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Daily briefing: Text-message tutoring keeps kids learning when schools close
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In 2025, researchers used protein analysis to show that a jawbone recovered from ocean sediments off the coast of Taiwan belonged to a Denisovan.Credit: Yousuke Kaifu
A collection of fossils and artefacts recovered from an abandoned quarry in southwestern China has given researchers an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of ancient humans called Denisovans. The items suggest that Denisovans — who lived at the site for at least 30,000 years — crafted bone tools similar to those of the Neanderthals, and were skilled hunters of animals such as deer. “This site’s the full package,” says archaeologist Ben Marwick. “It’s the first site that we have with a long, rich sequence that’s uniquely associated with Denisovans.”
Text messages and weekly 20-minute phone calls from a teacher can improve children’s learning during prolonged school closures. The approach offers a relatively cheap way to support children’s mathematics education when schooling is disrupted by natural disasters, pandemics or other emergencies, say the study authors. In a trial across five countries, kids that received both texts and phone calls improved the most. But text messages alone also improved children's learning compared to a control group.
The number of titles of peer-reviewed scientific papers that reference the names or lyrics of songs by The Beatles. (Science | 5 min read)
Reference: PLOS One paper (the title of which also contains a Beatles pun)
A prototype tool called ProteinTalks can predict how the cells in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tumours — which can behave very differently at the molecular level — will respond to various drugs. Researchers trained the computational simulation on millions of protein measurements collected over time from breast cancer cell lines that were treated with dozens of antitumour drugs and drug combinations. The model did a good job of predicting how cells would respond to drugs it hadn’t seen before and real-world clinical outcomes.
The United Nations has voted to phase out use of the Mercator map, a widely used sixteenth-century projection that has been criticized for not representing countries’ sizes accurately. The Mercator map depicts land masses closer to the poles — most of which are in the Northern Hemisphere — as disproportionately large. This can be problematic because people are inclined to conflate size and importance, researchers say. The UN resolution instead endorses use of the Equal Earth projection, which more accurately depicts the relative sizes of land masses. (Nature | 5 min read)
In 2019, retired topologist Joan Birman received an email from 15-year-old Vasudha Bharathram asking for help in learning geometry. After a few meetings, Birman realized that Bharathram had a knack for the subject, and often solved well-known problems in an unconventional way. Bharathram inspired Birman to revisit a problem that had eluded her for decades: is the Burau representation — the translation of the structure of braids into algebraic objects called matrices — faithful for four-strand braids? This year, a 99-year-old Birman, Bharathram and collaborator Tara Brendle published their answer: yes.