Science

A study published today changes the risk calculus for every long-horizon decision being made across the Atlantic world. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the ocean current that regulates climate across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, now has a greater than 50% probability of collapse, according to the new research which uses real-world ocean observations to validate climate models. ... and the impacts are: 🌊 50–100cm of additional sea-level rise along Atlantic coastlines. ❄️ Extreme cold winters and severe summer droughts across Western Europe . 🌧️ Collapse of the tropical rainfall belt across Sub-Saharan Africa and South America ⏱️ The tipping point — the moment collapse becomes irreversible — could arrive by mid-century. That is within current infrastructure cycles, bond maturities, and institutional investment horizons. The models producing these projections do not yet include Greenland meltwater, meaning the real risk is likely still higher. The WMO State of the Global Climate 2025 confirmed the trends feeding this: record ocean heat for the ninth consecutive year, accelerating ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica, and the highest Earth energy imbalance ever recorded. The physical system is moving faster than our risk frameworks. Any climate risk assessment that treats AMOC collapse as low-probability is now out of date and should be revised. Any coastal infrastructure investment not pricing in accelerated sea-level rise is built on obsolete assumptions. Any food and agricultural security strategy for Europe, Africa, or South America that ignores potential circulation collapse is incomplete. What is your organisation's AMOC scenario? Source: Portmann et al., Science Advances, April 15 2026 https://lnkd.in/e4HRQM6X

Today, I’m thrilled to share what I believe is the biggest breakthrough in microbiome science for a decade. Nature Magazine, the world's most influential scientific journal, has just published a scientific paper by ZOE's scientists, establishing the first reliable, repeatable, global way to measure the health of an individual’s gut microbiome. It represents the culmination of eight years of work at ZOE. Scientists have been trying to solve this puzzle for more than 20 years, right back to when they first discovered how important our gut microbes are for our health. It’s been achieved only because more than 34,000 ZOE members took part in this research. We’ve known for a long time that the microbiome is linked to cholesterol, inflammation, blood sugar control and even how we store fat. But we’ve never had a clear, evidence-based way to measure how healthy a microbiome actually is. This analysis finally delivers it, revealing a global ranking of microbes that works across populations, diets and environments. The insights are remarkable. Among the top 50 “good microbes” linked with better health, 22 were completely unknown to science until today, and most of the others have never been successfully grown in a lab. We also discovered clear links between these good microbes and health outcomes: healthy individuals carry around 3.6 more of these beneficial species, and people at a healthy weight carry about 5.2 more than those living with obesity. We also found a strong connection to diet. People eating healthier diets consistently have microbiomes that score better on this ranking. What we eat shapes our gut health, and now we can measure this relationship with unprecedented clarity. ZOE was created to enable microbiome research at a scale that traditional science has been unable to fund, and use this research to create actionable advice that can transform our gut health. This is a major milestone in that journey. I’m delighted to say that as a result, this breakthrough science is immediately available for the public to investigate their own microbiome through ZOE’s new Gut Health Test in the UK, and this is coming soon in the US. You can now receive not only a reliable measurement of how healthy your microbiome is as you change their diet, but also discover the health of clusters of gut microbes in your gut affecting metabolism, inflammation and more. To all our amazing ZOE members who have participated in our science: you made this possible. You are transforming our understanding of the microbiome. Thank you so much. I hope you feel as proud and excited as I do. I should note that your research is now published in Nature, which is the ultimate scientific accolade, and you can definitely brag about that with your friends! If you think this science could help others understand their health, I’d love for you to share it. You’ll find links to more details from our findings and access to the paper in the comments.

