How to advance revolutionary science: high turnover, high risk and a licence to fail - Nature

Coiro, M., Doyle, J. A. & Hilton, J. How deep is the conflict between molecular and fossil evidence on the age of angiosperms? New Phytol. 223, 83–99 https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.15708 (2019). Article Hughes, N. F. & McDougall, A. B. Barremian-Aptian angiospermid pollen records from southern England. Rev. Palaeobot. Palynol. 65, 145–151 (1990). Article

Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of workers and youth mobilised across France for the latest in the recent wave of student-led protests sweeping the country. With 90 percent of French universities and hundreds of schools shut yesterday, it is clear that this youth-led movement has not been cowed or diminished in scale, despite brutal police repression. We publish below an article by Jérôme Métellus originally published in French at marxiste.org, which lays out the tasks ahead, if the successes of yesterday’s protests are to be turned into a struggle that can deal a killing blow to the hated Macron government. On 13 October, university and high school students mobilised massively once again. They have repeated 6 October’s show of force. This confirms the depth of the movement, its enormous reserves of fighting spirit – and its revolutionary potential. All eyes are now on 17 October. The idea was launched before the start of the magnificent mobilisation of high school students. But they, like the university students, naturally seized upon it. They have made 17 October a major step in their fight against the dismantling of the national education system.

The novel rotary speaker created by Nottingham engineers. Credit: University of NottinghamResearchers have demonstrated a solid-state approach to sound modulation that electronically creates the acoustic sensation of a moving sound source. A new speaker system developed at the University of Nottingham creates audio effects by manipulating sound waves around the listener rather than modifying only the electronic signal. The solid-state design recreates aspects of a classic rotary speaker without motors, belts, or other moving components, offering a new approach that sits between mechanical and digital audio effects. Researchers in the university’s Faculty of Engineering built the system from a circular array of speakers. Instead of physically rotating a horn or other sound source, the device electronically shifts the audio signal around the array, producing the acoustic impression of movement. The work has been published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. Moving the Sound, Not Just the SignalMost electronic and digital audio effects alter a signal before it reaches a speaker. The Nottingham system takes a different approach.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.