For months, researchers in a laboratory in Dallas, Texas, worked in secrecy, culturing grey-wolf blood cells and altering the DNA within. The scientists then plucked nuclei from these gene-edited cells and injected them into egg cells from a domestic dog to form clones. They transferred dozens of the cloned embryos into the wombs of surrogate dogs, eventually bringing into the world three animals of a type that had never been seen before. Two males named Romulus and Remus were born in October 2024, and a female, Khaleesi, was born in January. A few months later, Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based company that produced the creatures, declared: “The first de-extinct animals are here.” Of 20 edits made to the animals’ genomes, the company says that 15 match sequences identified in dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), a large-bodied wolf species that last roamed North America during the ice age that ended some 11,500 years ago. Ancient proteins rewrite the rhino family tree — are dinosaurs next? The company’s announcement of the pups in April, which described them as dire wolves, set off a media maelstrom. The ensuing debates over the nature of the animals — and the advisability of doing such work — have opened a chasm between Colossal’s team and other scientists. “I don’t think they de-extincted anything,” says Jeanne Loring, a stem-cell biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She and many others say that the hype surrounding Colossal’s announcement has the potential to confuse the public about what de-extinction technologies can achieve. Colossal, meanwhile, has taken an increasingly combative tone in addressing criticisms, issuing rapid rebuttals to researchers and conservationists who have publicly questioned the company’s work. The firm has also been accused of taking part in a campaign to undermine the credibility of some critics. The company denies having played any part in this. Colossal stands by its claims and insists that it is listening to dissenters and seeking advice from them. “We have had this attitude of running towards critics, not away,” says Ben Lamm, a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the company. Colossal ambitions De-extinction is an emerging field that represents the meeting point of several groundbreaking biotechnologies: ancient genomics, cloning and genome editing, ostensibly in the service of conservation. The field has roots in science fiction, with the term seeming first to have appeared in a 1979 novel by Piers Anthony called The Source of Magic. And Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park — itself inspired by ancient-DNA investigations — popularized the possibility that long-dead organisms could be cloned from preserved DNA. There has never been perfect agreement on what counts as de-extinction — such as whether it means cloning exact replicas of extinct species, creating proxies that fulfil their roles in ecosystems, or something in between. Some count the birth of a cloned bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), a type of wild goat, as a first example. The animal’s genome was transferred into goat (Capra hircus) egg cells from frozen cell samples taken from one of the last living bucardo specimens in 2000. (The resulting creature died within minutes of birth1.) But this pathway to de-extinction isn’t an option for most species. DNA degrades over time, and without a sample of carefully preserved DNA, researchers would have to engineer the whole genome. The advent of CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing in 2012 provided another option. Researchers can identify genetic variants that contribute to key traits of extinct animals and edit these variants into cells of living relatives. They can then use that manipulated DNA to create a new animal through cloning. Plans to bring back animals such as the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) and the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) began to flourish. Even though there was interest among researchers and the public, funding was an issue. “We had been unable to get really any philanthropic interest in de-extinction,” says Ben Novak, who leads a passenger-pigeon de-extinction effort at the non-profit organization Revive & Restore in Sausalito, California. But in 2021, geneticist George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was working with Revive & Restore, caught a break. He teamed up with Lamm to launch Colossal Biosciences with US$15 million in funding, much of which came from venture capitalists. De-extinction of the woolly mammoth would be the firm’s flagship project, using elephants as surrogates. Beth Shapiro joined US firm Colossal Biosciences in 2024 to focus on de-extinction work.Credit: Shelby Tauber/The Washington Post/Getty Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary geneticist who is chief scientific officer at Colossal, was initially sceptical that there was a strong conservation argument for creating elephants that had key mammoth traits. In 2015, she told Nature that her book on de-extinction, called How To Clone A Mammoth, might have been more accurately titled ‘How One Might Go About Cloning a Mammoth (Should It Become Technically Possible, And If It Were, In Fact, a Good Idea, Which It’s Probably Not)’. Shapiro turned down an offer to join the company at first, but started seriously entertaining the idea when Colossal expanded its de-extinction ambitions. It began projects to bring back the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), which was wiped out in the seventeenth century, and to restore thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus), the Australian marsupials that are sometimes referred to as Tasmanian tigers and that were hunted to extinction in the 1930s. She was especially interested in seeing de-extinction technologies applied to existing endangered species. Shapiro joined Colossal in 2024 as its chief scientist. “This is an opportunity to scale up the impact that I have the potential to make,” she says. “Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis.” The company, now valued at around US$10 billion, has attracted celebrity investors, including the media personality Paris Hilton and film director Peter Jackson, alongside a handful of leading scientists as staff and advisers. Dire disagreements The dire-wolf project was different from many of Colossal’s other efforts because it proceeded quietly. Few people knew about the work until this year, and that irked some researchers. “They didn’t invite any kind of conversation about whether or not that is a good use of funds or a good project to do,” says Novak. Shapiro says the secrecy around the dire-wolf project was designed to generate surprise, and to counter public perceptions that the company overpromises and under-delivers. She also says that the company talked extensively to scientists, conservationists and others about the project and how it should proceed. The firm has not released the full list of edits that it made — 20 changes to 14 genome locations. Fifteen of