferation of lovely, well-kept houseplants provides a unique sense of home comfort. Any house plants have the potential to purify the air quality in addition to being attractive. (Photo : Matthew Henry, Burst) If you turn your house into a full-fledged botanical garden, though, you might be doing yourself a disservice, as certain traditional

US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen (left) and IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva must work to align their approaches to funding science.Credit: Action Press/Shutterstock, Chesnot/Getty Last week, the world’s economics and finance communities ended their annual meetings — held online this year — on a salutary note. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) proposed a US$650-billion boost

Thomas Mboa inspects an incubator he built with his team.Credit: Mboalab Alfredo Giron-Nava didn’t spot many peers at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development. The postdoctoral researcher was one of only six junior scientists at the event, held in Copenhagen in May 2019. Four of them began

A recent study suggests that squirrels and other arboreal rodents developed to have bigger brains compared to their burrowing cousins. This greater power of the brain has given them key abilities they need to flourish in woodland habitats, both better motor skills, and vision, and improved movement of the head and eye, experts disclose. (Photo

The Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in the eastern Himalayas is the deepest canyon in the world, and one of the longest.Credit: Dong Lei/NaturePL As China sets about designating its first national parks, we propose that the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in the eastern Himalayas on the Brahmaputra River, close to the Indian border, should be

Based on a recent study, human activity has resulted in a global plastic cycle, which is similar to natural cycles like the carbon cycle, in which plastic moves through the atmosphere, seas, and soil. According to one physicist, the result is the planet’s “plastification.” (Photo : Tom Fisk) Plastic Waste (Photo : Wikimedia Commons) According

Experiments to find Majorana signals are performed by loading a nanowire into a dilution refrigerator capable of cooling it down to close to absolute zero.Credit: HGA Architects and Engineers A shadow has fallen over the race to detect a new type of quantum particle, the Majorana fermion, that could power quantum computers. As someone who

A ground-floor gallery space at the Francis Crick Institute in London, where I’m 18 months into my PhD, opened as a COVID-19 vaccination centre in January. It operates from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., 7 days a week. I signed up immediately as a part-time staff volunteer; we number more than 300. Our training was

Endangered primates that get constantly killed by cars while attempting to cross the road in a national park located in Zanzibar have been given a lifeline after experts put in speed bumps to reduce traffic. Zanzibar red colobuses (Piliocolobus kirkii) are little primates that have a white coat, black face, and red back. They are

Forty years after China became a part of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the country has made so much efforts to ensure 85 percent of key safeguarded wildlife are under good protection, the State Forestry and Grassland Administration (SFGA) said Thursday, promising to eliminate outmoded habits

Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), The Barcelona Institute for Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain Ernest Latorre, Laura Casares, Manuel Gómez-González, Marina Uroz, Léo Valon, Elena Garreta, Nuria Montserrat, Marino Arroyo & Xavier Trepat LaCàN, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech, Barcelona, Spain Ernest Latorre, Sohan Kale & Marino Arroyo INM-Leibniz Institut für Neue Materialien, Saarbrücken, Germany Roshna V. Nair & Aránzazu del Campo Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red

A vulture’s death in Spain was confirmed to be caused by a newly approved veterinary drug. The event, according to conservationists, could be the tip of an iceberg, and the opioid could wipe out dozens of Europe’s vultures while also affecting similar animals such as golden eagles. (Photo : Karen Alchin) Banned Drug (Photo :

Startup of Elon Musk’s brain-implant Neuralink shares a video showing a monkey making use of its device to play ” Ping Pong” with its mind  (Photo : Simon) Neuralink’s Devices  Neuralink named the experiment an “initial demonstration of the potential capabilities” of its high-tech brain chips, although it’s not clear whether the outcomes will be

 According to a research analysis in April 2020 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the loud rushing noise of the wind through a stretch of forest, birds alarming to one another as they alight on tree branches, the burble of a brook over a rocky bed – these are the types of sounds that

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here The storage-ring magnet used for the g − 2 experiment at Fermilab.Credit: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab Thrilling muon result shakes up physics Muons — massive, unstable cousins of the electron — seem to be more magnetic than the

A reef manta ray visits a cleaning station at Lady Elliot Island, Australia. Credit: A. O. Armstrong et al./Ecol. Evol. (CC BY 4.0) Ecology 08 April 2021 What manta rays remember: the best spots to get spruced up Giant fish preserve a mental map of where cleaning fish provide the highest-quality pest removal. Share on

Companies in search of breakthrough products tend to disregard the greatest invention machine in the world: life’s over three-billion-year evolution history by natural selection. By observing dogs, birds, sharks, and other creatures of the wild, scientists and engineers have developed many new products whose inspiration came from these animals and their physical characteristics. (Photo :

President Joe Biden released his first proposed budget for the United States on 9 April.Credit: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty US President Joe Biden unveiled his first proposed budget on 9 April, and it signaled strong support for research and development. The spending plan would provide across-the-board increases in science funding and inject billions into the

The orcas were biting the jaw of the blue whale, trying to get hold of its tongue. In a struggle for about an hour, as many as 70 killer whales tracked down and killed a blue whale off the southwestern coast of Australia, according to a marine biologist who witnessed the “astonishing, a bit of disturbing

A nurse immunizes a teacher in Granada, Spain, with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.Credit: Carlos Gil Andreu/Getty The very rare occurrence of a mysterious blood-clotting disorder among some recipients of the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has researchers scrambling to uncover whether and how the inoculation could trigger such an unusual reaction. After weeks of investigation, the European Medicines

