Every breath you take ... could add to a breathing pattern that is unique to you, a study finds.Credit: Anusak Laowilas/NurPhoto via Getty Like the swirls in fingerprints, a person’s breathing pattern might be unique to them — offering a way not only to identify individuals, but also to identify some of their physical and mental traits. A team of researchers measured the breathing of 97 healthy people for 24 hours, and found that they could identify participants with relatively high accuracy from their breathing pattern alone. What’s more, they found that these patterns can be correlated with body-mass index (BMI) and signs of depression and anxiety. “In a way, we’re reading the mind through the nose,” says co-author Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. “This could be a very powerful diagnostic tool.” The team published its study today in Current Biology1. Taking a breath Breathing is deeply connected to the brain. Every inhalation and exhalation is coordinated to supply the oxygen needed for the brain to manage the body’s systems. Sobel and his team wondered: if every brain functions differently, shouldn’t every person’s breathing be unique, too? To test this, the researchers developed a custom, wearable device that records airflow through each of a person’s nostrils. Mounted on the back of the neck, the device, which has tubes fitted under the nose, tracks people’s breathing during their everyday routines, both while they are awake and while they are asleep. Researchers measured study participants’ breathing patterns over 24 hours, using a custom device that sits on the back of the neck.Credit: Soroka et al., Current Biology To characterize a person’s breath pattern, the team extracted 24 parameters from the airflow data, including duration of inhalation and exhalation and airflow asymmetry between nostrils. They separated the periods when participants were awake and asleep, and trained a machine-learning algorithm with the data. When 42 of the participants came back to the laboratory weeks, months and even two years later, to take part in another 24-hour measurement, the trained algorithm could identify them from their breath patterns. Data from periods when the participants were awake gave more accurate results than did those from sleeping periods, but when the researchers used a 100-parameter characterization of a full data set instead of one using 24 parameters, they could pick individuals out with 96.8% accuracy. Given this success, Sobel and his colleagues began wondering whether they could learn more from the breath patterns. Healthy breathing The researchers collected data on the participants’ BMIs, and from questionnaires that assess levels of depression and anxiety. An analysis found correlations between this information and the breathing patterns, even though most participants had low-level scores on the questionnaires. For instance, the breathing profiles during sleep of people with higher BMIs were different from those of people with lower BMIs. And those who scored higher on the questionnaires for anxiety or depression had distinct patterns in how they inhaled and exhaled. An AI revolution is brewing in medicine. What will it look like? “It’s a very cool study,” says Artin Arshamian, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Scientists who study respiration have been trying to connect breath signatures to health — mirroring how an electrocardiogram, which uses electrodes on a person’s finger, arm or other body parts to measure their heart’s activity, can expose abnormal rhythms, says psychiatrist Helen Lavretsky at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sobel and his colleagues’ work, she says, is “an improvement” in the breath-pattern field, which has usually collected respiration data over shorter periods. And it opens the door to designing breath treatments, she says. Lavretsky says that “the most potent tool that is available to us is breath”. For example, some branches of the US military teach personnel to control their breath to manage stress and keep focus in high-pressure moments. Sobel and his coworkers are now trying to find out what type of breathing patterns are correlated with low levels of stress and anxiety, to see whether they could counteract those feelings. If they succeed, they will attempt “to teach people to breathe in a way that will alleviate the condition”, Sobel says.

Eight new members have been appointed to the US powerful Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which plays a large part in the vaccines taken by US children and adults. Credit: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty An emergency-room doctor, critics of COVID-19 vaccines and an obstetrician who advises a supplement company are among the advisers handpicked by vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to provide advice on vaccines to the federal government. Kennedy announced his new roster for the influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on 11 June — just two days after he fired all 17 of its previous members and accused the ACIP of “malevolent malpractice”. The ACIP advises US public-health officials as to who should receive approved vaccines, and when. Those recommendations are then often used to guide whether public and private health-insurance programmes will pay for the shots. Kennedy has pledged that the ACIP will re-evaluate the vaccine “schedule” for children — the list of which vaccines children should get and when they should get them. This week’s shakeup of the committee is “a major step towards restoring public trust in vaccines,” Kennedy said in a post on the social media platform, X. Will RFK Jr’s vaccine agenda make America contagious again? Several of the new ACIP members have expressed public support for vaccines. But a number of them have also expressed scepticism; one serves on the board of an anti-vaccination organization, and a second has been a prominent sceptic of the COVID-19 vaccines on social media. As first reported by the biomedical news outlet STAT, Kennedy included four of the new committee members in the dedication to his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. “This is a disaster for public health,” says Adam Ratner, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City. “It has the potential to set us back decades.” The HHS did not respond to a request for comment before publication. Far-reaching implications Infectious-disease specialists worry about the implications of the ACIP potentially voting to recommend fewer vaccines or fewer doses than are currently advised. Paul Offit, an infectious-diseases paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine who served on the ACIP from 1998 to 2003, says insurers don’t have to cover vaccines that aren’t recommended by the ACIP. And “doctors or pharmacists who give vaccines may feel that they would be liable for giving that vaccine”, he adds. Even those who can pay for vaccines out of pocket might find them harder to get without an ACIP recommendation, says Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, because overall demand for the shots will decrease. That, in turn, could lead some pharmacies to stop stocking