the changes were identified in two dire-wolf genomes obtained from the remains of animals that lived 13,000 and 72,000 years ago. The genome differs from that of the grey wolf (Canis lupus) by about 12 million DNA letters. The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) went extinct in the seventeenth century. Colossal Biosciences aims to edit the genome of a related pigeon species to mimic the dodo’s traits.Credit: Klaus Nigge/Nature Picture Library Colossal says that other edits, including changes that led to the creatures’ white coats and contributed to their large size, were intended to replicate dire-wolf traits using gene variants found in grey wolves. Many scientists say that the coat colour in particular was probably inspired more by the animals’ appearance in the fantasy television series Game of Thrones than by reality. “There is no chance in hell a dire wolf is going to look like that,” says Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a scientific adviser to Colossal. He says he agrees with other scientists who have argued that, on the basis of what is known about the dire wolf’s range, it “basically would have looked like a slightly larger coyote”. Colossal notes that the coat colour is based on the discovery of variants in two dire-wolf genomes that it says would have resulted in light-coloured fur. According to an update from Colossal in late June, Romulus and Remus weigh around 40 kilograms, around 20% heavier than a standard grey wolf of the same age, and Khaleesi is about 16 kilograms. They live on an 800-hectare ecological preserve surrounded by a 3-metre wall. Colossal plans to make more of the animals, and to study their health and development in depth. It says it will not release them into the wild. The mysterious extinction of the dire wolf Shapiro argued in her 2015 book that forming a wild population is a requirement for successful de-extinction. She nevertheless considers the dire wolves to be an example of de-extinction, and says that creating them will have conservation benefits for wolves and other species. Many scientists disagree. A group of experts on canids that advises the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) issued a statement in mid-April rejecting Colossal’s claim that gene-edited wolves could be considered dire wolves, or even proxies for the extinct species. The statement cites a 2016 IUCN definition for de-extinction that emphasizes that the animal must fill an ecological niche. The work, the group said, “may demonstrate technical capabilities, but it does not contribute to conservation”. Colossal has disputed this on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) saying that the dire-wolf project “develops vital conservation technologies and provides an ideal platform for the next stage of this research”. Novak says: “The dire wolf fits the Jurassic Park model of de-extinction beautifully.” The animals have the traits of extinct species and are, to his knowledge, not intended for release into the wild, he says. “It is clearly for spectacle.” Gilbert, who was a co-author of a preprint describing the ancient dire-wolf genomes2, says he is concerned that Colossal is not being sufficiently clear to the public about what it has done. “It’s a dog with 20 edits,” he says. “If you’re putting out descriptions that are going to be so easily falsified, the risk is you do damage to science’s reputation.” The Tasmanian tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was a carnivorous marsupial that once roamed Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. The last known specimen died in the 1930s. Credit: Chronicle/Alamy Lamm rejects the idea that Colossal’s messaging undermines public credibility in science, pointing to what he says was an overwhelmingly positive reaction. Loring, who is part of an effort to use stem-cell technology in conservation, says that she sees merit in Colossal’s work. It has, she says, changed her views on how to repopulate northern white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). But she worries that Colossal’s messaging overshadows those contributions. “It may create an opportunity for us to educate the public,” she says. “More often, it creates an opportunity for us to be ignored.” To Love Dalén, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Stockholm and a scientific adviser to Colossal, the controversy is “a storm in a teacup” that detracts from Colossal’s achievement. “It makes me a little bit sad there is this huge debate and angry voices about the common name,” he says. Dogfight Shapiro says she was surprised and saddened by the strength of reactions to Colossal’s announcement. “It was harder than I thought it would be, and the questions were getting meaner and meaner,” she says. But she and Colossal were quick to respond. “Some of y’all are real mad about this,” she began in a video posted on X in April. “You can call these animals proxy dire wolves or Colossal’s dire wolves. All of that would be correct. We chose to call them dire wolves because they look like dire wolves and reflect the key traits we found by sequencing their genome.” Meet the ‘woolly mouse’: why scientists doubt it’s a big step towards recreating mammoths A statement by Colossal to reporters in early April struck a more defensive tone. “It’s obvious most critics would rather complain than contribute,” it said. It asked critics to “maybe also take a breath and think about what the birth of these technologies means to the future of our planet instead of nitpicking terminology”. Lamm insists that Colossal is willing to listen to scientists’ criticisms. He points out that Gilbert is part of its scientific advisory board. But he also questions the legitimacy of some of Colossal’s detractors. “We have a couple of consistent critics that don’t have the highest levels of credentials,” he says, “people who haven’t contributed to their fields in quite some time.” Meanwhile, one of Colossal’s critics, evolutionary geneticist Vincent Lynch at the University at Buffalo in New York, has accused Lamm and the company of mounting a campaign to discredit him, after Lynch discovered several mostly anonymous web pages and posts questioning his expertise. In a series of posts on X and the social-media service Bluesky, Lynch said he suspects that Colossal and Lamm are responsible for the material. Nature has identified similar posts targeting other critics: Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield, UK; palaeoecologist Nic Rawlence at the University of Otago in New Zealand; and Kristofer Helgen, an evolutionary biologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lynch acknowledges that he has no direct evidence that Lamm or Colossal were involved. But he says he thinks that the articles targeting him and others were timed to undermine them just as the company was making major announcements, including those about the dire wolf and a gene-edited ‘woolly mouse’ that the company says lays the groundwork for its woolly mammoth de-extinction efforts. In March, Colossal Biosciences reported the creation of ‘woolly mice’, gene-edited mice