Digital distractions are real — but you can rescue your attention span

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Researchers have created a thermometer small enough to check the temperature of a single living cell, and even individual cellular regions, such as the nucleus. The nanosensors are made of pentacene — a line of five benzene rings — embedded into tiny crystal fragments that are coated with a cell-friendly polymer. The sensors rely on a quantum property called spin, which causes them to glow when excited by lasers and microwaves — a glow that changes depending on how warm they are.

Nature | 6 min read

Reference: Science Advances paper

A stranded humpback whale became the focus of people’s sympathy in Germany, but researchers say that efforts to save it might have done more harm than good. The whale, which was nicknamed ‘Timmy’, was transported into deeper seas in a water-filled barge as part of a plan fronted by a far-right media personality, among others. Video of the whale struggling in the barge and being dragged by its sensitive fluke have horrified some marine biologists, and a veterinarian that fled the rescue team said the mission went badly awry. “It’s very hard to watch,” says oceanographer Burkard Baschek. “The animal must have suffered greatly.”

Science | 8 min read

The abrupt termination last year of thousands of research grants by the US National Institutes of Health disproportionately hit researchers from groups that have been historically under-represented in the biomedical sciences — including women, people of colour and investigators from sexual and gender minorities. “Who’s based in the sciences gets to influence what questions are being asked, so when diverse investigators and scientists are pushed out, then those questions are also pushed out,” says epidemiologist Arjee Restar.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: The Lancet Regional Health Americas paper

Researchers attempting to quantify the impact of AI on the scientific literature say that it’s a lot — but it’s hard to say just how much. For example, a recent analysis of 5,000 biomedical science papers published last year in journals including Science, Nature and Cell, flagged 6 of them as fully AI-written, with one in eight articles containing some AI-generated text. “We’re at the very, very beginning of this new era. What we’re seeing is the first droplets of a storm that’s incoming,” says stem-cell biologist Richard She, who did the analysis.

Nature | 8 min read

Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Almost half of people with hard-to-treat blood cancer given longer-lived CAR T cells with stem-like characteristics went into remission in a small clinical trial. The ‘enriched’ immunotherapy contained an unusually high proportion of immune cells with properties similar to stem cells, such as the ability to generate many types of T cells. “On a per-dose basis, these cells definitely seemed more potent,” says cancer immunotherapy researcher Christine Brown. “It’s a first step, but an important one.”

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: Cell paper

Features & opinion

Are smartphones and other digital distractions really eating away at our attention spans? Research across psychology and neuroscience suggest that people do flit from one task to another more frequently than they did in previous decades, and that this switching is often detrimental to performance. But there is little evidence that the brain’s fundamental ability to concentrate has been impaired. This suggests that if we can shut down the distractions of our environment, it is possible to recover focus.

Nature | 16 min read

“Belief in photographic memory is common and the idea is compelling,” says memory researcher Gabrielle Principe. “But it is simply wrong.” The closest thing to most people’s concept of ‘photographic memory’ is eidetic imagery: a rare ability seen mostly in children, in which people say they can recall a long-studied image — but the mental picture isn’t perfect, and soon fades. “The brain is not a roll of film, it’s a storyteller,” writes Principe. And that’s a good thing: forgetting is an essential process that doesn’t get bogged down in the details, dulls the pain of negative experiences and helps to maintain your sense of self, as you are now.

The Conversation | 7 min read

Image of the week

Micro-computed tomography is a type of scan often used in biology and other sciences. Here, researchers combined it with a deep-learning technique to scan samples of coral skeleton (from two species, Montastraea cavernosa and Porites astreoides) in 3D, revealing structural details such as microscopic pores, with a resolution of just a few micrometres. The team tested three data-analysis techniques, all of which could distinguish between healthy corals and those affected by stony coral tissue loss disease. The disease is killing corals in the Florida Reef and the Caribbean, and has unknown causes.

See more of the month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team. (Florida Atlantic University)

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Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Felicity Nelson

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