Nature Briefing

Hello Nature readers,
Today we track attempts to save a world-leading weather and climate research lab in Colorado, hear that Elsevier has joined a class-action lawsuit against Meta and consider why, if sleep has so many benefits, humans as a species sleep so little.

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Climate ‘mothership’ fights back in court

One of the leading climate-science institutions in the world — the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado — is fighting for its life in a US courtroom. The universities that manage the research centre are suing the administration of President Donald Trump, which has said that it will dismantle NCAR because it is a source of “climate alarmism”. At the heart of the case is whether the US National Science Foundation is moving too quickly and without authority to hand off pieces of NCAR — including a supercomputing centre in Wyoming — to public and private institutions. Whatever the ruling, the broader battle over the future of NCAR — including its aeroplane fleet, space-weather studies and climate-modelling teams — will probably continue to play out.

Nature | 8 min read

Publishers sue over papers fed to Meta AI

Mega-publisher Elsevier has joined a class-action lawsuit against technology company Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that its copyrighted works were used to train Meta’s AI models. The lawsuit claims that Meta drew on databases, such as Sci-Hub, that contain unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Meta has suggested that it will argue that AI training is ‘transformative’ and allowed under the ‘fair use’ exemption.

Nature | 6 min read

Fact-checking MAHA mental-health claims

At a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) wellness summit attended by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, speakers raised concerns about the quality of mental-health treatment in the United States, pointing to issues of overdiagnosis, overmedication and withdrawal. But the true problems are “underdiagnosis and undertreatment”, says Timothy Wilens, a clinical psychiatrist and president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), who notes that at least one-half of US children with mental-health conditions are not getting the care they need. When it comes to withdrawal, clinicians don’t have enough information because researchers have struggled to find funding for large-scale discontinuation trials, says psychiatrist and AACAP president John Walkup.

Nature | 9 min read

Cyberattack hobbles Canvas platform

An estimated 9,000 educational institutions — including universities across the United States, Canada and Australia — have been affected by a breach of the Canvas software platform. Students and teachers — including some who were in the middle of exams — were greeted with a ransomware message when they attempted to use the system. Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, says the platform is mostly up and running again, but some institutions have suspended its use.

BBC | 7 min read

Why humans sleep so little

On the basis of the sleeping habits of closely related animals, biological anthropologist David Samson estimates that humans require roughly 2.5 hours more sleep than we tend to get each day. This “human sleep paradox” is the focus of his book, The Sleepless Ape. Using ethnography, neurobiology and primatology, Samson argues that the amount of sleep our species gets reflects an evolutionary trade-off. Short, high-quality bouts of sleep helped our ground-sleeping ancestors to stay alert to predators, with the bonus of more waking hours for social interaction and learning — something that reshaped the trajectory of our evolution.

Nature | 7 min read

The true language of the genome

The regulatory region makes up about 98% of the human genome but is written in a code that researchers have yet to untangle. Now, a suite of tools called massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) could give them a cipher key. MPRAs measure how thousands of isolated sequence variants influence the expression of hand-picked reporter genes, letting scientists hone in on the genome’s ‘control knobs’. Decoding this mysterious language could help to clarify the genetic foundations of disease, reveal the changes wrought by evolution and guide the development of next-generation therapeutics.

Nature | 16 min read

Science dug a hole it couldn’t get out of

When the launch of Sputnik put the USSR at the forefront of the Cold-War space race, the event galvanized funding and inertia for US science, argues Lisa Margonelli, the editor-in-chief of Issues in Science and Technology. “But Sputnik moments have an evil twin, what might be called Mohole moments, when some focal point for distrust closes windows, rolls back funding, cuts support, and craters trust.” Margonelli looks back at Project Mohole, a plan to drill to the Earth’s mantle that was cancelled in 1966 amidst huge cost overruns, as an example of how narratives — particularly scandals — can drive science policymaking.

Issues in Science and Technology | 13 min read