that it says have key traits of the woolly mammoth.Credit: Colossal Biosciences A Colossal spokesperson said the firm was unaware of the posts aimed at Herridge, Rawlence and Helgen, and became aware of those mentioning Lynch only when he accused Colossal of having a hand in them. The company and Lamm deny any involvement. “It’s unclear to the company who would write critical articles about Vincent Lynch, but given his obsession and aggressive behaviour, the company believes it’s safe to assume he may have a few enemies,” says a spokesperson. Lynch says: “Colossal clearly doesn’t know anything about me or my life.” On 19 June, he received a letter from Colossal’s lawyers, accusing him of defamation against Lamm and threatening legal action. Lynch says that holding companies and their founders accountable for their words and actions should not be considered defamation. “It is our responsibility as scientists,” he says. Forging ahead From Colossal’s perspective, the dire-wolf announcement was a success. Lamm says that the company tracked thousands of articles and social-media mentions about the achievement using artificial intelligence, and that they are overwhelmingly positive. “I wouldn’t change one thing,” he says. In July, Colossal announced controversial plans to de-extinct moas, a group of giant flightless birds that vanished not long after humans first arrived in New Zealand. And the company remains bullish on its other efforts, predicting that mammoth-like elephants could arrive as early as 2028. Some critics are becoming concerned about how the company will conduct its work in the future, and what the impacts of that might be. In a 2021 opinion piece in Nature3, Herridge, who had previously turned down an invitation to serve as a scientific adviser to Colossal, wrote that she felt the company’s founders were “driven by a real desire to help the world”. But after the dire-wolf roll-out, she’s concerned about Colossal’s approach and its priorities. “We have a company that is only listening to people who agree with them, who is pushing forward with statements that they aren’t backing down from,” she says. This “is not really where we want to be with a technology that has the potential to change the way our world will look”. Lamm disagrees. “We happily engage with critics,” he says. “As scientists, we will absolutely consider new data presented and adapt our hypotheses and conclusions.”

Consuming minimally processed foods — such as those home-cooked from raw ingredients — could make it easier to shed weight while on a diet.Credit: Filippo Carlot/Alamy Eating ultra-processed foods might hinder attempts to lose weight even when the diet accords with national healthy-eating recommendations, a study has found. The study, published in Nature Medicine on 4 August1, highlights a lack of focus on the impact of UPFs in national dietary recommendations in the United Kingdom — where the study was conducted — and elsewhere, the authors say. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are products that have been developed by combining food extracts with additives and industrial ingredients. The result is food items that are cheap, profitable and widely accessible. It is well established that the high salt and sugar content of many UPFs makes the products unhealthy, but some research has suggested that how they are processed could also have a role. Samuel Dicken, an obesity and behaviour researcher at University College London and lead author of the paper, says that the motivation behind this study was to address a gap in national dietary recommendations, and to do so in the participants' everyday environment. “It will be the longest-ever trial of a UPF diet to date. It’s the first one to do it in the real world to try and apply all those behavioural influences” associated with daily life. In the United Kingdom, more than half of the energy in the average person’s diet comes from UPFs, with similar figures found elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Socio-economic factors The wider availability of affordable UPFs over less-processed alternatives could have a disproportionate effect on people from low-income areas. “Issues around diet and obesity related to these [UPFs] are very much related to socio-economic inequalities,” says Dicken, adding that people might have unhealthy diets not because they aren’t trying to eat healthily, but “because our food environment is just setting us up to fail”. The study examined the impacts of UPFs on 55 adults on a diet based on UK national dietary guidelines. Participants followed an 8-week diet based on minimally processed foods (MPFs) and an 8-week diet based on UPFs, with a 4-week period between the two, where participants returned to their usual diet. Both diets followed the UK Eatwell Guide, which focuses on food groups and macronutrients including fat, protein, and carbohydrate content. During both phases, the participants had all meals, snacks, and drinks delivered to their homes, but could choose how much to eat at any one time, and when it was consumed. The researchers found that participants’ weight and body-mass index decreased during both phases. However, participants lost more than twice as much weight — 1.84 kilograms on average, compared with 0.88 kilograms — while following the MPF diet. Changes in body composition, such as decreases in fat mass, body-fat percentage and visceral-fat rating occurred on the MPF diet but not on the UPF one. Cravings were also decreased on the MPF diet. The mechanism for contrasting weight changes when consuming UPFs and MPFs remains unclear. Researchers suggest that textural and structural changes to the food during processing can mean that people are likely to consume the food more quickly, delaying satiation and leading to increased energy intake. The additives used and excessive heat treatment of UPFs could also affect the gut microbiome and promote inflammation. Marketing and advertising are also thought to play a part, because UPF packaging often contains nutritional claims that could mislead consumers. “This trial supports the importance of considering food processing as a distinct and policy-relevant dimension of diet quality,” says Tera Fazzino, a psychologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “Policies that focus solely on reformulating UPFs to meet nutritional standards may overlook the behavioural and physiological effects of how those foods are engineered.” This study “strengthens the evidence base needed to inform policy and public-health messaging. By showing that processing matters even when nutritional quality is controlled, it challenges the current focus on nutrients alone and may help catalyse broader discussion and reform,” adds Fazzino. “I think this will be a landmark study in the literature”, says Carlos Monteiro, an epidemiologist at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Monteiro, who coined the term ‘ultra-processed food’, says that “UPFs are engineered to be overconsumed”. These foods are more “addictive-like”, energy-dense and tasty which can lead to higher intake when compared with MPFs.

