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·搜一搜.cn/Nature’s 10: Ten people who mattered in science in 2018

《自然》年度十大人物：天才少年曹原居首，贺建奎来去匆匆

世界顶尖学术期刊、英国《自然》杂志（Nature）在北京时间12月19日零时发布了2018年度影响世界的十大科学人物，发现石墨烯超导角度的“神童”曹原，以及因世界首例基因编辑婴儿而饱受争议的贺建奎名列其中。

22岁的天才少年曹原出现在榜单的第一位。2018年3月5日，《自然》背靠背发表了两篇以曹原为第一作者的石墨烯重磅论文。这名中科大少年班的毕业生、美国麻省理工学院的博士生发现当两层平行石墨烯堆成约1.1°的微妙角度，就会产生神奇的超导效应。这一发现轰动国际学界，直接开辟了凝聚态物理的一块新领域。如今，正有无数学者试图重复、拓展他的研究。

在相关的特写文章中，曹原称自己“并不特别”，大学还是读满了4年，只是跳过了中学阶段的一些“无聊东西”。他在麻省理工的导师评价道，曹原的实验技巧在研究中至关重要。曹原在内心深处是个“修补匠”，喜欢把东西拆开重装，办公室里堆满了计算机和自制望远镜的零件，乱糟糟的。

虽然每年《自然》十大人物的封面图片都是一个巨大的数字“10”，但具体样式和底纹都会融入当年的科技热点进行设计。比如，2016年的封面图片形如涟漪，暗示当年最大的科学成果引力波的发现。被外界评为“人工智能元年”的2017年的封面图片则融入了计算机代码的元素。


封面图片暗示曹原发现的石墨烯“魔角”
今年的封面图片明显指向曹原的成果。数字“10”中的“0”被处理成一个正六边形，宛如构成石墨烯的碳环结构。再仔细看，整个数字“10”由2层蜂窝状的小小正六边形填涂而成，分别为红色和蓝色，两层之间有微小的夹角，使得图像出现了重影。这点出了赋予石墨烯超导能力的“魔角”。

Nature’s 10: Ten people who mattered in science in 2018
NEWS FEATURE18 DEC 18




18 DECEMBER 2018

2018 in news: The science events that shaped the year

Wildfires, cosmic rays and ancient-human hybrids are some of this year’s top stories.




Climate change Genetics Politics
http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07683-5




Science in longform: The big narratives of 2018



Watch and listen: The science of 2018 in audio and video

• Nature’s 10

• Yuan Cao
• Graphene wrangler

• Viviane Slon
• Humanity’s historian

• He Jiankui
• CRISPR rogue

• Jess Wade
• Diversity champion

• Valérie Masson-Delmotte
• Earth monitor

• Anthony Brown
• Star mapper

• Bee Yin Yeo
• Force for the environment

• Barbara Rae-Venter
• DNA detective

• Robert-Jan Smits
• Open-access leader

• Makoto Yoshikawa
• Asteroid hunter

• Ones to watch 2019

• About Nature’s 10

• About the Nature’s 10 image

YUAN CAO: Graphene wrangler

A PhD student coaxed superconductivity from sheets of atom-thick carbon.
BY ELIZABETH GIBNEY
曹原  本文图片均来自《自然》杂志
Credit: Corinna Kern for Nature
以下是《自然》关于曹原的特写。原文为英文，经澎湃新闻记者全文翻译。
“石墨烯牛仔”曹原：一个诱导碳原子薄膜产生超导性的博士生
Yuan Cao’s teenage years were hardly typical. By age 18, he had already graduated from high school, completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, and travelled to the United States to begin his PhD. He hasn’t slowed down since: this year, aged just 21, Cao had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have spurred a new field of physics. Cao admits that his situation is unusual, but says he isn’t special. After all, he did spend a full four years at university: “I just skipped some of the boring stuff in middle school.”
曹原的青少年时期过得相当“非主流”。18岁时，他就在合肥读完了中国科学技术大学的本科，前往美国攻读博士学位。那之后他也没有放慢脚步：今年，21岁的曹原发表了两篇关于碳原子薄膜表现出的奇异行为的论文，在物理学开辟出一片全新的疆域。曹原承认自己的情况并不常见，但说自己并不特别。毕竟，他在大学里还是待满了四年：“我只是跳过了中学里面一些无聊的东西。”

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero’s group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge was already layering and rotating sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao’s job was to investigate what happened in two-layer stacks when one graphene sheet was twisted only slightly with respect to the other, which one theory predicted would radically change the material’s behaviour.
2014年，当曹原加入实验室的时候，美国麻省理工学院的Pablo Jarillo-Herrero课题组就已经在用不同的角度堆叠、旋转碳原子层了。曹原的工作是研究垒在一起的两层石墨烯彼此间轻微偏转会发生什么，按照理论预测，轻微的偏转就会让材料行为产生剧变。


Many physicists were sceptical about the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene — which ordinarily conducts electricity — became an insulator (Y. Cao et al. Nature 556, 80–84; 2018). That by itself was surprising. “We knew already that it would have a big impact on the community,” says Cao. But the best was yet to come: with a slight tweak to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance (Y. Cao et al. Nature 556, 43–50; 2018). Seeing the effect in a second sample convinced the team that it was real.

许多物理学家对此心存怀疑。但曹原着手搭成微妙偏转的石墨烯层后，他发现了奇怪的东西。置于一个小型电场，温度降至绝对零度以上1.7度，通常会导电的石墨烯成为了绝缘体。这就够令人吃惊了。“我们知道它会在学界引起轰动。”曹原说道。不过，更好的还在后面：稍微调整一下电场，偏转的石墨烯层就变成了超导体，电流可无阻流动。在第二个样本中观察到同样的现象后，实验组相信这是真的。



The ability to coax atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physicists clamouring to engineer exciting behaviour in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials super-conduct at much higher temperatures. “There are so many things we can do,” says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University in New York City. “The opportunities at hand now are almost overwhelming.”
简单的旋转就能让碳原子薄膜进入复杂的电子态，如今，物理学家们都争着要在其他扭转的二维材料上创造出激动人心的行为。一些人甚至希望石墨烯可以揭开复杂材料高温超导的奥秘。“我们能做的事情太多了。”哥伦比亚大学物理学家Cory Dean说道。“我眼下都要被机会淹没了。”


Hitting graphene’s ‘magic angle’ — a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1° — involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was crucial, says Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack composed of two layers with identical orientation, from which he could then fine-tune alignment. He also tweaked the cryogenic system to reach a temperature that allowed superconductivity to emerge more clearly.
要使平行的两层石墨烯旋转成约1.1°的“魔角”，需要一些试误，但曹原很快就能可靠地完成。他的实验技巧至关重要，Jarillo-Herrero说道。曹原开创了一种撕出单层石墨烯的方法，以制出具有相同角度的双层堆叠，接着微调校准。他还调整了低温系统的温度，使超导性得以更清晰地显现。

Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. At heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes — pieces of which usually lie strewn across Cao’s office. “Every time I go in, it’s a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk,” says Jarillo-Herrero.
曹原热爱把东西拆开重装。在内心深处，他是个“修补匠”，曹原的导师评价道。比如，他会用自制的照相机和望远镜拍摄夜空，享受自己的时光。相关的零件撒满了他的办公室。“每次我走进去，里面都乱糟糟的，计算机被拆开了，桌上满是望远镜零件。” Jarillo-Herrero说道。

Despite his youth and shy manner, colleagues say that Cao’s maturity shines through in his persistence. Having missed out by a whisker on a place in MIT’s physics graduate programme, for example, Cao found a way to pursue the subject by joining Jarillo-Herrero’s team through the electrical-engineering department. Cao also shrugged off a disappointing start to his PhD, after realizing that seemingly exciting data that he had spent six months trying to understand were due to a quirk of the experimental set-up. “He wasn’t happy, but he just rolled up his sleeves and continued working,” Jarillo-Herrero says.
尽管年轻又害羞，同事们都说曹原的成熟表现在坚持不懈上。比如，曹原与麻省理工学院的物理学研究生项目失之交臂，他还是通过电气工程系进入了Jarillo-Herrero的课题组，继续做物理。对于博士开局阶段的失望结果，曹原也满不在乎。他当时花了六个月时间研究一份看似令人激动的数据，最终却发现那不过是实验设置中的巧合。“他不开心，但他只是卷起袖子继续干了。” Jarillo-Herrero说道。

Cao, now 22, doesn’t yet know where he’d like his career to lead. “On magic-angle graphene, we still have a lot of things to do,” he says. But universities around the world are already eyeing him for not only postdoctorate jobs, but also faculty positions, says physicist Changgan Zeng, Cao’s undergraduate supervisor and mentor at the University of Science and Technology of China. “Among condensed-matter physicists in China, everybody knows his name,” Zeng says. The university would gladly have him back, but Zeng expects that Cao will stay in the United States for now. “There, it’s easier to see the stars.”
今年22岁的曹原，尚不知道自己的科研生涯会走向何方。“关于魔角石墨烯，我们还要做很多工作，”他说道。然而，据曹原在中科大的研究生导师、物理学家曾长淦所知，世界范围的大学已经对他青眼有加，不仅抛来博士后工作，还有教职。“在中国的凝聚态物理学界，人人都知道曹原的名字，”曾长淦说道。中科大乐于见到他回来，不过，曾长淦预期曹原目前还是会留在美国。“那里，更容易看到群星璀璨。”

p.s.
除了两名华人以外，上榜的年度人物还有
VIVIANE SLON: Humanity’s historian
A palaeogeneticist discovered a remarkable ancient hybrid hominin: half Neanderthal, half Denisovan.
BY EWEN CALLAWAY
考古学家薇薇安·斯隆(Viviane Slon)。
她发现了一具9万年前 “混血儿”的骸骨：这名史前女孩的母亲为尼安德特人，父亲为丹尼索瓦人。