them. Offit notes that at the ACIP’s next meeting, which starts 25 June, the panel will decide whether to recommend vaccines for COVID-19, the human papillomavirus, meningococcal disease and RSV. “These are established vaccines, and we’re voting on them?” Offit says. “The entire childhood and adult immunisation schedule is on the table.” How to speak to a vaccine sceptic: research reveals what works Kennedy has criticized the ACIP for what he says are rampant conflicts of interest among its members. He has also said that past committee members did not demand what he considers to be adequate safety trials with control groups that received a placebo, before recommending vaccines. But many of the vaccine studies included placebo controls, Ratner says, unless it was unethical to conduct the trial with one. And Reingold, who has served on the ACIP in the past, says that the committee has strict policies regarding conflicts of interest and that committee members must recuse themselves from any vote that might pose a conflict. “The issue of potential conflicts of interest has been radically overblown and unfairly called into question the objectivity of this panel,” he says. Offit says several independent groups have reviewed previous ACIP members and found no conflicts of interest. “Now, the conflict of interest is real because these folks are indebted to RFK Jr, who just gave them this position,” he says. Vetting process Researchers are also concerned about the loss of expertise. The committee’s new lineup is “disturbing”, says Nancy Bennett, a public-health specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. In the past, members were nominated and then vetted by staff at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) before being sent to the head of the CDC and, finally, the head of the HHS for approval. Bennett says the vetting process sometimes took years. “The ACIP was meant to be composed of people with deep expertise in the area,” Ratner says. “That’s what we have lost.” Joseph Hibbeln Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who once worked at the US National Institutes of Health. His recent papers1 have focused on the connection between nutrition and various disorders, including mental-health conditions, and his LinkedIn profile states that twenty-first-century diets are contributing to “inadequate brain nutrients and are likely contributing to the high burden of mental illnesses worldwide”. A search of PubMed, a database of biomedical papers, did not turn up any papers he has authored about vaccines or infectious disease. He did not respond to a request for comment. Martin Kulldorff Kulldorff is a Swedish epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a think tank based in West Hartford, Connecticut, that formed “to provide an independent voice for personal liberty” and to oppose lockdown policies instituted by public officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with Jayanta Bhattacharya, the current head of the US National Institutes of Health, Kulldorff wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which advocated against COVID-19 lockdowns except for vulnerable populations, and drew much pushback from the medical community. Last year, Kulldorff wrote in City Journal that he was fired from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine even though he already had immunity from being infected. He also wrote that “vaccines are a vital medical invention, allowing people to obtain immunity without the risk that comes from getting sick,” but suggested that trials of COVID-19 vaccines early in the pandemic were not properly designed. Kulldorff did not respond to Nature’s request for comment. Retsef Levi Levi is a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He has published several papers on COVID-19, including one2 expressing concerns about side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. In a post on social-media platform X in 2023, Levi said, “The evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people. We have to stop giving them immediately!” Levi did not respond to a request for comment. Robert Malone Malone is a physician and scientist whose research contributed to the development of mRNA vaccines. He maintains that he has not received the credit he deserves for his role, but in a 2023 video, he said the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 would damage children’s organs and had no benefit to children. Physician-scientist Robert Malone has been named to a prominent vaccine advisory committee.Credit: Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty He also promoted ivermectin, an anti-parasite medication, as a treatment for COVID-19; mounting evidence shows that it has no effect3. Malone declined to comment but said in an e-mailed statement that he will do his “best to serve with unbiased objectivity and rigor”. Cody Meissner Meissner studies paediatrics at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and has served on multiple federal committees on vaccines. He was a member of the ACIP from 2008 to 2012. He has emphasized the importance of COVID-19 vaccines, saying in 2021 that “it’s important that the main message we transmit is that we’ve got to get everyone two doses.” In 2021, he co-authored a newspaper commentary opposing mask mandates for children, and he has expressed scepticism about the benefits of repeated COVID-19 booster shots for children. He did not respond to a request for comment. James Pagano Pagano, now retired, has worked as an emergency medicine physician and emergency-room medical director. Kennedy described him as a “strong advocate for evidence-based medicine”. He has published two fiction books about hospital physicians and in 2014 wrote a blog post questioning whether climate change is real. His public record on vaccines is thin. He did not respond to a request for comment. Vicky Pebsworth Pebsworth is a nurse, health-care administrator and health-policy analyst who has been a voting member of an FDA advisory committee on vaccines. She’s also a volunteer at the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a non-profit organization that highlights vaccine risks and informs about “biological mechanisms involved in vaccine injury and death”. Her NVIC profile says that her interest on vaccine safety started after her son experienced “long-term health problems following receipt of seven live viruses and killed bacterial vaccines administered during his 15-month well-baby visit”. Pebsworth was part of a working group for the FDA’s National Vaccine Advisory Committee that monitored post-marketing vaccine safety and potential risks. In 2020, she told an FDA committee that the NVIC’s position was that “using coercion and sanctions to persuade adults to take an experimental vaccine, or give it to their children, is unethical and unlawful”, as first reported by CBS. She did not respond to a request for comment. Michael Ross Ross is an obstetrician and chief medical officer at Manta Pharma, an implantable device company in Maryland. He has been a board member and adviser for nearly a dozen pharmaceutical and medical-device companies, including LarreaRx, which distributes an herbal supplement. Ross was a presidential appointee on a CDC committee for preventing breast and cervical cancer, and a professor at George Washington University for 46 years. His LinkedIn profile lists his specialties as “Contact lenses, International Business, Healthcare and pharmaceutical executive management, pharmaceutical consulting”. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The motor cortex (orange, illustration). Electrodes implanted in this region helped to record the speech-related brain activity of a man who could not speak intelligibly. Credit: Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library A man with a severe speech disability is able to speak expressively and sing using a brain implant that translates his neural activity into words almost instantly. The device conveys changes of tone when he asks questions, emphasizes the words of his choice and allows him to hum a string of notes in three pitches. The system — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — used artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the participant’s electrical brain activity as he attempted to speak. The device is the first to reproduce not only a person’s intended words but also features of natural speech such as tone, pitch and emphasis, which help to express meaning and emotion. In a study, a synthetic voice that mimicked the participant’s own spoke his words within 10 milliseconds of the neural activity that signalled his intention to speak. The system, described today in Nature1, marks a significant improvement over earlier BCI models, which streamed speech within three seconds or produced it only after users finished miming an entire sentence. “This is the holy grail in speech BCIs,” says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. “This is now real, spontaneous, continuous speech.” Real-time decoder The study participant, a 45-year-old man, lost his ability to speak clearly after developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neuron disease, which damages the nerves that control muscle movements, including those needed for speech. Although he could still make sounds and mouth words, his speech was slow and unclear. Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets Five years after his symptoms began, the participant underwent surgery to insert 256 silicon electrodes, each 1.5-mm long, in a brain region that controls movement. Study co-author Maitreyee Wairagkar, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues trained deep-learning algorithms to capture the signals in his brain every 10 milliseconds. Their system decodes, in real time, the sounds the man attempts to produce rather than his intended words or the constituent phonemes — the subunits of speech that form spoken words. “We don’t always use words to communicate what we want. We have interjections. We have other expressive vocalizations that are not in the vocabulary,” explains Wairagkar. “In order to do that, we have adopted this approach, which is completely unrestricted.” The team also personalized the synthetic voice to sound like the man’s own, by training AI algorithms on recordings of interviews he had done before the onset of his disease. The team asked the participant to attempt to make interjections such as ‘aah’, ‘ooh’ and ‘hmm’ and say made-up words. The BCI successfully produced these sounds, showing that it could generate speech without needing a fixed vocabulary. Freedom of speech Using the device, the participant spelt out words, responded to open-ended questions and said whatever he wanted, using some words that were not part of the decoder’s training data. He told the researchers that listening to the synthetic voice produce his speech made him “feel happy” and that it felt like his “real voice”. In other experiments, the BCI identified whether the participant was attempting to say a sentence as a question or as a statement. The system could also determine when he stressed different words in the same sentence and adjust the tone of his synthetic voice accordingly. “We are bringing in all these different elements of human speech which are really important,” says Wairagkar. Previous BCIs could produce only flat, monotone speech. “This is a bit of a paradigm shift in the sense that it can really lead to a real-life tool,” says Silvia Marchesotti, a neuroengineer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The system’s features “would be crucial for adoption for daily use for the patients in the future”.

Jayanta Bhattacharya, head of the US National Institutes of Health, testified about proposed budget cuts to his agency at a Senate hearing on 10 June.Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Capitol Hill, Washington DC US senators grilled National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jayanta Bhattacharya at a hearing on 10 June about how his professed support for science squares with unprecedented funding delays and research-grant terminations at the agency this year, as well as enormous cuts that have been proposed for its 2026 budget. Can NIH-funded research on racism and health survive Trump’s cuts? What would normally be a routine hearing about government spending was anything but: hundreds of scientists and advocates for Alzheimer’s disease research packed into a cramped room on Capitol Hill to denounce US President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget request, which calls for cutting the NIH’s budget by about 40% and collapsing its 27 institutes and centres into 8. Such a cut “would stop critical Alzheimer’s research in its tracks”, Tonya Maurer, an advocate for the Alzheimer’s Association, a non-profit group based in Chicago, Illinois, told Nature at the hearing. “We’ve worked too damn hard to see this happen.” Bhattacharya defended his leadership at the agency — the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world — noting that there is a “need for reform at the NIH” and that to restore its reputation, the NIH “cannot return to business as usual”. (The NIH has been accused by Trump and his Republican allies of funding ‘woke’ science and research on coronaviruses that they say could have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.) To help fix the agency, Bhattacharya told the senators that he wants to focus on increasing reproducibility in biomedical research, upholding academic freedom and studying the cause of autism, which US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has pledged to find an answer to by September. Letters of dissent The hearing comes the day after more than 300 NIH staff members sent Bhattacharya a fiery letter decrying the mass termination of jobs at the agency and its cancellation of thousands of research projects on a growing list of topics that the Trump team has said are ‘politicized’, including those investigating the biology of COVID-19, the health of sexual and gender minorities (LGBT+) and reasons that people might be hesitant to receive a vaccine. Exclusive: NIH to cut grants for COVID research, documents reveal “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” the staff members wrote. They named their letter the ‘Bethesda Declaration’, after the Maryland