We’re planting trees — but losing biodiversity. Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent paper published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether. Forest restoration is at the heart of Target 2 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to place 30% of degraded ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030. But the gap between ambition and outcome is wide. "Biodiversity will remain a vague buzzword rather than an actual outcome" unless projects explicitly prioritize it, the authors caution. Restoration has typically prioritized utilitarian goals such as timber production, carbon sequestration, or erosion control. This bias is reflected in the widespread use of monoculture plantations or low-diversity agroforests. Nearly half of the Bonn Challenge’s forest commitments consist of commercial plantations of exotic species — a trend that risks undermining biodiversity rather than enhancing it. Scientific evidence shows that restoring biodiversity requires more than planting trees. Methods like natural regeneration — allowing forests to recover on their own — can often yield superior biodiversity outcomes, though they face social and economic barriers. By contrast, planting a few fast-growing species may sequester carbon quickly but offers little for threatened plants and animals. Biodiversity recovery is influenced by many factors: the intensity of prior land use, the surrounding landscape, and the species chosen for restoration. Recovery is slow — often measured in decades — and tends to lag for rare and specialist species. Alarmingly, most projects stop monitoring after just a few years, long before ecosystems stabilize. However, the authors say there are reasons for optimism. Biodiversity markets, including emerging biodiversity credit schemes and carbon credits with biodiversity safeguards, could mobilize new financing. Meanwhile, technologies like environmental DNA sampling, bioacoustics, and remote sensing promise to improve monitoring at scale. To turn good intentions into reality, the paper argues, projects must define explicit biodiversity goals, select suitable methods, and commit to long-term monitoring. Social equity must also be central. "Improving biodiversity outcomes of forest restoration… could contribute to mitigating power asymmetries and inequalities," the authors write, citing examples from Madagascar and Brazil. If designed well, forest restoration could help address the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. But without a deliberate shift, billions of dollars risk being spent on projects that plant trees — and little else. 🔬 Brancalion et al (2025): https://lnkd.in/gG6X36WP

If your paper is getting rejected, it isn’t necessarily the science that’s the problem (it’s likely the journal fit that’s off!). Here’s how you can be be strategic about journal selection. How do I choose the right scientific journal? ↳ Analyze your citation list and target relevant publications. Can impact factor really determine journal quality? ↳ Look beyond numbers, focus on specialized audience fit. How to avoid predatory journal publication traps? ↳ Verify journal reputation before submitting your research. Will editors help improve my manuscript? ↳ Follow author guidelines meticulously. Navigating the academic publication landscape can feel like traversing a complex maze. As a professor, I've learned that selecting the right journal is both an art and a science. Here's a game-changing approach I've developed: 1. Conduct a citation audit: Count journals you've referenced most frequently. These are likely your ideal publication targets. 2. Beyond Impact Factor: Don't get fixated on numbers. A lower-ranked journal with a specialized audience might be more valuable than a high-impact generic publication. 3. Beware of predatory journals: If an unsolicited email promises quick publication for a fee, run! Legitimate open-access journals conduct rigorous peer review. 4. Craft a strategic cover letter: Suggest credible reviewers, highlight your paper's novelty, and demonstrate professionalism. 5. Patience is key: Most journals reject approximately 50% of submissions. Don't be discouraged - each submission is a learning opportunity. Pro tip: Always read and follow the journal's specific author guidelines. This shows you're a detail-oriented, professional researcher. Have you ever struggled with selecting the right scientific journal for your research? What challenges have you encountered? #science #scientist #ScientificCommunication #publishing #phd #professor #research #postgraduate

Double Materiality 🌎 Beyond compliance with key regulations like CSRD, double materiality assessments are essential for businesses to develop a comprehensive sustainability strategy. This framework helps companies identify how their activities impact society and the environment while also assessing how sustainability-related risks and opportunities affect financial performance. Impact materiality examines how a company’s operations influence people and the planet, covering topics like climate change, biodiversity, and social equity. Financial materiality focuses on how sustainability factors, such as regulatory changes, resource scarcity, or reputational risks, impact business performance and long-term growth. Some issues, like climate change mitigation, resource management, and labor conditions, fall under double materiality, meaning they are significant for both external impact and financial outcomes. By integrating double materiality, companies can align sustainability efforts with business objectives, risk management, and investor expectations, strengthening corporate resilience. This approach ensures that sustainability is not just a compliance exercise but a strategic tool to drive innovation, operational efficiency, and stakeholder trust. It also supports transparent reporting, helping businesses meet increasing demands from investors, regulators, and consumers for credible sustainability disclosures. Sectors like finance, manufacturing, and retail are already leveraging double materiality insights to guide decision-making, investment strategies, and supply chain management. This matrix developed by Vestas in their sustainability report is a great example of how to structure a double materiality assessment, clearly linking environmental and social impacts to financial performance and strategic decision-making. #sustainability #sustainable #business #esg #climatechange #doublemateriality #materiality