薇薇安·斯隆(Viviane Slon)

Credit: Stefanie Loos for Nature
Viviane Slon was sure she had made a mistake three years ago, when DNA tests on an ancient bone fragment pointed to a union of two extinct human groups. Half of the genome looked like a Neanderthal’s; the other half matched sequences from Denisovans — a group once found throughout Asia.
“I was very much of the mindset that this cannot be,” says Slon, a palaeo-geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Slon told no one for several days, and wondered whether she had made some mistake.
When she couldn’t find an error, Slon shared the results with her colleagues and began to ponder what they might mean. Further tests determined that the individual — a young adult female affectionately named Denny by colleagues — was the daughter of a female Neanderthal and a male Denisovan who lived roughly 90,000 years ago.
Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes point to past interbreeding, but a direct product of such an encounter had never been found.
The discovery, reported in August, reverberated with other scientists and the public, triggering hundreds of news articles and thousands of tweets. “It’s probably the most fascinating person who’s ever had their genome sequenced,” one geneticist said at the time.
Slon’s perspective is unique among her peers, says Israel Hershkovitz, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Tel Aviv, Israel. He supervised some of Slon’s graduate-degree research, which spanned archaeology, anthropology, pathology and anatomy; she even supported herself by working in a cadaver lab. “She was not born in a sterile DNA lab,” says Hershkovitz. “When she speaks about the Neanderthal, she sees the Neanderthal. She sees its physiology, its anatomy, not just its genes.”
Slon says she is drawn to using genetics and other scientific approaches to study prehistory because of the lack of written records. “Every-thing you can infer is from what people left behind,” she says. “It’s almost like solving a riddle.”
Much of her palaeogenetics research has centred around material from Denisova Cave, the vast cavern in southern Siberia that gave its name to the Denisovans, a cousin group to Neanderthals.
Slon’s first project on remains from the cave was to sequence the DNA in a tooth from the fourth Denisovan individual found there. She also co-led a team that found Denisovan DNA in excavated dirt, an approach that could transform palaeogenetics — because it doesn’t rely on finding rare hominin bones. Slon’s colleagues had to screen more than 2,300 unidentified bone fragments to find Denny.
Slon is still working on material from Denisova Cave, which she got to visit for the first time earlier this year. And she will continue to work on extracting hominin DNA from sediments. She doesn’t expect to happen on another once-in-a-lifetime find like Denny, but she is eager to plumb ancient genomes for all sorts of personal insights, such as family relationships between ancient humans or how living conditions influenced the individuals’ health. She also hopes to examine the lives of hominins who lived beyond Eurasian sites. “There’s a whole world that can still be explored,” she says.



HE JIANKUI: CRISPR rogue
A scientist’s claim to have created gene-edited babies generated international furore.
BY ELIZABETH GIBNEY
贺建奎 Credit: Mark Schiefelbein/AP/REX/Shutterstock
He Jiankui knew he was crossing a new bioethical boundary, when he revealed in November that he had altered the genomes of two infants — in a way that would be passed on to future generations. “I understand my work will be controversial, but I believe families need this technology and I’m willing to take the criticism for them,” he said in a video announcing the births of twin girls whose genomes he had edited using CRISPR, ostensibly to protect them from HIV infection.
The reaction to the news was stronger than He had expected. He was widely criticized for ignoring important ethical considerations and exposing the girls to unknown risks for an uncertain benefit. The Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, where He works, distanced itself. The Chinese science ministry forbade him from continuing research. And the health ministry launched an investigation. He, who is now not speaking to the press, disappeared from the world stage as quickly as he had emerged.
He came to gene editing as an outsider. The first publication listed on his website, from a decade ago, is related to quantum physics. In 2010, he had publications on economics, evolution and the nature of curious repeated sections of DNA in bacterial genomes. He won some acclaim for his work in genome sequencing. A company he founded, Direct Genomics in Shenzhen, targeted the clinical-sequencing market and pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.
But He wanted to get into gene editing. He visited Feng Zhang, a CRISPR pioneer, at his laboratory at MIT, who warned him against editing human embryos for reproduction. Mark DeWitt, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that he advised the same. Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley, another CRISPR pioneer, refused He’s request for a visit because she thought he wasn’t doing anything related to this technology. Now, she wonders whether He was “trying to leave a trail” of reputable contacts so he could say that he had broad support.
He will leave a complicated legacy. Scientists worry that the field of gene editing might now struggle to secure funding, regulatory approval or support from the public. And although the technology could lead to new insights into human development and potentially some ways of preventing deadly genetic disorders, few would argue that He’s approach has helped. “I think he will be judged harshly,” says DeWitt.