In 2022, PLoS ONE retracted more than 100 papers after an editor noticed an unusual spike in submissions. An independent study has now looked at the journal's retraction history more in depth. Credit: Getty Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found. The study1, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 4 August, found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted. The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature’s news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE’s retracted papers up to 14 July. “The footprints that systematic fraud leaves in the literature are so massive that there’s no way that it’s just a couple of bad authors,” says PNAS study co-author Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “There is complicity from within the journal-appointed editors that allows for this to happen.” “PLOS has long been aware of the issue addressed in this article,” says Renee Hoch, head of publication ethics at the publisher. “In each case we promptly removed the people of concern from PLOS editorial boards and took action as needed on the affected articles.” She adds that “the issues discussed in this article are not specific to PLoS One and have been affecting journals and publishers across the industry”. Cassidy Sugimoto, a science-policy researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, calls the findings “disheartening”. But, she says, they show “that we have the tools and mechanisms to identify misconduct at scale, and begin to uproot some of the poor behaviours that are happening in science”. Sugimoto adds that the study cannot not determine whether all flagged editors acted deliberately to slip problematic work through peer review, or whether they were “negligent in their duties”. Papers can be retracted by their authors or publishers for myriad reasons, including honest errors, authorship disputes or problems that arise from research misconduct. Editors with high retraction rates PLoS ONE is published by the open-access Public Library of Science (PLOS) in San Francisco, California. The journal relies on thousands of volunteer academic editors, who handle submissions and oversee peer review, with support from 22 staff editors. In the PNAS study, researchers examined 276,956 articles published in PLoS ONE from its launch in 2006 to late 2023, and tracked 134,983 authors and 18,329 handling editors. They identified 22 editors who disproportionately accepted papers that were later retracted, and 33 others who accepted papers that had been flagged on PubPeer — a site for post-publication peer review — more frequently than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, the analysis identified 21 authors who seemed to steer their submissions towards the group of 22 editors flagged for high retraction rates. The study reveals how individuals can form coordinated networks and work under the guise of editorial duty to push large amounts of problematic research into the scientific literature, in some cases with links to paper mills — businesses that churn out fake papers and sell authorship slots. Hoch denies that PLoS ONE systematically allows authors to choose who is assigned to handle their submission. “Editor assignment at PLoS One is done via an algorithm that matches submissions to editors with suitable expertise, or in a minority of cases PLOS staff manually research and assign editors. Author requests for specific editors are not honoured or even considered in most cases, and when they are considered they are carefully vetted for potential competing interests.” Conflicting interests In 2022, PLoS ONE retracted more than 100 papers after an editor noticed an unusual spike in submissions, many in agricultural research, from one author. The journal’s investigation found that some academic editors had handled manuscripts from the same authors repeatedly, co-authored papers with them and manipulated peer review. In their analysis of PLoS ONE’s publication records, Richardson and his colleagues identified 19 researchers — based in 4 countries — who served as academic editors between 2020 and 2023, and repeatedly handled each other’s submissions. More than half of the papers they accepted were later retracted, with nearly identical notices citing concerns about authorship, peer review and competing interests. Nature’s analysis identified 3 of those 19 editors. Shahid Farooq, a plant biologist at Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, topped the list of PLoS ONE editors ordered by the number of retracted papers that they handled. Between 2019 and 2023, Farooq was responsible for editing 79 articles, 52 of which were subsequently retracted. All of the retraction notices stated that the papers were “identified as one of a series of submissions” for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Farooq also co-authored seven articles in PLoS ONE that were later retracted with identical retraction notices. Farooq told Nature in an e-mail statement that he relied on reviewers’ reports to make his editorial decisions, and that editors had limited tools to detect conflicts of interest. In a 2022 press release, PLOS’s Hoch said that “internal competing interest checks” were not “equipped to identify co-publication histories” at the time. PLOS introduced new policies in 2023 to try to prevent manipulation of the publication process. More recently, journals have started using automated tools for analysing co-authorship patterns and flagging potential paper-mill issues. Farooq says that PLoS ONE removed him from the editorial board in 2022, and that he subsequently resigned from his editorial positions in other journals, including Frontiers in Agronomy and BMC Plant Biology. “My editing experience has changed to not editing any paper for any publisher, as the publishers become innocent once any issues are raised on the published papers,” he added. Another editor flagged in Nature’s analysis is Zhihan Lv (also known as Zhihan Lyu), a researcher in virtual reality, who ranked second in the list of editors who handled high numbers of retracted PLoS ONE papers. Between 2017 and 2021, Lv edited 54 papers, and 43 of these have been retracted, including 31 this year. All notices cited concerns about peer-review integrity and potential manipulation of the publication process. Lv was also an editor for more than 400 papers in journals published by Hindawi — a subsidiary of New Jersey-based publisher Wiley that has now ceased activity. Many of these papers have been retracted. In 2024, the journal Neural Computing and Applications — published by London-based Springer Nature — retracted 24 of 26 papers in a 2018 special issue for which Lv was the managing guest editor (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher). The retractions, which included one research article co-authored by Lv, referred to compromised editorial handling and peer review, irrelevant citations, image manipulations, tortured phrases and content outside the scope of the journal and its special issue. Lv told Nature he did not know at the time that there was a conflict of interest in submitting a paper to a special