community and Washington DC suburb where most of the NIH is located. The title also alludes to the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, an open letter that Bhattacharya co-signed in October 2020 that argued against COVID-19 lockdowns except for the most vulnerable citizens, instead allowing for children and others to be infected so that ‘herd immunity’ could be reached ― a proposal that numerous scientists and NIH officials called dangerous at the time. At the hearing, Patty Murray, a Democratic senator from Washington, implored Bhattacharya to “heed their warning”, and said that she expects that “none of them face retaliation for raising those concerns”. Bhattacharya didn’t respond to this comment at the hearing but said in a statement on 9 June that the Bethesda Declaration “has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months”, but that “respectful dissent in science is productive”. Gavin Yamey, a global-health researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who signed the latest declaration, said, “he can talk about freedom, but his own staff are decrying his censorship. How he’s actually acting and what he says are not one in the same.” Taking ownership Several senators, including Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, questioned who was in charge at the NIH, given reports that billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ordered agency employees to cut hundreds of specific grants. NIH grant cuts will axe clinical trials abroad — and could leave thousands without care “The changes in priorities, the move away from politicized science, I’ve made those decisions,” Bhattacharya responded. The mass terminations of awards at institutions such as Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “that’s joint with the administration”, he said. (The Trump administration has alleged that universities such as Harvard have allowed discrimination, including antisemitism, on their campuses, and has cut or frozen research funding as a result.) The drastic 40% cut to the NIH’s budget proposed for the fiscal year 2026 is not yet set in stone: the US Congress has the ultimate say over government spending, and during Trump’s first presidency, when he proposed a huge cut to the biomedical agency in 2017, it instead approved a slight increase. Nevertheless, the composition of the body has changed significantly since then — far more of its members are now loyal to Trump. Comments made at the hearing by the senators weren’t entirely divided down party lines. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine who voted to confirm both Bhattacharya and RFK Jr, said she was disturbed by the budget proposal. “It would undo years of congressional investment in the NIH,” she said.

Around the world, teenage boys outperform girls on mathematics tests, and men are more likely to pursue related careers — despite baby boys showing no superior sense of numbers or grasp of logic. Now, a gigantic study of schoolchildren in France pinpoints that this ‘mathematical gender gap’ appears during the first year of school. The finding could help to focus efforts to stop girls from falling behind. Boys and girls receive similar maths scores at the start of school, but boys pull ahead of girls after just four months (see 'Watch the mathemtics gender gap emerge'). A more dramatic gap in mathematical performance emerges after 12 months of school, according to the analysis, published on 11 June in Nature1. “This paper suggests that the gender inequalities in children’s maths performance aren’t innate or inevitable,” says psychologist Jillian Lauer at the University of Cambridge, UK. “If we want to stop girls from falling behind, we need to focus on their early experiences at school.” Source: Ref. 1 The study authors make a host of suggestions for how to do this — including providing support to children to reduce anxiety around maths; teachers encouraging participation from girls as often as boys during class; and encouraging curiosity and problem-solving outside the classroom. “Ethically speaking, we cannot do nothing when we see these results,” says study author and neuroscientist Pauline Martinot at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Paris. The latest study is more comprehensive than previous ones that found a similar gender gap in the first year of school. It covers four cohorts: all children who started their first year of school in France in 2018, 2019, 2020 or 2021. This amounts to almost three million five-, six- and seven-year olds. It confirms the finding across the whole country: the gap emerged in all cohorts, socioeconomic groups, regions of France and types of school. This “startling” universality suggests that policies aimed at reducing the gap have to target everyone, says economist Andrew Simon at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “The policy can’t be limited to a certain group if you really want to fix it.” Power of big data The study uses the power of big data to show that it is the start of formal education — not age — that triggers the gap. In France, children start school the September of the calendar year that they turn six. The researchers compare children who were born just a few days apart but are in different school years. The gender gap is present for boys and girls born in December entering their second year of school, the researchers report, but is absent among their peers born days later, in January, who have just started school. The lack of average differences between the performance of boys and girls at the beginning of the first year suggests that the causes lie in the environment children experience once they start school, rather than innate differences in interest or ability, say researchers. “There might be some biological factor that we haven’t been able to clearly link to maths or spatial reasoning,” says Lauer. “But this paper suggests that their experiences with the world are mattering more than anything else.” As babies and very young children, girls and boys display very similar grasp of numbers and logic. “We all have this common core knowledge of mathematics,” says Martinot. Why do girls fall behind? One possible cause is teachers and parents transmitting the stereotype that boys are better than girls at maths — or that boys’ success is due to talent and girls to hard work, undermining girls’ confidence, the authors write in the paper. The labelling of certain activities as ‘maths’ when school starts — with separate hours and books dedicated to them — could prompt girls to apply the stereotypes to themselves, according to the study. Girls also tend to exhibit more anxiety about maths than boys, which might reduce their ability to perform well on timed tests. It might also be necessary to broaden what counts as being good at maths, so that girls can succeed on their own terms, says education researcher Meghna Nag Chowdhuri at University College London. Answering a question quickly might be celebrated in early-years maths classes, for instance, but finding an innovative way to solve a problem could also be a marker of ability, she says. “Let’s broaden schooling,” she says, “not just make all the girls become boys.”

“There are so many stars!” This might sound like an obvious thing for a professional stargazer to say. But astrophysicist Federica Bianco was reacting to something extraordinary — the first full-colour picture from a telescope that promises to image vastly more stars than any that came before it. Bianco and her collaborators got a sneak peek at the sky as seen through the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a US$810 million, US-led facility that is due to start full operations in the coming months at its 2,647-metre-high site on Cerro Pachón in Chile. To be seen at full resolution, each of Rubin’s 3,200 megapixel shots — captured with the world’s largest digital camera — would take several hundred high definition (HD) television screens put together. The Rubin Observatory will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights, observing each spot around 800 times over its ten years of planned operations. Eight science collaborations will sift through the data it produces, each focusing on different questions, from mapping the history of the Universe and its dark matter contents to tracking potentially dangerous objects in the Solar System. The observatory will also capture an unprecedented number of transient and variable astronomical events in real time — stars whose brightness changes unpredictably, for example, and those that explode or suddenly disappear. “We are going to be able to release alerts worldwide on anything that moves or changes brightness — 8 million alerts per night,” says Tony Tyson, an astronomer at the University of California, Davis, who first conceived of the concept for the telescope in the 1990s. The team will unveil the inaugural image on 23 June; in the meantime, the researchers are keeping quiet about what it shows. “We’ve been very serious about keeping it capped, so that we can do a big reveal,” says Bianco, who is at the University of Delaware in Newark. Way, way beyond HD The Rubin Observatory’s telescope, named the Simonyi Survey Telescope after the philanthropic foundation that contributed to its construction, will not be the largest eye on the sky. With a diameter of 8.4 metres, its primary mirror will not collect quite as much light as the handful of bigger telescopes currently in operation, let alone the 39 metres of the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope, which is expected to come online in 2029, also in Chile. Nor will Rubin peer as far back into the past as the James Webb Space Telescope, which can sense longer wavelengths of infrared light on account of being in space, and can therefore image more distant objects. But where Rubin will excel is in its ability to image large swaths of sky — capturing an area of the night sky equivalent to 45 full moons in each shot — and to do so at a staggering speed. Tyson came up with the concept for the telescope while he was helping to pioneer digital sensors that could replace photographic plates at the world’s optical observatories. Tyson says he realized that Moore’s law — which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years or so — meant that computers would soon be able to process staggering amounts of data, and that digital sensors would pack in more and more pixels. He could imagine taking larger and larger pictures that could map the Universe’s galaxies — and how images of these structures are distorted by clouds of dark matter. The effort, originally called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, was named as a top priority in the US Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey of 2010. Construction started in 2015, after the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy both committed funding. In 2019, the US Congress officially renamed the telescope after the late astronomer Vera Rubin, who pioneered the study of dark matter. Built for speed To capture so much of the sky, the telescope uses a cylindrical digital camera that is roughly the size of a small car. Another unusual feature of the telescope is its manoeuvrability, which is enabled by a unique mirror design: the primary mirror doubles up as a tertiary mirror. This removed the need for a separate tertiary mirror, which allowed the telescope to stay compact in shape — rather than elongated — and therefore to be easily manoeuvrable despite its staggering mass. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin full operations in the coming months.Credit: Javier Torres/AFP via Getty The telescope is able to swing and take shots of different locations in the sky every 40 seconds. The energy required to start and stop the telescope is stored in electrical capacitors and then quickly released again, a similar principle to that underlying the regenerative braking used in modern electric cars. The choice was dictated, in part, by the observatory’s remote location at the top of a mountain in the Andes, far away from Chile's main electric grid. “We accelerate so fast that technically, there is not enough energy where the telescope is built to move the telescope,” says Jacques Sebag, an optical engineer who helped to lead the telescope’s design and construction. The opening of the Rubin Observatory is “a huge milestone in the astronomy world”, says Hiranya Peiris, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Rubin will open up a huge discovery space, expanding the surveyed space-time volume by a factor of a thousand.” It will also be the new global flagship instrument for astronomers working on a range of other topics, from understanding the structure and formation of the Milky Way to the early detection of potentially dangerous asteroids, Peiris and others say. But Tyson says the biggest discoveries are likely to be phenomena that have never been seen before. “I can’t predict what we will find,” Tyson says. “But I think I can predict we will find something we can’t imagine.”

A method based on quantum physics produces strings of numbers that are truly unpredictable.Credit: Flavio Coelho/Getty The outcome of quantum experiments is intrinsically unpredictable. Now physicists have combined that feature with blockchain techniques to generate random numbers in a fully transparent process for the first time1. Public sources of random numbers are used for various applications, such as lotteries, jury-duty selection or the assignment of placebos in clinical trials. A process that not only produces numbers that are truly random, but does so in a trackable, verifiable way can add an extra layer of trustworthiness, say the researchers who developed the new system. This is the fastest random-number generator ever built Their approach builds on a quantum-physics-based technique for generating random numbers that was first demonstrated in 20182 by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. It uses a device that produces pairs of photons that are entangled to each other, meaning that they share a common quantum state. The two photons are sent to two measuring stations 90 metres apart, where their polarizations are detected to produce a string of digital bits (0s and 1s). The bits are truly random because quantum physics dictates that the photons are not in a well-defined polarization until they are detected, and that the outcome of that measurement is random. Crucially, the way the detections are done is chosen at random in each location independently: any coordination between the two locations would require signals to travel between them faster than the speed of light. The results are then independently checked by devices at the University of Colorado across town. Tamper-proof process In the latest upgrade to this system, described in Nature on 11 June, the team has made it possible for third parties to verify the process by time-logging every step in the measurement using blockchain techniques. The change means anyone who accesses the publicly available data would be able to see if the process had been tampered with. The team has also vastly improved the system’s efficiency. “In our experiment, we produce 512 bits in about 20 seconds,” says study co-author Krister Shalm, a physicist at NIST. “In 2018, that took 10 minutes.” In a separate experiment published in March, a different group of researchers showed for the first time that random numbers could be generated using a quantum computer3. That technique is “very nice” and could be easier to implement than NIST’s entanglement-based experiment, says Peter Brown, a mathematician at Quriosity, a quantum cryptography research centre in Paris. But for now, the NIST system is the only one that is fully traceable. “There are some very nice applications of public randomness for which a posteriori validation is an important feature,” says Brown. For example, anyone who is picked for jury duty could verify that their selection was truly done at random, he says.

