Daily briefing: New mineral discovered inside a diamond

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Small black specks in a diamond mined decades ago in Botswana have turned out to be a vital ingredient of the deep Earth. This is the first time the mineral has been identified in nature, after decades of searching. It is a rare glimpse of something that normally cannot exist on Earth’s surface, but plays a major part in heat flow deep inside the planet, says geochemist Oliver Tschauner. Tschauner named the mineral davemaoite after Ho-kwang ‘Dave’ Mao, a scientist who has made many pioneering discoveries in high-pressure geochemistry and geophysics.

Nature | 4 min read

Scientists have expressed relief that the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) reached an agreement that pledges further action to curb emissions, more frequent updates on progress and additional funding for low- and middle-income countries. But some left the meeting dissatisfied at the lack of stronger commitments to reduce emissions, and failure to agree to ‘loss and damage’ finance for countries that are vulnerable to climate change. “COP26 has closed the gap, but it has not solved the problem,” says climate researcher Niklas Hoehne.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Glasgow Climate Pact (helpfully annotated by The Washington Post)

After nearly ten months without a permanent commissioner for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), President Joe Biden has nominated Robert Califf, former head of the agency, to lead it once again. Although some in the research community are opposed to the nomination because of Califf’s ties to industry, others welcome a permanent director after such a long delay, particularly amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the agency plays a crucial part. If confirmed by the US Senate, Califf will have to restore trust undermined by a series of difficulties in the past decade — ranging from the agency’s approval of controversial drugs to the perception that it has bowed to political pressure.

Nature | 6 min read

Pregnant women in the United States die by homicide more often than they die of pregnancy-related causes — and they’re frequently killed by a partner. A study of US death certificates found that women who are pregnant or in the post-partum period die by homicide at more than twice the rate that they die of bleeding or placental disorders — the leading causes of what are usually classified as pregnancy-related deaths. Also, becoming pregnant increases the risk of death by homicide: between the ages of 10 and 44 years, women who are currently or recently pregnant are killed at a rate 16% higher than are women who are not pregnant.

Nature | 6 min read

Reference: Obstetrics & Gynecology paper

8.4 million tonnes

The amount of pandemic-related plastic waste that has been generated globally, with nearly 26,000 tonnes of it ending up in the oceans. (Nature Research Highlight | 2 min read, Nature paywall)

Reference: PNAS paper

Features & opinion

Spinning off your research into a company can help it to make a real-world impact (and might make you some money). Five researchers and intellectual-property specialists offer their tips for deciding which discoveries are worth patenting, and how to do the homework needed for success.

Nature | 10 min read

The workers who painstakingly release fossils from rocks seldom receive specific training or certification, and are sometimes unpaid volunteers. They are conspicuously visible to the museum-going public — many working in glass-walled labs in exhibition spaces — but rarely receive credit in publications or exhibitions. Their outsize impact on palaeontology “is an unwritten secret that scientists, preparators, and all other paleontology lab workers know”, writes Caitlin Donahue Wylie, a science and technology studies researcher. Recognizing them is a powerful way to reveal the true diversity of people who do science, she argues.

Issues in Science and Technology | 9 min read

Infographic of the week

As we review the decisions made at the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, UK, this striking graph puts our current situation in perspective. It shows changes in Earth’s global temperature over the past 24,000 years.

A team of researchers combined climate models with proxy data — obtained indirectly, through palaeoclimate records such as ocean sediments — to work out the evolution of the difference in the global mean surface temperature relative to the average for the pre-industrial period of the past millennium (1000–1850). The shaded area represents a 95% confidence interval.

If confirmed through further studies, write the authors of this News & Views article, the results imply that modern warming is extraordinary compared with that of the past 10,000 years — adding weight to a similar conclusion made in the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Read more: Global temperature changes mapped across the past 24,000 years (Nature News & Views article | 6 min read, Nature paywall)

Hear more: Climate special: the past and future of the Earth’s climate (Nature Podcast | 18 min listen, free)

Reference: Nature paper

See more of the week’s key infographics, selected by Nature’s news and art teams.

On Friday, Leif Penguinson was exploring the snow-dusted standing stones of the Merrivale prehistoric settlement in Devon, UK. Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.

Thanks to those readers keeping me up to date with penguin news, including the birth of a rare rockhopper penguin chick at a zoo in Montreal (I’m assured that Leif had nothing to do with it) and news that an Adélie penguin from Antarctica had appeared 3,000 kilometres away, in New Zealand. Remember, penguins, Leif is a trained globetrotter — don’t try this at home.

This newsletter is always evolving — tell us what you think! Please send your feedback to [email protected].

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing