2026年9月26日

Briefing Chat: Why scientists made papyrus scrolls, then burnt them

Shamini Bundell

Why science wouldn’t exist without alchemy, curiosity and great writing: Books in brief

Andrew Robinson

Anthropic’s AI biolab finds ‘CRISPR-like’ DNA in viruses. What’s next?

Heidi Ledford

Chemists struggle to ditch hazardous solvents — even after decades of ‘green’ efforts

Mark Peplow

Nepal’s floods expose issues with climate-disaster funding — firmer policies are needed fast

Uttam Babu Shrestha

Exclusive: Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers

Max Kozlov

OpenAI's research chief talks of ‘cultural reset’ after wild few weeks

Elizabeth Gibney

AI bots are flooding researchers with requests for money and time

Mohana Basu

Daily briefing: Will AI really be the death of us all?

Jacob Smith

Daily briefing: Read the text inside a charred, rolled-up scroll

Flora Graham

Generative artifical intelligence for climate dialogue justice

Victor Galaz

Persistent contribution of biogenic emissions to lower stratospheric aerosols via global monsoon convections

Pengfei Yu

Flood risk governance must put social vulnerability at the centre

Avidesh Seenath

Make the invisible visible by strengthening utility literacy to sustain water services

Ahmed Rachid El-Khattabi

A River Wave framework to unify river ecosystem concepts and predict ecological change

Eva Bergman

Abstract The River Wave Concept is a theoretical interpretation of river ecosystem processes that links flow to multiple river ecosystem concepts and contextualizes how a river functions with or without anthropogenic impacts. Here we propose a framework that can map the River Wave Concept to ecosystem concepts and wave metrics using widely available flow data from gauging station networks. The framework can produce a three-dimensional River Wave visualization, a time series of ecosystem process changes over time and wave metrics that can be related to organism patterns across space. Our case study contrasted Sweden’s fragmented rivers with modelled free-flowing conditions and found that the observed fragmented rivers may favour specific fish life history strategies, that ecosystem functio…