值得一提的是，《自然》年度十大人物只是选取当年对科学界产生最大影响力的人物，并不一定是正面形象。2017年的榜单中就出现了一名“反派”—— 美国总统特朗普任命的环保署署长斯科特·普鲁特（Scott Pruitt）。这名气候变化怀疑论者入职后瓦解了奥巴马政府的一系列环保遗产。今年榜单中的“反派”则由“基因编辑婴儿”事件的主角、南科大副教授贺建奎担任。

贺建奎在11月宣布两名经CRISPR编辑基因的双胞胎女婴降生，尽管现代辅助生育技术足以患有艾滋病的父亲生出健康的孩子，贺建奎依然决意用编辑胚胎基因的方法来试图达到免疫艾滋病的目的。外界普遍担忧，两个孩子的一生将被未知的健康风险笼罩。打开基因编辑伦理的“潘多拉魔盒”更令国际科学界物议沸腾。

不过，这名半路出家的基因编辑学者已不在媒体发声。“他在世界舞台上登场得匆匆，消失得也匆匆。”《自然》的特写文章写道。这篇文章的标题叫做《CRISPR流氓》。

JESS WADE: Diversity champion

A physicist wrote hundreds of Wikipedia pages to boost the profiles of scientists from under-represented groups.
BY NISHA GAIND
物理学家杰西·韦德（Jess Wade）为科学领域里的平权而努力，创建了数百个女性科学家的维基百科词条。


杰西·韦德（Jess Wade）
Credit: Graeme Robertson/Guardian/eyevine

When Jess Wade started writing a Wikipedia page every day, she didn’t expect her efforts to earn her global attention. She was simply trying to correct the online encyclopaedia’s under-representation of women and people of colour in science. But in July, when she tweeted about a trollish comment she’d received about the work, it prompted an outpouring of support and a big boost for her quest. “That wouldn’t have happened without that one mean comment,” she says.
Wade, a polymer physicist at Imperial College London, has tackled many science-outreach projects aimed at fostering diversity. She took up her page-a-day habit after learning that 90% of Wikipedia editors are men and only about 18% of people profiled on the site are women.
She has now created about 400 pages and works with organizations to host regular ‘edit-a-thons’ — in which people create and edit Wikipedia content with an eye to inclusivity. These have inspired similar events around the world, including some focused on other professions.
The visibility and momentum that Wade’s project created is important, says Lenna Cumberbatch, who studies diversity at the University of St Andrews, UK. Although Wikipedia entries won’t fix science’s inclusivity problems, efforts such as Wade’s help to change people’s expectations. “She’s redressing an imbalance that’s existed for aeons,” says Cumberbatch. “When you’re literally writing history — that’s kind of cool.”
Wade’s Wikipedia campaign isn’t the only thing that thrust her into the spotlight this year. In September, she spoke about her engagement work at a conference on gender at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. On the same day, physicist Alessandro Strumia from the University of Pisa in Italy delivered a presentation questioning women’s ability in physics and attacking policies that encourage diversity. “His presentation was totally inappropriate,” Wade says, “telling a room of mainly young woman scientists that they’d only ever achieve success in physics due to affirmative action”.
Wade once again used social media to highlight the comments, and they were widely condemned. Strumia has been suspended from his work with CERN while an investigation is ongoing.
Wade expects to press on with her outreach, including stocking school libraries with the book Inferior by Angela Saini, which explores the harm caused by gender stereotypes. “I think diverse teams do better science,” she says. “Doing all this stuff definitely makes sure that the academic community is more robust, resilient and creative.”