Neuroscientists developed a method to study how the brains distinguishes real from imagined images.Credit: Zephyr/Science Photo Library Real and imagined images are processed using the same systems in the brain, yet most people can distinguish between the two. Neuroscientists have identified two brain regions that keep imagined images separate from reality, described in a study1 published in Neuron on 5 June. “Being able to keep apart your inner world and actual reality is quite useful for normal functioning in daily life,” says co-author Nadine Dijkstra, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, UK. “This is something that does go wrong in psychosis and schizophrenia,” she adds. Dijkstra and her colleagues developed a method to probe the limit of people’s ability to distinguish real and imagined images. This involved showing volunteers black and white stripes of varying transparency over a background resembling television static. In some trials, the researchers asked the participants to imagine the stripes as they looked at the image, and to report whether they really saw the stripes and, if so, how vivid they were. When participants thought the stripes were more vivid, they were more likely to report them as real, regardless of whether the stripes were actually there. The researchers are trying to measure and then model an important yet abstract concept — the interaction between imagination and vision — that until now has been a philosophical question, says Thomas Naselaris, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Brain imaging To correlate the participants’ observations with brain activity, the researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) readings of the participants while they viewed the images with and without stripes. The fMRI readings, which rely on tracking changes in blood flow as a proxy for brain activity, showed that activity in a region called the fusiform gyrus correlated highly with the reported vividness of the stripes. Neuroscientists already knew that the fusiform gyrus processes high-level visual information, but its role in distinguishing imagined images from reality was unknown. This suggests that the fusiform gyrus sums up the total imagined and real stimulus, says Dijkstra. “The fusiform gyrus is tracking this ‘reality signal’, this vividness signal that then predicts reality judgments [whether participants judged the image to be real],” she says. The anterior insula, another region that is a central hub for processing and gatekeeping information, showed activity only when the participant judged the stripes to be real. Dijkstra notes that further studies are needed to confirm the extent of the anterior insula's involvement in separating imagined images from reality. Naselaris says the study is an important early step in disentangling perception and imagination, but he points out that studies relying on people reporting information need to account for other cognitive processes: for instance, if a participant’s attention wanders when the stripes are shown during the experiment, they might incorrectly report that the image wasn’t real. Both Dijkstra and Naselaris would like to observe brain activity in the two regions with more complex images, such as faces and scenes, because that would provide more information about how this process works in real-world visual processing, particularly in people who experience visual hallucinations.

Sheree had maintained a healthy weight for 15 years, thanks to a surgery that wrapped a silicone ring around the top of her stomach. But when the gastric band repeatedly slipped and had to be removed, the weight came back — fast. She gained nearly 20 kilograms in just 2 months. Frustrated, she turned to the latest generation of anti-obesity medications, hoping to slow the rapid weight gain. She cycled through various formulations of the blockbuster therapies semaglutide (sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (sold as Zepbound for weight loss), finding some success with higher doses of these drugs, which mimic the effects of the appetite-suppressing hormone GLP-1. But each time, drug shortages disrupted her treatment, forcing her to start again with a new formulation or to go without the drugs for weeks. Tired of the uncertainty around the therapies, she decided to try something different. Sheree, who asked that her middle name be used to protect her privacy, underwent two minimally invasive procedures designed to reduce the size of her stomach and to blunt hunger cues. Dozens of new obesity drugs are coming: these are the ones to watch Developed over the past two decades, these ‘endoscopic’ procedures — performed using flexible tubes inserted through the mouth, and no scalpels — are just one part of a growing toolkit to help people who want to move away from GLP-1 therapy. More-conventional bariatric surgeries, used routinely since the 1980s to reroute the flow of food through the gut or to restrict the stomach’s size, might also gain wider appeal. And the search is picking up for other drugs that could offer lasting alternatives for a post-GLP-1 population. That momentum is driven by a convergence of factors: chronic shortages of GLP-1 therapies, high costs, insurance barriers and debilitating side effects. As a result, many people who start the drugs ultimately stop — with discontinuation rates in clinical trials ranging from 37% to 81% in the first year1. And once treatment ends, the weight lost often piles back on. As demand grows for complementary strategies, the landscape of weight-loss treatment, which has been overtaken in recent years by semaglutide and tirzepatide, is now broadening again. In this way, says Ricardo Cohen, a weight-loss specialist at the Oswaldo Cruz German Hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, GLP-1 drugs are not just reshaping treatment — they’re pulling more people into often-overlooked avenues of support. “The new drugs are a gateway for people seeking obesity care,” he says. Surgical solution During their early ascent, GLP-1 drugs were often viewed not as a gateway, but as a pharmaceutical fix that might render older weight-loss strategies obsolete. For decades, bariatric surgery had been the gold standard in obesity care. In its various forms, including the gastric-band surgery that Sheree first had, the treatment induces substantial and sustained weight loss and improves obesity-related health conditions. And it has a strong safety record, with rates of serious complications and mortality that are