Nature

1 week ago | nature.com | Dan Garisto |Jeff Tollefson

As the administration of President Donald Trump continues its campaign to reshape the US government with spending cuts and mass lay-offs, some scientists still employed at government agencies say that their work has become impossible.

1 week ago | nature.com | Linda Nordling

“I’m a plant pathologist at the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Organization in Machakos, east of Nairobi. For more than a decade, I’ve been working on a sustainable way to control Striga, a parasitic weed that damages farmers’ crops here in Kenya. This photo, taken in January this year, shows me holding a Striga plant in a maize field in western Kenya, where Striga infested 73% of farms in 2009. It steals nutrients through the crops’ roots, sometimes destroying entire harvests.

1 week ago | nature.com | Subhra Priyadarshini

After nearly a decade of planning, lobbying, and fine-tuning, the Indian government has greenlit the full-scale construction of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory-India (LIGO-India), a world-class gravitational wave observatory. With a formal tender for civil and vacuum works issued this week and a ₹1600 crore (~$190 million USD) construction budget now unlocked, India’s contribution to the global hunt for gravitational waves is shifting from blueprints to brick and steel.

1 week ago | nature.com | A. Chyei Vinluan |Austin Smith |Edward H. Chang

AbstractIn both a field study (N = 28,064) and a preregistered vignette experiment (N = 800), we find that more perceived structure in evaluation processes is associated with higher levels of belonging for employees. More structured evaluation processes increase perceptions of procedural justice and of genuine commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion—both of which are tied to a greater sense of belonging.

1 week ago | nature.com | Wei Li |Shujun Li |Zhijun CHEN

AbstractLignin represents the most abundant biomass resource, which contains aromatic units. Lignin refinery is a promising, sustainable alternative for the production of aromatic chemicals. However, depolymerization and transformation of lignin into aryl halides, which are indispensable chemicals in both the academic and industrial communities, remain challenging.