Noah Baker and Amy Maxmen talk whistle-blowers, politics and COVID surveillance Your browser does not support the audio element. Download MP3 Rick Bright exposed former president Trump’s political meddling in the US COVID response. Now he is championing a new privately funded initiative to track viral spread and combat new variants. We discuss the challenges

As sea ice melts earlier in the year due to climate change, polar bears have begun their hunt for food on land, like bird eggs. They are not too good at it, a  recent drone-based study shows. That could be another bad sign for the ability of bears to survive in a changing world, researchers

Fresh scientific collaborations lead to exciting results. Credit: Getty Human behaviour 09 April 2021 Want fresh results? Analysis of thousands of papers suggests trying new teammates A deep dive into the physical-science literature links the most original research with the most recently formed teams of co-authors. Share on Twitter Share on Twitter Share on Facebook

An international team of scientists has studied individual differences in red deer behavior. They discovered that most behaviors observed form a component of personality, which they labeled ‘Confidence/Aggressiveness’. (Photo : Getty Images) Consistent Differences in Behavior  As is commonly known, individual people act consistently different from one another and these types of consistent differences in

On the island of Cayo Santiago, female macaques and their infants sit close to one another in a landscape stripped bare by Hurricane Maria. Credit: Lauren Brent Animal behaviour 08 April 2021 A hurricane wrecks ‘Monkey Island’ — and leads to new monkey friendships Amid the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria, rhesus macaques sought support

Plan S is helping to drive a shift among publishers towards open-access business models.Credit: Yang Qing/Xinhua via Zuma Wire In 2018, an influential group of research funders announced a bold pledge: the scientists they fund should publish their peer-reviewed papers outside journal paywalls. The initiative, called Plan S, caused an instant uproar over its aim

This past February for four days and three nights, a dog helplessly stranded on an ice floe in the frozen waters of the Detroit River located between the U.S. and Canada fought to remain alive. (Photo : Photo: Screenshot from Woodhaven Animal Hospital) The Dog Hoped For a Miracle Even though the situation was hopeless,

1. Holyoak, K. J. in Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence Vol. 2 (ed. Sternberg, R. J.) 199–230 (Erlbaum, 1984). 2. Newell, A. & Simon, H. A. Human Problem Solving (Prentice-Hall, 1972). 3. Reitman, W. R. in Human Judgments and Optimality (eds Shelley, M. W. & Bryan, G. L.) 282–315 (Wiley, 1964). 4. Kahneman,

According to a recent study led by the U.S. Geological Survey, the risk of scientists passing coronavirus to North American bats during winter research is low. Researchers discover the overall risk to be 1 in 1,000 if there are no protective measures taken, and the risk decrease to 1 in 3,333 or less, with the

1. Pomeranchuk, I. On the theory of He3. Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz 20, 919 (1950). CAS  Google Scholar  2. Bistritzer, R. & MacDonald, A. H. Moiré bands in twisted double-layer graphene. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 12233–12237 (2011). ADS  CAS  Article  Google Scholar  3. Cao, Y. et al. Correlated insulator behaviour at half-filling in

When solving problems, humans tend to think about adding something before they think of taking something away — even when subtracting is the better solution. Experiments show that this newly discovered psychological phenomenon applies across a range of situations from improving a physical design to solving an abstract puzzle. People think about what they can

Cancer in sponges has never been reported to date. Sponges are included in the phylum Porifera, and they possess a long lifespan and somatic cell turnover, which should make them easily affected by cancer because over the journey of their lifespans they would be expected to pile up carcinogenic mutations. (Photo : Elliot Connor) Transcriptomics

NOAA is using balloons like this one (shown being released in a photographic time lapse) to measure the size and number of aerosols in the stratosphere.Credit: Patrick Cullis, CIRES/NOAA GML United States urged to invest in sun-dimming studies The US government should launch a federal research programme to explore whether it’s feasible — or even

According to a proposed climate plan, South Africa plans to cut emissions by about a third by 2030. (Photo : Wikimedia Commons) Open Public Consultation The government has opened a public consultation on its revised climate strategy, which will extend until the end of May, to send a draft document to the UN in time

In the Milky Way, gas (red and blue; artificially coloured) flows outwards from ‘stellar eggs’ that could hatch into baby stars. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Lu et al./Astrophys. J. Astronomy and astrophysics 06 April 2021 Baby stars make it in a tough part of the Galaxy Star formation might be more resilient than astronomers had thought.

The Disordered Cosmos Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Bold Type (2021) Aged ten, writes theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “I thought that I could keep my curiosity about the mathematics of the universe and the existence and function of racism separate.” In fact, she became a leading Black activist in US academia, co-organizing last year’s Strike for Black Lives.

Buildings are to be held accountable for a lot of carbon emissions. Detaching them from fossil fuels is a crucial part of the climate solution. (Photo : Getty Images) Prohibition of Natural Gas  During the 2019 summer, the city council in Berkeley, California, made a very bold and unknown move: They disallowed natural gas hookups

During the pandemic, technology companies have been pitching their emotion-recognition software for monitoring workers and even children remotely. Take, for example, a system named 4 Little Trees. Developed in Hong Kong, the program claims to assess children’s emotions while they do classwork. It maps facial features to assign each pupil’s emotional state into a category