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Bite marks on the skeleton’s pelvis (top left) could suggest that a lion dragged the combatant away by his hip after being incapacitated, researchers suggest.
Bite marks found on a skeleton could be the first physical evidence that humans fought lions in the Roman empire. The young man’s skeleton — excavated from a UK cemetery where gladiators might have been buried — had puncture marks on the pelvis. Working with London Zoo, researchers compared the impressions with bite marks on horse bones made by big cats such as cheetahs, lions and tigers and found a match with lion bites. The discovery “[reshapes] our perception of Roman entertainment culture in the region”, says anthropologist and study co-author Tim Thompson.
Science sleuths have identified hundreds of cases in which artificial intelligence (AI) tools seem to have been used in the preparation of scientific papers without disclosure. In a preprint analysis of 500 such papers, 13% of them appeared in journals belonging to large publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature and MDPI. In some cases, the papers have been silently corrected — the hallmark AI phrases removed without acknowledgement. This type of quiet change is a potential threat to scientific integrity, say some researchers.
Reference: arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
Nature’s news team, including this newsletter, is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.
Trump’s impact on US science
Fresh turmoil has hit the US National Science Foundation (NSF): hundreds more of the agency’s research grants were terminated on Friday on top of the hundreds already cancelled the previous week. The blows came one day after the agency’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, abruptly resigned and NSF staff members were offered incentives to retire early. In a farewell letter to staff, Panchanathan wrote, “I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency”.
US science-funding agencies have so far frozen or cancelled at least US$6 billion in research grants and contracts across a number of top universities. These cuts are part of the Trump administration’s fight to reshape admissions, teaching and more at these institutions, which they have alleged are indoctrinating students with left-wing ideologies. The Trump team cites failing to stop “antisemitic violence and harassment” on campuses as the reason for halting funding to Columbia and Harvard. In some other cases, no justification has been stated publicly. Since the funding cuts began, more than 500 university presidents have since signed a letter opposing “unprecedented government overreach”.
Source: Data from Trump administration announcements, media reports and NIH RePORT
Several European research institutes are joining a worldwide grass-roots effort to save science data sets that could be deleted or decommissioned amid the Trump administration’s attack on research. Pangaea — a massive environmental data repository run by two institutes in Germany — is formally working with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to back up at-risk databases. NOAA monitors Earth’s atmosphere and climate and provides weather-forecasting services. Pangaea started to collect the freely-available data after hearing ‘distress calls’ from the scientific community and NOAA staffers.
Notable quotable
Social psychologist Keon West argues that while the Trump administration’s orders to dismantle diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are misguided, these initiatives could be improved. He calls for a more scientific approach to these programmes, underpinned by clear objectives and measurable metrics. (Nature | 5 min read)
Features & opinion
When trying to diagnose a rare disease, clinicians often sequence a pre-determined set of genes to try and find a disease-causing variant. This can stretch to a person’s entire exome — all of their protein-coding genes. But the exome only makes up 1.5% of our genome. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) can fill in the rest, capturing variants that might influence how genes are expressed. As WGS becomes cheaper and researchers develop tools that help analyse the data, many geneticists are calling for it to be offered much earlier in the diagnostic process for rare diseases.
This editorially independent article is part of Nature Outlook: Medical diagnostics, a supplement produced with financial support from Seegene.
Where I work
Jemma Wadham is a geoscientist at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway.Credit: Jacopo Pasotti for Nature
Geoscientist Jemma Wadham studies the ever-changing glaciers of the Arctic, analysing their melt water for beneficial or toxic chemicals and exploring the methane-producing microorganisms beneath them. “I see myself as a glacier-forensics expert, uncovering what has happened beneath the glacier, like investigating a crime,” she says. “Eventually, we hope that our research in Norway will contribute to scientists’ understanding of how glaciers affect carbon cycling and marine life in other global settings, such as the Canadian Arctic and Patagonia in South America.” (Nature | 3 min read)
On Friday, Leif Penguinson was celebrating World Penguin Day with a trip to the Chola Pass in Nepal. Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.
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