A fraud buster, a nuclear-clock maker and a virus hunter. These are just a few of the remarkable people chosen for this year’s Nature’s 10.
The Nature’s 10 list recognizes key developments in science over the past year, and tells the stories of some of the people behind them. It is compiled by Nature’s editors to highlight important trends in science, technology, engineering and medicine, as well as to acknowledge how researchers are shaping our world. Achievements this year range from reimagining how weather is forecast to leading a nation.
Ekkehard Peik: Father time
A physicist made key discoveries that could lead to nuclear clocks that outperform the best atomic ones.
Ekkehard Peik thought it would take only a few months to create the basic ingredients of a radical new clock. That was back in 2001, when he and his colleague Christian Tamm proposed a device with the potential to be even more precise and portable than the world’s best atomic clocks.
Peik’s estimate was off by more than two decades. But this year, his team and two other groups managed to finally achieve what he and Tamm had proposed, generating the first tick of a clock based on tiny energy shifts inside an atomic nucleus.
Kaitlin Kharas: Fair-pay champion
A PhD student helped to lead a campaign to get Canadian graduate students and postdocs their biggest pay rise in 20 years.
On 16 April 2024, Kaitlin Kharas was one of a select few people ushered into an office across the street from the Canadian Parliament and given a sneak peek at the latest budget.
It was, perhaps, an unusual source of excitement for a PhD student. But Kharas had waited a long time to see the contents of those stuffy, bureaucratic pages: the biggest pay rise in 20 years for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers across Canada. The budget included huge boosts to both the number and value of government scholarships. “There was absolute excitement and giddiness when I saw those numbers,” she says.
Li Chunlai: Moon-rock guardian
A geologist is leading efforts to study the rock samples that China’s Chang’e-6 mission collected from the Moon’s far side.
On 25 June, Li Chunlai watched eagerly as a capsule carrying the first pieces of the far side of the Moon landed on Earth. “Sample, I finally got you,” he thought, as if speaking to an adversary he had spent years trying to outwit.
That moment capped decades of hard work for Li, deputy chief designer for China’s Chang’e-6 mission, which blasted off to the Moon on 3 May. The 3,200-kilogram lander — about as heavy as a pickup truck — spent two days drilling and scooping material on the lunar surface before sending the samples back to Earth.
Anna Abalkina: Fraud buster
This Russian science sleuth spots fake papers and hijacked journals.
Early this year, Anna Abalkina found out that her name was on a watch list for Roskomnadzor, a Russian agency that tracks online and social-media activity. Abalkina, a Russian citizen now working in Berlin, tries not to worry about it. There shouldn’t be a risk if she were to return to Russia, she reasons. “But the problem is, you never know.” Her colleagues advise against it.
The reason that she has come under the watchful eye of the Russian state is that she has spent 13 years rooting out fraud in the scientific literature. Her work on plagiarism and on uncovering businesses that sell fake papers — called paper mills — has focused most heavily on Russia and ex-Soviet countries, and more recently on Iran and India.
Huji Xu: Daring doctor
A physician and researcher took a chance on a revolutionary approach to treating autoimmune disease.
Huji Xu’s team was on tenterhooks after delivering the first treatments. “We couldn’t sleep, because all these cases are very sick patients,” says Xu, a rheumatologist at the Naval Medical University in Shanghai, China, who published the first results of a revolutionary cellular therapy for autoimmune diseases in September (X. Wang et al. Cell 187, 4890–4904; 2024).
Two weeks after receiving engineered immune cells, the first patient — a woman with a debilitating disorder characterized by extreme muscle weakness — told nurses that she had regained enough strength to lift her arms and comb her hair. Two other recipients, both men, with a different condition, said that their symptoms began fading within days. More than six months later, all three recipients were in remission, according to Xu. “We are a little bit more relaxed” now, he says.
Wendy Freedman: Cosmic ranger
A long-standing tension over the Universe’s expansion rate might be put to rest — thanks to this astronomer’s efforts.
For decades, scientists have disagreed about a fundamental question: how quickly is the Universe expanding? But this year, astronomer Wendy Freedman announced results that could help to put the controversy to rest.
The long-standing puzzle has been that two methods to measure the cosmic expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, give stubbornly different answers. Studies using fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the Big Bang — suggest that for every megaparsec (Mpc; or 3.2 million light years) farther out one looks, galaxies rush away 67 kilometres per second faster. But when scientists, including Freedman, measured the recession rate of far galaxies and estimated their distance, they got a larger Hubble constant: variously 72–74 km s−1 Mpc−1.
Muhammad Yunus: Nation builder
An economist and Nobel peace laureate is now the interim leader of Bangladesh. He has the expectations of his country’s students on his shoulders.
After weeks of deadly demonstrations that toppled Bangladesh’s autocratic government in August, the students who led the revolution had one demand: invite Nobel Peace prizewinning economist Muhammad Yunus to lead the nation.
The task is the greatest challenge of Yunus’s life. In a career spanning six decades, he’s made a name for himself by testing ideas to fight poverty. Using research to inform decisions and understanding systems from first principles is at the core of how Yunus solves problems, say those who know him. “He is in his eighties, but has energy, physical and mental health. He has empathy and is a great communicator,” says Alex Counts, who has worked with Yunus for more than 30 years.
Placide Mbala: Virus hunter
He has been sounding the alarm about deadly mpox outbreaks. But when will the world truly listen?
Early this year, cases of mpox erupted across Central Africa, killing hundreds. Seeing the events unfold so soon after the still-simmering outbreak of 2022 “felt like scientific amnesia”, says Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Mbala led a team of researchers who sounded the alarm about the latest outbreak when they spotted a suspicious cluster of mpox cases among young adults and sex workers in an eastern region of the DRC. The team predicted that the disease would move quickly and urged health officials both in the DRC and in neighbouring countries to devise plans to contain the monkeypox virus’s spread.
Cordelia Bähr: Climate crusader
A lawyer and an army of older women in Switzerland won a historical legal battle against their government over its climate policies.
Eight years of legal fighting came down to this one moment.
On 9 April, Cordelia Bähr and the 2,500-plus women she represented in a landmark climate lawsuit were waiting to hear how the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would rule.
“I was very, very, very nervous,” says Bähr. But at the same time, she expected her side to prevail.
Rémi Lam: AI weather sleuth
This researcher is developing machine-learning techniques to vastly improve weather forecasts.
Rémi Lam had heard about San Francisco’s microclimates, but he didn’t realize how idiosyncratic they could be until he moved there this year. “The street I live in can be foggy, and it’s sunny two blocks down,” he says. Weather forecasts for the city can be wildly incorrect depending on the location. Even state-of-the-art weather forecasts can’t predict the city’s microclimates and how they will vary.
Lam has spent a lot of time thinking about weather and how to forecast it. As a researcher at Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm based in London, Lam has been pioneering the use of machine learning to improve weather prediction. This field has made rapid advances in the past few years, and Lam and his colleagues have been at the forefront of these efforts.
Click here https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-03890-5/index.html to read their full profiles.