VALÉRIE MASSON-DELMOTTE: Earth monitor
A climatologist was a driving force behind the IPCC’s stark report on global warming.
BY JEFF TOLLEFSON
气候专家梅森-德尔莫特（Valérie Masson-Delmotte）在政府间气候变化专门委员会领导发布了一份重要的调查报告，警告再过几十年，地球气温就会来到改变生态系统的转折点，珊瑚礁面临灭顶之灾。
梅森-德尔莫特（Valérie Masson-Delmotte）

Credit: Laurence Geai for Nature

In October, Valérie Masson-Delmotte and her colleagues presented the world with alarming news about its future. Within as little as a dozen years, Earth’s average temperature could reach 1.5 °C above what it was in the mid-nineteenth century, triggering a wave of changes that would transform ecosystems and kill off most of the world’s coral reefs, among many other impacts.
The warning came courtesy of a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in which Masson-Delmotte played a primary part. A climatologist at the Laboratory for Sciences of Climate and Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and co-chair of the IPCC working group that assesses the physical science of climate change, Masson-Delmotte helped to gather the report’s authors, coordinate their work and, ultimately, get the report approved by governments.
The IPCC normally takes the better part of a decade to produce its massive assessments, but the 1.5 °C report came together quickly, incorporating research published just weeks before the final draft was submitted for government review. “I’m really proud,” Masson-Delmotte says. “We had a horribly stringent timeline, but I think we managed to build trust and ownership of the report by the authors.”
The report makes clear that limiting warming to 1.5 °C would have huge benefits compared with allowing temperatures to surge to the 2 °C level. But keeping to 1.5 °C would require aggressive action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. And even if nations could somehow achieve that, the world would look very different: entire ecosystems could be destroyed across more than 6% of the planet’s terrestrial surface, and 70–90% of coral reefs would probably disappear.
“This report will be a hard one to ignore,” says co-author Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who is director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia.
Diana Liverman, a geographer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, singles out Masson-Delmotte’s work to improve diversity and representation in the IPCC. Women made up just 22% of the author team on the last assessment, completed in 2014; in this report, they comprised an unprecedented 40%. Masson-Delmotte also worked to elevate the role of early-career scientists and researchers from the global south. And for the next full climate assessment, due out in 2021, she has introduced procedures to promote engagement by all authors — including an online participation tool for scientists who are uncomfortable speaking up during meetings.
In an attempt to break down scientific silos, researchers from various disciplines worked together on every chapter. The result, Masson-Delmotte says, was an analysis that focused less on emissions scenarios and more on social, technological and governmental policies that could foster change — without exacerbating poverty and inequality around the world.
Masson-Delmotte spent ten days talking about the report and the wider IPCC process with delegates at the United Nations climate summit in late 2018. Now, she and the other co-chairs are pushing forward with two more reports — one on terrestrial biomes, the other on oceans and polar regions, slated for release in August and September 2019, respectively.
Similar to the IPCC itself — participation in which is a voluntary affair — Masson-Delmotte says that she is stretched to the limit. Her own research has been relegated to occasional nights, weekends and train rides, and she doesn’t see as much of her two daughters and husband as she used to. “It’s frustrating,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s awfully stimulating.”





ANTHONY BROWN: Star mapper
Working behind the scenes, an astronomer coordinated the release of Gaia’s long-awaited bounty of Milky Way data.
BY RACHEL COURTLAND
天文学家安东尼·布朗（Anthony Brown）的团队公开了盖亚太空望远镜追踪到的十亿颗恒星的数据集，迅速改变了人类对银河系演化的认知。
安东尼·布朗（Anthony Brown）

Credit: Timothy Archibald for Nature


For many astronomers, Christmas this year came on 25 April at precisely 10:00 Coordinated Universal Time. That was when scientists with the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission published its first major data set: a 551-gigabyte catalogue detailing the positions and movements of more than 1.3 billion stars.
Researchers around the world were eager to dive into the data. But Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, had a different feeling when the catalogue finally rolled out: “Tired,” he says.
Brown had good reason. He leads the Gaia project’s Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, a group of more than 400 researchers that had been crunching the numbers for years. The Gaia spacecraft, which launched in 2013, spins to scan the sky and records the starlight that streaks across the camera. Boiling the craft’s data down into precise information on stellar positions, motion and other properties requires sophisticated processing on the ground.
To researchers who are more interested in using Gaia to explore the mysteries of the Milky Way, Brown’s job might seem less than glamorous. A calm and measured character, Brown has worked as the data-processing consortium’s chair since 2012. His day-to-day job is intensively administrative: much of his time involves coordinating with and meeting consortium teams to make sure that the mission’s data-crunching pipeline, which fans out from an operations centre near Madrid, works smoothly.
But Brown’s care and expertise have been crucial to the success of Gaia’s data set, which has already been cited in more than 700 research papers. His efforts have helped to steer the collaboration through myriad snags, including a systematic error in the telescope’s parallax data -— measures of angles to stars that enable astronomers to work out distances. The team decided to characterize the problem carefully and explain it in the release, rather than delay for more than a year to collect more data to reduce the error, says Amina Helmi, an astronomer at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, and a member of the consortium. Brown has an impressive ability to motivate researchers who would rather be working on science, Helmi says. “I don’t know how he does it,” she says. “We all respect him. There is really this feeling that we all share that wants to make Gaia a success.”
Brown and his colleagues have had little time to catch their breath. They are already preparing the next data release, which will probably be ready some time in the first half of 2021. Another is planned after that, and more could follow: in November, the mission was extended to at least the end of 2020. Brown, who has been involved with Gaia since 1997, is in no rush to see it end: “Having worked on this mission more than 20 years now, it’s definitely part of who I am.”








