Nature Briefing: "Light threatens world-class telescopes."
Views expressed in this science, space, and technology news are those of the reporters and correspondents. Accessed on 19 March 2025, 2207 UTC.
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).
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| Chile’s Paranal Observatory has the advantage of extremely dark skies — which are at risk from a proposed energy project that would span 3,000 hectares in the Atacama Desert. (ESO/P. Horálek) | ||
Light threatens world-class telescopes
Light pollution and atmospheric turbulence from a green-hydrogen plant proposed for construction in Chile will cause “devastating, irreversible” damage to some of the world’s most powerful telescopes, say astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). An ESO analysis found that light pollution would increase by at least 35% at the Very Large Telescope ― one of the most advanced optical telescopes in the world ― and the project would cause vibrations that will damage the sensitive equipment. The plant’s builder says it will generate around 5,000 jobs and save at least 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Nature | 6 min readReference: European Southern Observatory analysis |
Microsoft’s qubit claim arouses physicists
At a standing-room-only talk in front of skeptical physicists, Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak has presented evidence for the company’s claim to have created the first ‘topological’ qubits. Qubits are analogous to the ‘bits’ in classical computers, and topological ones are much-desired because they might make quantum computers more stable and easier to build at scale. “It was a beautiful talk,” says theorist Daniel Loss, who nonetheless took issue with the strong claims and relative lack of evidence. And the presentation, which took place at a meeting of the American Physical Society, didn’t address a recent critical preprint. “It’s a hard problem,” says experimental physicist Ali Yazdani. To anyone trying to make topological qubits, he says, “good luck”. Nature | 5 min read |
Oldest crater discovered in Australia
Researchers have discovered an impact crater estimated to be 3.47 billion years old in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The team had theorized that the rocks in the Pilbara — which are some of the oldest on Earth — formed following huge meteorite impacts and seeded the continents. To back up their idea, they went searching for a giant crater in the area — and found it. Rock formed into ‘shatter cones’ prove that an enormous, planet-shaking impact took place there, says earth scientist Tim Barrows. “It would be near the diameter of the impact that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.” ABC News | 6 min readReference: Nature Communications paper |
Features & opinion
The rocky road to a mega-collider
The European particle physics laboratory CERN has plans to build the biggest machine on the planet — an enormous particle accelerator called the Future Circular Collider (FCC). When it opens in 2070, the FCC would smash particles together at eight times the energy of the Large Hadron Collider. It has the full support of the outgoing and incoming CERN chiefs, but many physicists still aren’t sold that the effort will yield the results CERN is hoping for, and it’s unclear whether member states will fund the project, which will cost at least US$30 billion and probably much more. Nature | 14 min read |
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Other ways of knowing
In the 1950s, Western researchers intrigued by the widespread use of Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) in traditional medicine discovered that the vinca alkaloids that it contained could treat cancer. Drugs derived from these compounds are still sold worldwide today for huge profits, but little of this money is seen by the local communities where the knowledge originated. It’s a story that has often been repeated: Indigenous and local knowledge has been simultaneously exploited and marginalized by Western science. Now, some researchers are working to bridge knowledge systems to do better science and empower communities. Nature | 11 min read |
Who’s the daddy
Geneticist Maarten Larmuseau works on what can be a fraught question: how often does a child’s genetic paternity differ from the father recorded by history? Though an oft-repeated statistic suggests that 10% of children have what is dubbed ‘extra-pair paternity’, Larmuseau’s research finds that the rate in Europe is closer to 1%. The findings have wide-ranging social implications and are useful for those who rely on accurate ancestry in their research. But Larmuseau stays away from doing tests that might reveal painful secrets in the recent past. “Biology is not necessary to have a good family and be a good parent,” he says. Science | 15 min read |
Infographic of the week
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| The proliferation of constructs and measures in psychology — many of which are introduced ad-hoc in new papers and then rarely seen again — is setting up “confusing redundancies” that “make the literature incomprehensible”, write six psychologists. View an interactive, high-resolution version of this image. (Nature Human Behaviour | 11 min read) (F. Anvari et al./Nature Hum. Behav.) | |
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