comparable to, or even lower than, those of common procedures such as gallbladder removal and knee replacement. Still, many people with obesity view bariatric surgery as a last resort. The proportion of eligible individuals who undergo the procedures has remained stubbornly low — around 1% in the United States, and not much higher in any other country. The arrival of semaglutide and tirzepatide offered a way to reach the other 99% — promising to achieve similar weight reductions without the invasiveness, recovery time or stigma often associated with surgical intervention. “The hype generated by the drugs put surgery in a second tier,” acknowledges Cohen, president of the International Federation for the Surgery of Obesity and Metabolic Disorders (IFSO) in Naples, Italy, a global professional organization for bariatric surgeons. But he hopes to shift that perception. In 2022, the IFSO and its US counterpart revised their guidelines, lowering the recommended body mass index thresholds for surgery eligibility, aiming to make the procedure available to more people who could benefit2. Cohen now sees opportunities to expand the surgery’s reach to people who discontinue GLP-1 therapy or who fail to achieve results with medication alone — and he’s hoping to build the case with clinical data. At his clinic in Brazil, for example, Cohen will soon begin enrolling participants for a randomized trial in which people who first lose weight on semaglutide will be assigned to receive bariatric surgery, continued semaglutide injections or undergo both treatments. Tummy techniques Regardless of whether opinions of bariatric surgery shift, there are other ways to shrink the stomach. Starting in the late 2000s, weight-loss specialists began developing non-surgical approaches that achieve similar results (see ‘Shrinking the stomach’). As an added bonus, these techniques tend to be less expensive and simpler to deploy than are surgical methods, because they require fewer hospital resources and involve shorter recovery times. The most widely adopted has been endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty (ESG), a procedure performed under anaesthesia that internally folds and stitches the stomach into a narrow tube. This reduces the stomach’s volume by up to 70% — to about the size of a banana — limiting food intake and promoting a feeling of fullness, although the weight-loss results are generally more modest than with surgery. Pichamol ‘Sigh’ Jirapinyo, a bariatric endoscopist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, says that nearly half of the people who underwent ESG last year at her hospital or at Bariendo, a US-based network of eight non-surgical weight-loss clinics where she serves as medical director, had previously taken a GLP-1 drug. That’s up from about one in six just two years earlier. ESG systems are approved as obesity treatments in the United States, the United Kingdom and beyond, but the procedure doesn’t work consistently for everyone. Sheree, who is from North Carolina and in her 50s, learnt that first-hand in 2022. When she didn’t get the results she desired from the ESG procedure, her physician recommended an experimental endoscopic method that uses a medical device authorized for other applications. Known as gastric mucosal ablation (GMA), the procedure uses argon gas and an electrical current to generate ionized plasma, rapidly raising tissue temperatures in the upper portion of the stomach. The result is a controlled thermal injury that creates scar tissue along the gastric lining. Vivek Kumbhari, a bariatric endoscopist at Mayo Clinic Florida in Jacksonville, and his colleagues have shown in studies in rats, pigs and human tissue that this targeted tissue-burning technique can reduce the upper stomach’s secretion of ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates hunger. It also makes the stomach stiffer, effectively shrinking its capacity (see, for example, ref. 3). Obesity drugs: huge study identifies new health risks Early recipients of GMA, an outpatient procedure done under anaesthesia, have experienced some side effects, including cramping, nausea and bloating. But these have generally been mild and temporary, and are more than offset by the weight-loss benefits, according to Christopher McGowan, a gastroenterologist who co-founded the True You Weight Loss clinic in Cary, North Carolina. McGowan, in collaboration with Kumbhari and others, published a clinical trial of GMA last year4. The study involved ten people with obesity who had tried to lose weight with diet and exercise, but explicitly excluded anyone who had taken weight-loss medications. Now, the researchers aim to fill that gap with a trial targeting individuals who have discontinued GLP-1 therapy, which is more representative of real-world patients navigating multiple treatment options. Demonstrating the effectiveness of GMA in this population could help to persuade more physicians and potential candidates to consider the procedure, says McGowan — and might pave the way for reimbursement by insurers and health-care systems. Individual experiences such as Sheree’s could prove anecdotally persuasive, too. Months after undergoing GMA at McGowan’s clinic — where she paid around US$6,000 for the procedure — she has reached a weight that she feels comfortable with, has had no adverse reactions and is maintaining her weight without GLP-1 drugs. “It gave me an outlet to stop chasing these medicines,” Sheree says. Gut reset In a mock surgical suite in an industrial park on the outskirts of Boston, Harith Rajagopalan is testing a proprietary device developed explicitly for post-GLP-1 weight maintenance. When he switches it on, a slender, squid-like catheter shimmers to life. Near the tip, a tiny balloon gently inflates with water that is heated to near-boiling point. This tool, inserted endoscopically through the throat, creates a precisely controlled tissue burn much as GMA does, but is targeted at the duodenum, the upper portion of the small intestine, rather than the stomach. Called Revita, it aims to minimize tissue damage and promote regeneration, potentially rewiring how the gut senses nutrients and regulates metabolism. Such changes could reverse the harm that chronic high-fat and high-sugar diets do over time, restoring “a more normal physiologic state”, says Rajagopalan, who is co-founder and chief executive of the firm Fractyl Health in Burlington, Massachusetts. “The duodenum is not designed to see Coca-Cola and McDonald’s,” he says. Why do obesity