BEE YIN YEO: Force for the environment
Malaysia’s new science and environment minister became a strong voice against plastic pollution.
BY YAO-HUA LAW
马来西亚能源、科技、环境与气候变化部长杨美盈（Yeo Bee Yin） 带头提倡减少一次性塑料的使用。

杨美盈（Yeo Bee Yin）
Credit: Vincent Paul Yong
Bee Yin Yeo began to question the future of the world — and her own career — while evaluating oil wells in the deserts of Turkmenistan. The new university graduate decided that humanity would eventually move away from fossil fuels, so she decided to find another profession that would serve the well-being of the world.
A few years later, in 2010, she returned home to Malaysia, armed with a master’s degree in advanced chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK. She joined politics and won a seat in a state legislative assembly in 2013. Then, a political tsunami hit Malaysia: on 9 May 2018, voters ousted the coalition that had held uninterrupted power since the country’s founding in 1963. The new government brought in its own cabinet members, including Yeo, who was appointed Minister of Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change.
Yeo was “shocked” when she first heard of her appointment. “It was unimaginable,” said the 35-year-old, who grew up in a small town amid oil-palm and rubber-tree estates in southern Malaysia. Yeo had spent the previous 5 years attacking national policies, and now she could change them.
Since taking office on 2 July, Yeo has made several bold steps in reforming how Malaysia manages its environment and research. She announced goals to increase renewable energy from 2% to 20% of total energy generation by 2030, to reform the electricity market and to ramp up energy efficiency. She also went to battle against plastics pollution — which plagues southeast Asia. She criticized the influx of plastic waste into Malaysia, and helped to set a nationwide ban on its import. On 31 October, Yeo launched a 12-year roadmap and legal framework towards eliminating single-use plastic in Malaysia by 2030, which also calls for research and commercialization of eco-friendly alternatives, such as biodegradable plastics.
Yeo’s efforts parallel an escalating global concern over single-use plastics. In October, the European parliament voted to ban their use in products such as straws and cutlery. And a growing number of other nations have issued similar bans.
Julian Hyde, general manager of the environmental organization Reef Check Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, praises Yeo’s efforts and roadmap. “The most important thing about it is that it’s over a realistic timescale.”
But the Malaysian Plastics Manufacturers Association (MPMA) sees problems ahead. Ching Yun Wee, who chairs the MPMA’s sustainability subcommittee, says that local manufacturers can now produce bio-degradable plastics, but that the material cannot yet decompose as quickly or completely as is needed to solve the problem of plastic pollution.
Wee says, however, that compared to her predecessors, Yeo has given the MPMA more opportunities to voice its opinion.
Yeo says that by funding local research and adopting foreign techniques, Malaysia can develop the technology for biodegradable plastic. “Some people think of problems to solutions, and not solutions to the problem,” she says. “When business as usual is not possible, you find another solution.”





BARBARA RAE-VENTER: DNA detective
A genealogist helped to identify a serial killer and paved the way for DNA to play a larger part in solving crimes.
BY BRENDAN MAHER
芭芭拉·雷凡特（Barbara Rae-Venter）用开源的DNA数据找出了1970到80年代犯下数十宗性侵、杀人案的“金州杀手”。
芭芭拉·雷凡特（Barbara Rae-Venter）