What happens when companies break their climate promises? Almost nothing. A new study has uncovered troubling truths about corporate climate commitments. Out of 1,041 companies with emissions reduction targets set for 2020: -9% (88 firms) openly failed to meet their goals. -31% (320 firms) stopped reporting on their targets without explanation. What happens when companies miss these targets? Practically no consequences: -Only three failed companies faced media scrutiny. -No significant market backlash, media sentiment shifts, or ESG rating downgrades. In contrast, companies were rewarded with positive press and improved ESG ratings simply for announcing these targets. The bigger issue: This accountability gap threatens the credibility of ambitious 2030 and 2050 climate pledges. Unlike financial targets, which are rigorously monitored, emissions goals often exist in a vacuum—without oversight or real consequences for failure. Interestingly, the study found that: -Firms in common-law countries and those with stronger media accountability had better success rates. -High-emitting sectors like energy and materials struggled the most, with the highest rates of "disappeared" targets. With more companies backing away from climate action, we cannot afford to let this cycle continue. It’s time for corporate sustainability leadership to move beyond announcements and deliver measurable, transparent results. Accountability mechanisms—demanded by both regulators and stakeholders are urgently needed. A great piece of work by Xiaoyan Jiang, Shawn Kim, and Shirley Simiao Lu! Let’s learn from these insights to ensure that corporate climate pledges actually deliver. #climatechange #netzero #esg

Text understanding with #LLMs is useful but not enough for scientific understanding and discovery. In chemistry, in addition to text, chemical structure is essential to determine the properties of molecules. We have created the first multimodal text-chemical structure model: MoleculeSTM. It has an aligned latent space of both modalities. This allows the users to provide free-form text instructions to create molecules with arbitrary sets of properties. This enables zero-shot text-guided molecule editing (lead optimization) without the need to fine-tune the model for each new specification. Paper: bit.ly/4736BPH Code: bit.ly/4877YOS The core idea of MoleculeSTM is to align the chemical structure and textual description modalities using contrastive pretraining. The pivotal advantage of such alignment is its capacity to introduce a new paradigm of LLM for drug discovery: by fully utilizing the open vocabulary and compositionality attributes of natural language. To adapt it to a more concrete task, we focus on zero-shot text-guided molecule editing (aka lead optimization). Existing ML-based molecule editing methods suffer from data insufficiency issues. MoleculeSTM circumvents this by formulating molecule editing as a natural language understanding and interpolation problem, which is much easier to solve under the zero-shot setting. Such a novel paradigm is meaningful for addressing more practical drug discovery challenges. We will have more follow-up works along this LLM for the molecule/drug discovery research line. Please stay tuned! Shengchao Liu Chaowei Xiao Weili Nie Zhuoran Qiao Caltech

ISRO along with NASA are making ready world's most expensive Earth Observation Satellite - NISAR with a budget of 1.5 billion $. For scale , the market cap of RBL bank or PVR is ~ 1.6 billion $. Here is why all are waiting for NISAR 👇 NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture RADAR ( NISAR ) - is the first satellite mission to collect radar data in two microwave bandwidth regions, called the L-band and the S-band, to measure changes of our planet’s surface, including movements as small as centimeter. NISAR uses a sophisticated information-processing technique known as synthetic aperture radar to produce extremely high-resolution images. To image objects from such a large distance , we need antenna of the length of Kilometers , which is practically impossible. So scientists use fast motion of the satellite to simulate a "Synthetic Aperture" ( a virtual antenna of kilometers ) Radar penetrates clouds and darkness, enabling NISAR to collect data day and night in any weather. NISAR will map the entire globe in 12 days and provide spatially and temporally consistent data for understanding changes in Earth’s ecosystems, ice mass, vegetation biomass, sea level rise, ground water and natural hazards including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and landslides. ISRO also announced the NISAR Utilization Programme (NISAR UP), an opportunity for Indian researchers and scientists to access, analyse and interpret the data from the NASA–ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite mission. NISAR offers such valuable data useful across multiple Earth Observation fields and it is scheduled for Launch early next year. How are you planning to utilise NISAR data? Let me know in the comments! #isro #nasa #nisar #engineering.