issue for which he was the handling editor. In 2022, PLoS ONE removed Lv from its editorial board and retracted three papers co-authored by him in later years. “I was listed as a co-author in these three articles without my consent. I have no knowledge of the details of these articles,” Lv told Nature. “I remember informing the journal of this when they contacted me before retracting the papers,” he added. But in 2023, PLOS alerted Uppsala University in Sweden — where Lv worked from 2021 until his resignation in September 2024 — citing concerns about his involvement in paper-mill activities. The university’s investigation concluded that there were “grounds for suspecting research misconduct” on one of his PLoS ONE papers, and referred a separate matter, involving an ethics review it said Lv had fabricated, to the Swedish police. Lv has since moved to Xidian University in Xi’an, China. Authorship concerns Haibin Lv, a marine geologist at the North Sea Bureau in China’s Ministry of Natural Resources in Qingdao, ranked third in Nature’s list of editors. Between 2021 and 2022, Haibin Lv edited 28 papers for PLoS ONE. All but one of the 28 papers have been retracted, and the journal noted that they were part of a series of submissions for which it had concerns about peer-review integrity, similarities across articles and potential manipulation of the publication process. PLoS ONE issued an expression of concern for the remaining paper in June, citing issues with peer review and citations. Nature also identified 113 papers published in Hindawi’s Journal of Sensors between 2021 and 2023 that Haibin Lv edited, 88 of which have been retracted. Two of the retracted papers in PLoS ONE that Haibin Lv edited were co-authored by Zhihan Lv, who told Nature he was listed as an author without his consent. “Zhihan Lv and I are collaborators on multiple research projects. My handling of the two PLoS ONE papers he co-authored was no different than handling papers from strangers,” Haibin Lv told Nature. Nature also identified ten articles that Haibin Lv and Zhihan Lv co-authored and published between 2022 and 2024 — six of which appeared in conferences run by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a professional association and publisher based in New York City. None have been retracted. The IEEE declined to comment on the matter. Zhihan Lv and Haibin Lv both told Nature that they are not brothers. Zhihan said they were not blood relatives, and Haibin described their relationship as “private”. Fourth on Nature's list is Adnan Noor Shah, an agronomist at Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology in Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan, who handled 24 papers published in PLoS ONE between August 2021 and May 2022. Eighteen of those papers have been retracted, and the retraction notices for 17 of them said that they were part of a series of submissions for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Shah also co-authored five articles that PLoS ONE later retracted, citing similar concerns, as well as issues with reference citations and overlap with other publications. Nature’s analysis found that, in 2022, Shah co-authored two papers in two journals, including Frontiers in Plant Science. His co-authors on these papers included three researchers who appeared as authors in four other papers that Shah edited for Frontiers in Plant Science. The journal’s publisher, Frontiers (based in Lausanne, Switzerland), told Nature that it is investigating 20 publications across the journals that Shah edited. Shah did not respond to Nature’s emails. Nature’s investigation also identified cancer researcher Aamir Ahmad as the most prolific PLoS ONE editor. Ahmad is the editor-in-chief of Non-coding RNA Research, an open-access journal published by Beijing-based KeAi. He has also been a cancer editor at Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports since 2017. Ahmad was at the University of South Alabama in Mobile for at least part of the time during which he served as an editor at PLoS ONE between 2012 and 2020. During these years, he edited 851 articles, including 273 and 246 papers in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Before 2016, Ahmad edited about 39 papers per year, on average. He told Nature that he did not request to handle so many papers in 2017 and 2018. “Perhaps the journal was more confident in my ability to handle multiple manuscripts after I had been managing manuscripts for them for four years,” said Ahmad. “Managing five to six papers per week is not really a big task,” he added. Only 9 of the 851 papers that Ahmad edited have been retracted, which puts him in sixth place in Nature’s analysis of PLoS ONE editors, but the retraction notices cited image duplications and contaminated cell lines. Last year, Frontiers retracted a paper that was edited by Ahmad, citing concerns about the validity of the paper’s data. “I never willingly allowed any problematic paper to be published,” he told Nature. “As an editor, it is quite difficult to be able to identify issues with image manipulation,” he noted, adding that the retracted papers underwent preliminary screening by senior editors and were peer reviewed later. In 2020, Ahmad moved to Qatar to take up a position as a senior research scientist at the Hamad Medical Corporation in Doha. Ahmad was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he worked for nearly ten years. During this time, he collaborated with Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher known for having faked research; 50 of Sarkar’s papers have been retracted, according to Retraction Watch’s database. Ahmad co-authored 35 papers with Sarkar, 13 of which have been retracted, all citing image manipulation. He told Nature that he was not “aware of any questionable research practices” before they came to light. “The fact that any shortcomings or concerns were not identified [by editors and reviewers] is also an explanation of how as an editor I was unable to identify concerns in that small percentage of manuscripts that I handled,” he added. Links with paper mills In the PNAS paper, Richardson and his colleagues compiled a list of 32,786 papers that they and other sleuths flagged for bearing hallmarks of paper-mill production, such as duplicated images, tortured phrases and whole copied sentences. Only 8,589 of these papers have been retracted. They report that the number of suspected paper-mill articles is doubling every 1.5 years — outpacing the number of retractions, which is doubling every 3.3 years. “Science-integrity measures that we use currently are woefully inadequate in scale to actually tackle the size of the paper-mill problem, and of systematic fraud in general,” says Richardson. “We need to radically scale up these integrity interventions if we want them to be effective at all,” and reporting the roles of editors is part of that response, he adds. Sugimoto agrees, saying that “there has to be a level of transparency”. The increasing volume of submissions is also putting editors under pressure, and raising the risk that low-quality or fraudulent work slips through, she adds.