Credit: Brian L. Frank/NYT/Redux/eyevine
In February 2017, Barbara Rae-Venter got a call from an investigator looking for help with a criminal case. “I said, ‘Sure,’” says Rae-Venter, a retired patent attorney in northern California, unaware that she was signing up to try and catch one of the most notorious serial killers and rapists in US history. This year, Rae-Venter’s work not only led to the killer’s arrest, but also demonstrated a powerful — if controversial — approach for identifying criminals through genetic genealogy.
“She opened the door for others who wanted to do this, but had reservations,” says CeCe Moore, who heads a forensic-genealogy unit at the company Parabon Nanolabs in Reston, Virginia.
Rae-Venter first trained in genetic genealogy — which uses DNA to fill out family trees — to explore her own ancestry. Eventually, she started using the tools to aid others, such as people who had been adopted as children, which drew the attention of Paul Holes, an investigator with the Contra Costa county district attorney’s office in California.
Holes was on the trail of a man who had terrorized California during the 1970s and 1980s. With 12 murders, 45 rapes and 120 burglaries attributed to him, the elusive perpetrator had become known as the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker and the Golden State Killer. Holes reasoned that if Rae-Venter could piece together the killer’s family history, it could help to find his true name.
Rae-Venter uploaded a profile made from crime-scene DNA into GEDmatch, a public database used by genealogists. Although not nearly as large as commercial genealogy websites, GEDmatch’s terms of service didn’t expressly prohibit law enforcement from doing searches.
Right away, she found someone who seemed to be a third or fourth cousin to the killer. With the help of the FBI and local law officials, she worked to triangulate a common ancestor and then build the family tree. She eventually zeroed in on Joseph DeAngelo, a former police officer living in Sacramento. A direct test of his DNA proved the match.
Many in the genealogy community knew that this approach was possible and there had been ongoing debates over whether it constituted an invasion of privacy. Moore says that she had been approached in the past to help in this way, but declined because of the debate and because most people who used GEDmatch were unaware that it could be done. DeAngelo’s highly publicized arrest changed that: the genealogy community, by and large, embraced this use of data, at least for finding violent criminals.
Curtis Rogers, a co-founder of GEDmatch, has amended the database’s rules to make it clearer that law enforcement might use the information. He hasn’t seen a mass exodus from his site, he says.
The floodgates have now opened for these kinds of cases. Under Moore’s direction, Parabon Nanolabs has uploaded about 200 perpetrator profiles to GEDmatch, resulting in at least 22 identifications and nearly as many arrests.
Rae-Venter says that she has been approached for help in more than 70 cases. Quiet and private, she is nevertheless excited to get more involved. After all, her new calling seems to run in the family. In her own research, she identified a great uncle who was a detective inspector with the London Metropolitan Police during the time of Jack the Ripper. “I would love to find out which cases he worked on,” she says.







ROBERT-JAN SMITS: Open-access leader
A bureaucrat launched a drive to transform science publishing.
BY HOLLY ELSE
罗伯特-杨·施密茨（Robert-Jan Smits）推出了“S计划”，这是一项推进科研论文开放获取的大胆倡议，掀起了科学出版业的巨浪。
罗伯特-杨·施密茨（Robert-Jan Smits）

Credit: Artur Eranosian/European Commission

The architect of this year’s bold push to get rid of paywalls in science publishing says he got his ideas from an unlikely source: the publishers themselves.
In March, Robert-Jan Smits was tasked by the European Union’s research commissioner, Carlos Moedas, with a special one-year mission: to get more research papers published outside journal paywalls, and fast. A veteran science-policy bureaucrat, Smits decided to go to the source: he asked big publishers how he could do it. They told him that if the organizations that pay for research insisted the findings had to be published openly, journals would have to adapt.
So that’s what Smits set out to persuade research funders to do — in a plan launched in September that has sent shock waves through science publishing.
Smits has spent decades pulling the science-policy strings at the European Commission, and, until his current assignment, had served eight years as the director-general of research. He was ideally connected to begin rallying Europe’s agencies with the idea, dubbed Plan S for ‘science, speed, solution, shock’, as he puts it. As Nature went to press, 16 funders had signed the plan; they require that the results of work they support be made freely available at the time of publication, starting in 2020.
Publishers have been dictating how research is published for decades, Smits says. “Now it is the funders calling the shots, and we will do things differently.”
It’s too early to know what the ultimate impact of Plan S on research publishing will be. Its details are open for consultation, and much might depend on how many other funders adopt the idea — but it will at least improve access to research, says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Smits has been overwhelmed with messages of support. But the initiative has also met with resistance: several publishers have said it could put them out of business, and some researchers have said that they don’t want their choice of where to publish to be restricted.
Smits is no stranger to disrupting the status quo in European science. In 2007, he was instrumental in setting up the excellence-focused European Research Council (ERC) funding agency — when, he says, very few member states wanted it. “We had to go country by country to convince people that we needed it,” he says.
Those who have worked with Smits are not surprised by his ability to get consensus on controversial policies. “Robert-Jan has a fantastic memory, of people, events, documents, policies. His networking capacity is spectacular,” says Helga Nowotny, a former president of the ERC.
Smits’ short tenure as open-access tsar is almost over. Next year, he will leave to become chair of the Eindhoven University of Technology in his native Netherlands. “It’s time for me to leave the commission at what I consider my height,” he says.