👩🦰 Persona Spectrum For Inclusive Design (Figma Kit) (https://lnkd.in/eGD38hs4), a wonderful little accessibility tool for designers to include permanent, temporary and situational contexts in design decisions. Open sources, with all illustrations and assets for presentations and print. By 🐝 Mahana Delacour. --- 🔶 1. Accessibility ≠ Compliance We should never rely on automated accessibility testing alone to “ensure” accessibility. Compliance means that a user can use your product, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a great user experience. Manual testing makes sure that your users actually can meet their goals in their own context. It often feels daunting to get started, but small first steps are a great beginning. First, gather people interested in accessibility. Document what research was done, where the gaps are. And then try to include 5–12 users with disabilities in a dedicated accessibility testing. One way to find participants is to reach out to local chapters, local training centers, non-profits and public communities of users with disabilities in your country. You might want to add extra $25–$50 depending on disability transportation. Once you have access to users, run a small accessibility initiative around key flows in your products. Tap into critical touch points and research them. Eventually extend to components, patterns, flows, service design. A good target is to incorporate inclusive sampling into all research projects — at least 15% of usability testers should have a permanent, temporary or situational disability. --- 🔹 2. Building Accessibility Research From Scratch If you’d like to get started, I highly recommend to check “How We’ve Built Accessibility Research at Booking.com” (https://lnkd.in/eq_3zSPJ), a fantastic case study by Maya Alvarado on how to build accessibility practices and inclusive design into UX research from scratch. Maya highlights the idea of extending Microsoft's Inclusive Design Toolkit (https://lnkd.in/eN5J7EkJ) to meet specific user needs of a product. It adds a different dimension to disability considerations which might be less abstract and much easier to relate for the entire organization. And as Maya noted, inclusive design is about building a door that can be opened by anyone and lets everyone in. Accessibility isn’t a checklist — it’s a practice that goes way beyond compliance. A practice that involves actual people with actual disabilities throughout all UX research activities. More resources in the comments ↓

My colleague Prof. Eleanor Maguire passed away this weekend after a long battle with cancer. Her contributions to #neuroscience have shaped how we understand memory and navigation, leaving a lasting legacy. One of Eleanor’s groundbreaking discoveries was that when a London taxi driver learns the 25,000 windy streets of London together with thousands of landmarks (collectively called “the Knowledge”), it physically changes their #brain. A part of the brain called the #hippocampus is important both for making new memories and for navigating one’s environment. For aspiring black cab drivers, learning the Knowledge pushes the hippocampus to adapt in remarkable ways. Eleanor and her colleagues used #MRI to measure the hippocampus in taxi drivers compared to a control group and discovered it was larger in the taxi drivers. In other words, London cabbies have special brains that are particularly well suited for their work. This raises a really interesting question: Are they born with a larger hippocampus and therefore better able to become taxi drivers or does learning the Knowledge change their brains? To answer this, Eleanor and her team ran a follow-up study where they followed 39 trainee taxi drivers from the beginning of their training to when qualified approximately 4 years later. Each received a brain scan at the beginning and end of their training. 👉 Before training, the aspiring taxi drivers showed no difference in hippocampus size compared to matched control volunteers. 👉 After training, the newly qualified taxi drivers were found to have larger hippocampi than they did 4 years ago and also larger than the control volunteers. In other words, even as an adult, learning the Knowledge has a strong effect on the brain that can be measured using MRI. Eleanor’s work has become one of the most well-known examples of #neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s remarkable ability to change and adapt throughout life. A few years ago, a group of students were visiting UCL’s Functional Imaging Lab. They had learned about her taxi study in their A-level psychology class so when they discovered that Eleanor worked there, there was a frenzy of excitement! They couldn’t believe that they got to meet the “Maguire” whose work they had read in school. It was absolutely charming! Although best known for work with taxi drivers, Eleanor made substantial contributions to memory and hippocampal function including: 👉 Discovering that patients with amnesia cannot imagine the future 👉 Showing that it is possible to decode individual memories by analysing patterns of activity in the hippocampus 👉 Clarifying the relation between memory for life episodes, the ability to imagine the future, and the ability to navigate spatial environments Eleanor’s work is a powerful reminder of the brain’s potential to adapt and grow throughout life. May her legacy inspire all of us to keep learning and exploring the frontiers of science.