Attendees at a meeting of a US Senate appropriations committee on 31 July: from left, Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state; Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine; and Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky.Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty A US Senate committee has voted to reject Republican President Donald Trump’s plan to cut the 2026 budget of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 40% and to collapse its 27 institutes and centres into 8. Instead, Republicans and Democrats on the committee endorsed maintaining the biomedical agency’s structure and increasing its funding by US$400 million, or about 1%. The details, presented in a bill released today by the committee, will probably change before the bill is signed into law. But the initial figure for the NIH, discussed at a meeting yesterday, offers yet another hint that the US Congress, which controls government spending, does not support Trump’s desire to slash US science. (Earlier this month, another Senate committee said it wanted to keep the budget for the US National Science Foundation relatively flat despite Trump’s call for a 57% reduction.) “Given the alternative, the Senate’s recommendation of a $400-million increase for NIH is an indication the agency still has support on Capitol Hill,” says Jennifer Zeitzer, director of public affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland. “A 40% cut would have been devastating, so this is a good outcome in a tough year.” The road ahead The bill now faces several challenges. First, the full Senate must pass it. Then, the lower chamber of Congress, the US House of Representatives, will pass its own version, and the two bodies must come together to agree on a single bill that Trump is willing to sign. Judge rules against NIH grant cuts — and calls them discriminatory The bill might also change if legislators introduce amendments before it’s sent to Trump’s desk. For example, Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator for Illinois, tried at the meeting yesterday to add a provision to reinstate billions of dollars in health-research funding that had been frozen or terminated by the Trump administration because projects — including some on COVID-19 — did not align with agency priorities. The amendment failed in a vote that fell along party lines, with 14 Democrats voting for it and 15 Republicans voting against it. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator for West Virginia, urged her colleagues to vote against the amendment, saying that “every president has the prerogative to implement new goals and priorities”. Nevertheless, senators at the hearing rejoiced that they could come to a bipartisan agreement to fund health agencies: “To the scientists wondering if there will even be an NIH by the end of this administration, this committee’s resounding message is: ‘Yes, Congress has your back’,” said Patty Murray, a Democratic senator for Washington state and vice-chair of the committee. “We need you to stay here and keep this research going.” Under the bill, budgets for other health agencies would also remain roughly the same. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose budget the Trump administration wanted to cut by more than half, would receive $9.1 billion, compared with $9.2 billion in 2024. Turbulent times The committee meeting comes towards the end of a tumultuous week for the NIH, after the White House blocked, and then unblocked, the agency from spending the remainder of its 2025 budget — about $15 billion — by issuing grants. With the NIH cancelling grant-review meetings in early 2025, funding processes have been delayed, and agency staff members are working in overdrive to process as many grants as possible before the end of the fiscal year on 30 September. If they don’t distribute the money, the agency will have to return the unused funds to the US Treasury. US senators poised to reject Trump’s proposed massive science cuts These disruptions have drawn condemnation, and not only from Trump’s opponents: 14 Republican senators sent a letter to the White House on 25 July demanding that the NIH be allowed to spend its full 2025 budget. The NIH was already grappling with a White House mandate issued in early July that was putting strain on its ability to fund research. Typically, the agency — the largest funder of biomedical research in the world — awards multi-year grants and pays for them from the budgets of multiple fiscal years. Grants are renewed each year as long as researchers show good progress on their projects in annual reports submitted to the agency. But the mandate requires the NIH to fund half of the remaining grants it awards for the rest of this fiscal year with an up-front, lump-sum payment, rather than over multiple years. This means that the number of projects the agency can fund will sharply decrease: the NIH estimates that it will award money to 40% fewer projects in 2025 than in 2024. One of the NIH’s institutes, the National Cancer Institute, for example, has announced that it will fund only the top 4% of applications for the remainder of the fiscal year; typically, it funds between 10 and 25%. Exclusive: NIH to dismiss dozens of grant reviewers to align with Trump priorities “It turns the whole [grant-application process] into a lottery” to implement this mandate with a budget that’s decreased with inflation, says Michael Lauer, who for about ten years ran the NIH’s ‘extramural’ arm, which funds researchers at institutions across the United States. Lauer says that, when he was at the agency, “we actively discouraged this [lump sum] funding because it’s more difficult to exercise proper stewardship of taxpayer funds without the leverage over the grant recipient” that they have to demonstrate progress. In the Senate committee’s proposed spending bill, lawmakers adopted a provision that effectively prevents the Trump administration from using such lump-sum grant payments. The committee also rejected the Trump administration’s plans to slash billions of dollars from US research institutions by implementing a 15% cap on fees for research overheads, which cover the ‘indirect costs’ of necessities such as electricity at university research facilities.

