How to bounce back from a PhD-project failure

Hello Nature readers,
Today we hear that a major report has struggled to tally humanity’s exploitation of wild species. Plus, we meet an AI that learns physics like a baby and learn how to bounce back from a PhD-project failure.

Where livelihoods depend on wild species

Billions of people worldwide rely on at least 50,000 species of wild plants and animals for food, medicine and income. Dozens of authors, including individuals with Indigenous and local knowledge, were involved in a major attempt by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to quantify how much humanity relies on nature. The report highlights many examples of wild species being used sustainably, and recommends ways to support and replicate those methods. Critics say there are significant gaps in the evidence and question whether some cases are as sustainable as they seem. The report’s authors acknowledge those gaps but say they shouldn’t slow efforts to introduce better practices.

DeepMind AI learns physics like a baby

Researchers at Google-owned company DeepMind have created an artificial intelligence (AI) that knows about as much physics as a 3-month-old baby. The team trained the system on simple videos until it could predict patterns such as solidity (two objects do not pass through one another) and continuity (objects do not blink in and out of existence). The research makes an interesting contribution to the nature–nurture debate about how infants learn to see the world, say psychologists Susan Hespos and Apoorva Shivaram in the accompanying News & Views article. The results suggest that experience “is an important contribution to the learning process, but it is not the whole story. The complete story requires some built-in knowledge.”

Bounce back from a PhD-project failure

Science is riddled with stories of getting scooped, data glitches and funding crises — which can feel particularly acute for PhD candidates who are racing against time to earn their degrees. Five researchers talk about the hurdles they faced and how they overcame them.

‘Why I advocate for abortion access for all’

“I know in my heart that I would never have become a scientist had I not had my abortion,” writes palaeoecologist Jacquelyn Gill. She never regretted her decision, she says, but she has carried a lifetime of grief because of unnecessary barriers that made the experience more invasive, expensive and traumatic than it had to be. She shares her deeply personal story to illustrate that “reproductive justice matters to science not only because scientists get abortions, but also because so many scientists are well-positioned to use our privilege and roles as trusted experts to de-stigmatize and support abortion rights for everyone”.

How BA.5 is reshaping the pandemic

The rise and rise of the BA.5 variant of SARS-CoV-2 — a sub-variant of Omicron — raises questions about how we will deal with a pandemic in which many more people get COVID-19 or experience repeated reinfections. Focusing on the United States, where the variant is spreading quickly, science writer Ed Yong debunks some false assumptions. He also urges US leaders to tighten up the country’s slackening health-protection policies against COVID-19. “This is what ‘living with COVID” means’,” writes Yong. “A continual cat-and-mouse game that we can choose to play seriously or repeatedly forfeit.”