CLAMPING down on conspiracy theories may not help tackle extremist views online, instead it might cause them to proliferate. Shruti Phadke at the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues analysed 6 million posts from 60,000 people on social news aggregation site Reddit, as well as their memberships of user-created communities called subreddits, in an attempt to identify the roots of online radicalisation. All the people’s profiles were roughly similar, but half of them were members of at least one subreddit focused on discussing political and scientific conspiracy theories. Phadke’s team found that downvoting or banning users for voicing…

The European Union has taken a first step towards clamping down on the export of coronavirus vaccines after pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca told the bloc it would deliver far fewer doses than expected in the next months. The EU hasn’t stopped manufacturers from selling to outside nations, including the UK, but has taken a step towards this by requiring vaccine manufacturers to give notice before exporting. “In the future, all companies producing vaccines against covid-19 in the EU will have to provide early notification whenever they want to export vaccines to third countries,” said Stella Kyriakides, the EU commissioner for health, on 25 January. “Humanitarian…

ARTIFICIAL intelligence has learned to identify the songs someone is listening to from their brain readings. Derek Lomas at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues asked 20 people to listen to 12 songs through headphones. The volunteers did this blindfolded and in a dimly lit room to minimise the effect of their other senses on the results. Each person’s brainwaves were recorded using an electroencephalography (EEG) cap that detects electrical activity. The EEG readings from each person were cut into short segments and used along with the matching music clip to train an AI to spot patterns between…

A method for altering RNA that works similarly to the CRISPR DNA-editing technique has proven effective in animal tests and could be a powerful new tool for doctors. The approach, created by a team led by Prashant Mali at the University of California, San Diego, is inherently safer than CRISPR because it doesn’t alter the genome. What’s more, it could be used to temporarily alter gene expression, which could treat conditions such as chronic pain. “This is a clever and elegant approach,” says Gaetan Burgio at the Australian National University in Canberra. “Overall, I believe this technique has great potential.” The recipes for making the proteins our…

Quantum computing can be chaotic, but key properties of that chaos may actually help us develop useful devices. That is the finding of a study of the behaviour of quantum bits, or qubits, which has shown that their chaotic nature may be easier to predict than thought. Quantum computers use qubits as the basic unit of memory, the same way regular computers use bits. The difference is that while a bit can only be in one of two states – a 1 or a 0 – a qubit can be in a combination of the two. When qubits are put into…

Hospitals in the Brazilian Amazon are collapsing once again under the strain of treating covid-19 patients. This is despite the high rate of coronavirus infections in Amazonas during the first wave of the virus, and suggests that if herd immunityby infection is possible, it may be harder to achieve than previously thought. In Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, hospital beds are unavailable. People are queuing to buy oxygen tanks from private suppliers to attempt to treat family or friends at home, as oxygen supplies in hospitals were exhausted as of 15 January. The state is “in the most critical moment of the pandemic”, said the…

THE World Health Organization’s scientific mission to explore the origins of the coronavirus has only been under way for a few days, but has already been the subject of clashes between the US and China over the investigation’s access to people and evidence. The first of the 13 scientists arrived in Wuhan on 14 January, after visa issues delayed an original 5 January start date. Led by Peter Ben Embarek at the WHO, the team is currently in quarantine for 14 days in a hotel and talking with Chinese officials, including those at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control. Members…

Lithium-ion batteries power the world, but with lithium running low, we desperately need a viable alternative. Here’s why common salt may be our best bet THEY are the widgets that quietly power our lives: lithium-ion batteries. Our phones, laptops and increasingly our cars rely on them. They already seem ubiquitous, yet the real battery revolution is still coming. Just take electric vehicles: in 2019, the number of electric cars on the world’s roads was just over 7 million, but that is expected to shoot up to some 200 million by 2030. And then consider our hopes of running the future on green electricity…

Genomic medicine is deeply biased towards white people Lack of diversity in genome studies means that treatments derived from them are leaving people of colour behind. Changing that isn’t only about justice – it could also lead to new therapies that would otherwise go undiscovered IF YOUR doctor suspects you might have type 2 diabetes, they will want to know your average blood sugar level, which typically means taking a glycated haemoglobin test. This method of diagnosis is recommended by the World Health Organization and used pretty much everywhere. The problem, as Deepti Gurdasani discovered in 2019, is that the test may…

An active volcano in Ecuador has collapsed twice in the past 250,000 years, causing vast debris avalanches that reached over 60 kilometres away. It could happen again, but it isn’t possible to predict when – although there is no reason to think it is imminent. Sangay is Ecuador’s most active volcano. It lies on the eastern edge of the Andes mountains, overlooking the western edge of the Amazon rainforest. “It’s a volcano that’s in the jungle,” says Viviana Valverde of the Geophysical Institute in Quito, Ecuador. As a result of its remote location, for decades it wasn’t regarded as a major risk, but she…