Misconduct is the main reason journal articles from India are retracted.Credit: sritakoset/Shutterstock India’s national university ranking will start penalizing institutions if a sizable number of papers published by their researchers are retracted — a first for an institutional ranking system. The move is an attempt by the government to address the country’s growing number of retractions due to misconduct. These universities have the most retracted scientific articles Many retractions correct honest mistakes in the literature, but others arise because of misconduct. India has had more papers retracted than any country apart from China and the United States, according to an analysis of the public database maintained by Retraction Watch of retractions over the past three decades. But whereas less than 1 paper is retracted for every 1,000 papers published in the United States, more than 3 are retracted for every 1,000 published in China, and the figure is 2 per 1,000 in India. The majority in India and China are withdrawn because of misconduct or research-integrity concerns. Retractions are “a very important signal of misconduct, and we should be looking closely at them now”, says Achal Agrawal, a data scientist in Raipur, India, who was involved in the analysis. Agrawal is founder of India Research Watch, an online group of researchers and students who highlight integrity issues. Some researchers have welcomed the government’s decision, calling it a first step in acknowledging and attempting to tackle the problem. But others warn that retractions are a way for science to self-correct and should not be penalized. The policy’s effectiveness will depend on how exactly institutional retractions are measured and penalized — details that will be revealed only when the latest ranking results are announced, in a couple of weeks. “I hope that the penalty is strong enough to act as a deterrent, and it doesn’t remain symbolic,” says Agrawal. Moumita Koley, who studies metascience at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, also appreciates the policy. “Indian science needs a little clean-up, and this shows that people have taken note,” she says. But she worries that the situation won’t change for the better. She says that adjusting one ranking instrument doesn’t remove the incentives that drive researchers and institutions to publish lots of papers at the cost of quality, such as promotions and other ranking metrics rewarding high publication counts, and individual drives for public recognition. Rising retractions India’s National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) assesses higher-education institutions every year. It takes into account factors including teaching, engagement and research-impact metrics such as publication and citation counts. “It’s the most important ranking in India,” says Agrawal. Institutions must participate in the ranking to be eligible for certain national grant schemes. A high rank confers some advantages, including permission to design their own curriculum. But the growing number of retractions in India and globally has not gone unnoticed, says Anil Sahasrabudhe, who chairs the National Board of Accreditation in New Delhi, which conducts the national ranking. A 2025 analysis by Nature found that several Indian institutions were among the top global institutions with the most retracted papers in the past five years. The board decided to deduct marks as a way to ‘name and shame’ institutions, and send the message that unethical research practices are not acceptable, says Sahasrabudhe. Because this year will be the first in which the assessment considers retractions, penalties will be mild and symbolic for now, he says. The NIRF will count the number of research papers retracted in the Scopus and Web of Science databases for each institution over the past three years, he says. A small number of retractions is acceptable, but generally, “the more number of retractions, the more the penalty”. Institutions that consistently get many retractions could be penalized more over time and might even be barred from the ranking, he says. Sahasrabudhe acknowledges that retractions sometimes occur for reasons beyond a researcher’s control, but when they happen in large numbers, “they are not necessarily by error but deliberate, hence need to be punished to send a strong signal.” Root of the problem Researchers say the assessment should also consider retractions recorded in the public database maintained by Retraction Watch, which is more comprehensive than Scopus or Web of Science and includes the reasons for retractions. Anil says they wanted to use the same source for retractions as they use for publications and citations. Researchers also say the ranking should penalize only those retractions that are attributable to plagiarism, fraud or other research-integrity issues — and should look for patterns of bad behaviour, as opposed to one-offs. “Superficially, it sounds good,” says Ivan Oransky, a specialist in academic publishing and co-founder of Retraction Watch. “You want people to be accountable, and universities to be accountable.” The problem, he notes, is that aligning the research ecosystem against retractions could create perverse incentives. For example, it could encourage institutions and researchers to find ways to avoid getting their papers retracted, at least in a timely manner. The policy change should also come with a review of how the NIRF’s own metrics, which reward publication counts, are contributing to the bad behaviour. “They should see it as a sort of band-aid,” says Oransky, and “also look at changing the ranking criteria themselves”. Sahasrabudhe says that it will take time to address the perverse incentives caused by the pressure to publish, and the NIRF is attempting to use artificial intelligence and data analytics to curb these trends. “This is a constant endeavour.” The NIRF ranks only Indian institutions. So far, no global institutional rankings have begun to penalize retractions. Spokespeople for the QS World University Rankings and the global list produced by US News & World Report said in e-mails that the rankings remove retracted papers when compiling paper and citation metrics, so that institutions don’t get credit for them. “In our experience, while retractions may be regrettable on an individual level, they often reflect strong governance and values-led research management at the institutional level — qualities QS seeks to champion, not discourage,” said Ben Sowter, a senior vice-president at QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a higher-education analysis company based in London. The Nature Index, which tracks well-known natural-science and health-science journals and publishes institutional rankings, also does not account for retractions. (Nature Index is published by Springer Nature; Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.) Phil Baty, head of global affairs at Times Higher Education in London, which also has a university ranking, agrees that retractions can suggest a positive culture of vigilance and transparency.