MAKOTO YOSHIKAWA: Asteroid hunter
An astronomer leads a mission to collect samples from an asteroid.
BY DAVIDE CASTELVECCHI
日本宇宙航空研究开发机构科学家吉川真领导的 “隼鸟2”号探测器将前往饺子状的小行星“龙宫”采样并返回地球。
吉川真


Credit: Noriko Hayashi for Nature
In June 2018, astronomer Makoto Yoshikawa stayed up around the clock as the space mission he was leading zeroed in on its quarry — a dumpling-shaped rock called Ryugu. In a delicate manoeuvre after a journey of more than three years, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft fired its thrusters so that it moved in synchrony with the 1-kilometre-wide asteroid as they orbited the Sun together.
That task achieved, Yoshikawa and his team at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) moved on to the exploration phase. By early October, the craft had successfully dropped three small rovers onto Ryugu — providing the first close-ups of the asteroid.
Hayabusa2 faces a bigger test next year, when it will gently touch down on Ryugu and collect a sample. Any navigational imprecision could send it crashing against a boulder. In an even more daring manoeuvre, the craft will then shoot a projectile at the asteroid and analyse the material that gets kicked up. The probe is due to come back to Earth in 2020, carrying specimens that could shed light on the early stages of the Solar System’s evolution.
Yoshikawa has been through nail-biters before. As a JAXA astronomer, he helped to mastermind two of the most spectacular rescue operations in the history of uncrewed space exploration.
The first mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, the original Hayabusa, touched down on asteroid Itokawa in 2005. Soon afterwards, mission control lost touch with the craft. The team managed to restore communications and piloted Hayabusa back to Earth, despite having lost its main engine. The speeding craft burnt up during its re-entry, but its sample-return capsule was eventually recovered.
Then, in 2010, another JAXA probe, Akatsuki, had an engine malfunction as it tried to decelerate to enter into orbit around Venus. Akatsuki drifted away and went many times around the Sun until 2015, when it passed Venus again and the team managed to put it into orbit.
Some mishaps were inevitable, Yoshikawa says, given that Japan’s space programme does not have a long tradition of deep-space exploration. “We need experience,” he says. But Hayabusa2 has, so far, provided some redress for JAXA’s historic ill-fortune.
Stephan Ulamec, a geophysicist at the German Aerospace Center in Cologne who had a leading role in developing one of the Hayabusa2 landers, MASCOT, says that risk-taking and the ability to learn from failures set Japanese space endeavours apart from more-cautious — and better-funded — agencies in the West. “They have a tendency to do bold missions, to take risks NASA would not,” he says.
Yoshikawa has the rare ability to lead a collaboration of many different laboratories without having a big ego, and that has been key to the success of these missions, says Aurélie Moussi, an astrophysicist at the French space agency CNES in Toulouse and a co-project manager for MASCOT. “He is the kindest scientist I’ve ever worked with,” she says.
Yoshikawa has had an interest in asteroids ever since he was a child and read The Little Prince— a 1943 novella that features a boy who lives on an asteroid and visits Earth. Asteroids are potential menaces that need to be kept track of — but they also hold the secrets to the Solar System, and are a possible source of materials to mine for future space exploration, Yoshikawa says.
“Asteroids are very small objects in the Universe — but very important for the future life of humans.”



Ones to watch in 2019

• Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum

Director-general of the Democratic Republic of the Congo National Institute for Biomedical Research
As his nation battles a worsening Ebola outbreak, this veteran virologist is spearheading the deployment of experimental therapies and a new vaccine.

• Julia Olson

Co-counsel for the plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States
This lawyer is suing the US government on behalf of people who claim that the country has violated their rights by not preventing climate change.

• Muthayya Vanitha

Project director of India’s Chandrayaan-2 Moon mission
A big moment for this engineer could come in early 2019, as India plans to land a rover near the lunar south pole and explore that region for the first time.

• Maura McLaughlin

Chair of management team at the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves
This astronomer and her colleagues monitor neutron stars, and could soon detect gravitational waves created by supermassive black holes for the first time.

• Sandra DÍaz

Co-leader of the Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
Díaz and researchers from more than 50 countries will release a major biodiversity report as part of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

• About Nature’s 10

Nature’s 10 is the journal’s annual list of ten people who mattered in science this year. Their role in science may have had a significant impact on the world, or their position in the world may have had an important impact on science. In ten short profiles we reveal the human stories behind some of the year’s most important discoveries and events.


About the Nature’s 10 image
This design highlights advances in studies of atom-thick materials with unusual properties. The image represents two graphene sheets offset by a ‘magic’ angle, an arrangement that can behave as a superconductor in certain conditions. Image by JVG.





Nature’s 10 Ten people who mattered this year.
2018-12-19 00:00 来源：澎湃新闻 澎湃新闻记者 虞涵棋
《自然》年度十大人物：天才少年曹原居首，贺建奎来去匆匆
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-018-07683-5/index.html
“这份榜单包含了今年科学界大新闻里面的主角，从超导体的发现到饱受批评的基因编辑婴儿，”《自然》杂志特写主编Rich Monastersky说道。“这十个人的故事浓缩了2018年最难忘的科学事件。他们迫使我们直面一些难题：我们是谁？我们从哪来？我们往哪去？”
https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_2750105