Heidi Ledford

2 weeks ago | nature.com | Jeff Tollefson |Dan Garisto |Heidi Ledford

In just the first three months of his second term, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science. His administration has fired thousands of government scientists, bringing large swathes of the country’s research to a standstill and halting many clinical trials.

3 weeks ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

A diet rich in fibre and low in fat can replenish populations of gut microbes ravaged by antibiotics, according to a study1 in mice. The analysis, published on 30 April in Nature, found that good nutrition is more powerful than transplanting faeces — and the microbes it contains — from a healthy gut into a disrupted one. In addition, failure to correct an unhealthy diet rendered such transplants useless for helping the gut to recover from antibiotics.

1 month ago | nature.com | Helen Pearson |Heidi Ledford

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has produced some huge scientific breakthroughs, ranging from the first mRNA vaccines and CRISPR-based gene-editing techniques to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the first measurements of gravitational waves. But you won’t find any of these advances described in the top-cited papers published since 2000. That is one of the findings of an analysis by Nature’s news team of the 25 most-cited papers published in the twenty-first century.

1 month ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

A second unvaccinated child in Texas has died from measles, amplifying fears that the outbreak there could be wider than reported. The death, announced on 6 April, also harkens back to a pre-vaccine past that many Americans have forgotten, when hundreds of children died each year of measles. Generations ago, a child swimming in a community pool could become paralysed by polio.

1 month ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford |Max Kozlov

Long COVID advocates and researchers in the United States have done the extraordinary. After a bruising battle, they managed to revive some of the research grants cancelled by the administration of President Donald Trump ― a rare victory for science as Trump’s team slashes funding and fires federal scientific staff. The crisis began in late March, when the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated the funding for dozens of long-COVID projects.