drugs seem to treat so many other ailments? The company has shown that its one-time, 40-minute procedure — called duodenal mucosal resurfacing — can induce sustainable weight loss and improve various aspects of metabolism, including insulin sensitivity, in people with type 2 diabetes5,6. Fractyl Health is now advancing trials of its procedure as a weight-maintenance intervention for people who have stopped using tirzepatide. According to the company, no safety issues have been reported in the first 15 people treated in the trial, and early indications suggest that participants gained less weight over the same time period than did people who had discontinued GLP-1 drugs in previous trials7. “The initial data are promising,” says trial investigator Shailendra Singh, a gastroenterologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Maintenance phase Although surgical and endoscopic procedures might promise lasting weight loss, history shows that people naturally gravitate towards less-intrusive options — a pattern that will probably continue as more people look for alternatives after quitting weight-loss drugs. Preliminary studies show that structured exercise programmes8, specialized meal plans and smartphone-based behavioural interventions can aid in long-term weight management. But they don’t address the molecular hunger cues that fuel weight regain, says Kelseanna Hollis-Hansen, a nutrition researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “You’re still going to be fighting against the physiological drive to eat,” she says. Another option — available but not yet widely used — is to move people from GLP-1 drugs to older, more affordable and tolerable anti-obesity medications, such as the blood-sugar-lowering agent metformin or the appetite suppressant phentermine. A study published last year9 found that this crossover approach not only helped people to maintain their initial weight loss, but also spurred further reductions over time. Michelle Cardel, chief nutrition officer at WeightWatchers in New York City, is now leading a randomized trial in which people who have first lost at least 15% of their body weight through a GLP-1 therapy either continue with lifestyle support alone or add one of two older drug regimens. The goal, she says, is “to make sure that we have evidence-based strategies that directly inform our clinical care”. (Cardel notes that the study is unaffected by WeightWatchers’ bankruptcy filing in the United States last month.) New drugs to counteract rebound weight gain are also in the works. For example, GLP-1 therapies are being paired with experimental agents that enhance or preserve muscle mass — an approach designed to optimize metabolic function and mitigate rebound weight if or when the drugs are discontinued. Muscle tissue burns more calories than fat, helping to stabilize weight. Some drug companies are even positioning weight-loss therapies currently in development as post-GLP-1 solutions, rather than competing with first-line obesity treatments that are now available or nearing the market. One such firm is Response Pharmaceuticals in Falls Church, Virginia, which has developed a twice-daily pill, RDX-002, that blocks intestinal fat absorption and is being tested in a 68-person trial as a post-GLP-1 therapy. Trial enrolment progressed four times faster than expected, averaging close to one new sign-up for every business day that the study was recruiting, says Trisha Shamp, a clinical pharmacologist who leads medical services at Nucleus Network in St. Paul, Minnesota — a clinical-trial provider that is running the study. She attributes the rapid accrual to the pent-up demand for a safety net against weight rebound after GLP-1 drugs. “There’s a real fear of going off these meds and gaining that weight back.” New drugs and procedures are beginning to allay that fear — and were welcome news to Cheila from Florida, who asked that only her first name be used to protect her identity. She tried semaglutide for a couple of months, but the nausea and cramping proved unbearable. Last year, she underwent GMA, lost more than 10 kilograms and now enjoys a healthier relationship with food. Cheila thought GLP-1 therapy would be a miracle fix, but the reality proved otherwise. Her procedure wasn’t a magic bullet either — she has yet to reach her ideal weight. Still, she says: “There’s no way I’m going back on the drugs.”

Download the Nature Podcast 11 June 2025 In this episode: 00:45 A flexible neural-implant that grows with the brain Researchers have developed a soft electronic implant that can measure brain activity of amphibian embryos as they develop. Understanding the neural activity of developing brains is a key aim for neuroscientists, but conventional, rigid probes can damage growing brains. To overcome this, a team have developed a flexible mesh that stretches with the brain and tested it by monitoring single neuron activity during development of frog and axolotl embryos. More testing and ethical considerations will be required, but the researchers hope that eventually such implants could help with neurological conditions that affect humans. Research article: Sheng et al. 13:11 Research Highlights The exoplanet slowly evaporating into space, and cockatoos that have figured out an innovative way to stay hydrated. Research Highlight: Solved: the mystery of the evaporating planet Research Highlight: Clever cockatoos learn an easy way to quench their thirst 15:30 An AI-based way to repair damaged paintings By combining AI tools with mechanical engineering techniques, a researcher has developed a new way to speed up the restoration of damaged paintings. The technique creates a removable mask that can be overlaid onto a painting to cover any damage apparent in the artwork. It was successfully tested on an oil painting, fixing a large number of damaged areas in only a few hours. This could offer a significant speed-boost to painting restoration, which can often take months, or even years. Research article: Kachkine Video: Meet the engineer who invented an AI-powered way to restore art 27:36 Briefing Chat A new ranking system could make it easier to spot universities that are chasing publishing metrics at the expense of rigorous science, and evidence that cutting off rhinos’ horns deters poachers. Nature: ‘Integrity index’ flags universities with high retraction rates AP: Cutting off rhinos’ horns is a contentious last resort to stop poaching. A new study found it works Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too.