HIV particles (red dots) enter cells using proteins that bind to the cell membrane.Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library Two vaccine candidates using mRNA technology elicit a potent immune response against HIV, according to an early-stage clinical trial1. The trial is only the third to test mRNA vaccines against HIV. “These are the first studies, so they’re very, very important,” says infectious-disease physician Sharon Lewin, who heads the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, Australia. Around 41 million people globally live with HIV, for which there is currently no vaccine. To design vaccines against a virus, researchers often study how the body clears the pathogen from its system, says Lewin. But HIV attacks the immune system, and the body rarely manages to clear it out. As a result, candidates for vaccines against the virus must undergo lots of testing through trial and error. That makes HIV vaccines a good place to use mRNA technology. The first mRNA vaccine was approved in 2020, for COVID-19. Compared with other modes of delivery, mRNA vaccines can be modified at low cost quickly — in months, not years — which enables researchers to test out different strategies. The vaccines work by delivering instructions to cells, in the form of mRNA, to produce specific proteins typically found on the surface of viruses. This induces an immune response, which helps the body to recognize and clear out a virus, should it be exposed to the real thing. Bound or free HIV uses an ‘envelope’ protein on its outer membrane to bind to and infect cells. In the latest study, published in Science Translational Medicine, a team including William Schief at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, who works on protein design, conducted a small trial, comparing two vaccine approaches. In one, the standard method for HIV vaccine candidates, the cell is directed to produce envelope proteins that float freely. In the other, the mRNA vaccine instructs the cell to make envelope proteins that are attached to the cell membrane — similar to how they are found in the live virus. The authors describe animal tests of this method in a companion paper2. The trial involved 108 healthy adults aged between 18 and 55 across ten study sites in the United States. It tested two membrane-bound vaccine candidates and one unbound candidate. Participants each received three doses of a single vaccine, at a low or high dose, several weeks apart; which vaccine they received was selected randomly. The vaccines were provided by pharmaceutical company Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Schief is vice-president for protein design. Some 80% of the participants who received either of the vaccines that made membrane-bound proteins went on to produce antibodies that could block that protein from entering cells. By contrast, only 4% of the participants who received the unbound-protein vaccine produced corresponding antibodies. “The difference is pretty striking,” says Lewin. She expects the findings to inform the development of future vaccine candidates. Side effects All three vaccines were well tolerated by most participants, in both high and low doses. However, seven people — 6.5% of the study group — developed hives, large, itchy rashes. Five of them had symptoms that lasted for more than six weeks, some even for years. The reaction was seen across all three vaccine candidates, at both doses. Two previous trials by the same team, described in May3, tested a strategy in which participants receive initial injections of one mRNA vaccine candidate and booster doses of others, with the goal of inducing a broad immune response that could defend against a range of HIV variants. The approach made good progress. The trials were conducted in the United States, Rwanda and South Africa. In one of those trials, 18% of participants developed hives or other skin reactions. In their May paper, Schief and his colleagues determined that something about the combination of HIV and mRNA — not each individually — probably caused the side effect, but they couldn’t pinpoint what exactly. Lewin says researchers need to work out what is causing these side effects to help prevent them, but they aren’t a reason to stop experimental development of HIV mRNA vaccines. “The need for an HIV vaccine is high,” she says. Schief and his colleagues plan to conduct trials using lower doses of mRNA to see whether this results in fewer cases of hives. They intend to focus on membrane-bound versions of the protein.

The AI system AlphaEarth Foundations integrates satellite images, such as this one of irrigated cropland, with other types of map to offer a data-rich picture of Earth.Credit: USGS The technology giant Google has released an artificial intelligence (AI) model that acts as a ‘virtual satellite’ to weave together trillions of disparate observations — satellite images, radar and more — to track changes in land and shallow waters across Earth. Researchers are lauding the sheer scale of the effort while also calling on Google for more information about its tests, and warning that it will be up to individual scientists to verify any maps they obtain from the tool. Google tapped billions of mobile phones to detect quakes worldwide — and send alerts The model, called AlphaEarth Foundations, maps the world “at any place and time”, Christopher Brown, a research engineer at Google DeepMind in New York City, said at a press briefing on 28 July. Scientists might use it to identify the best places for clean-energy projects, study the ecological impacts of climate change, track deforestation and more. Alongside the model, which was released yesterday, Google and its DeepMind AI unit have posted a paper, ahead of peer review, to the arXiv preprint server1. The manuscript describes the creation of the model, its initial testing and baseline data sets covering Earth during the years 2017–24. It says that AlphaEarth beats similar AI models in terms of both accuracy and data density, and that the model saves users computing time and reduces energy use. Nicholas Murray, a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, is the lead scientist for Global Ecosystems Atlas, an initiative to map the world’s biodiversity and environments. Murray says that his team often spends “tens to hundreds of days” processing satellite data before it can even begin to make products such as maps describing changes in tidal wetlands over time. He hopes that Google’s latest model — which the team is familiar with — will make that process more efficient. Packaging the data Moving forward, Google says, it will regularly update AlphaEarth’s data sets, which come fully processed. They are available through the company’s Earth Engine, a cloud-based platform that already hosts separate repositories of data covering topics such as agriculture, deforestation and weather. AlphaEarth weaves together many of these data sets to create an integrated product that scientists can explore more easily. DeepMind AI weather forecaster beats world-class system Satellites view the world in terms of individual attributes such as colours and clouds. AlphaEarth processes those and other data into digital representations called ‘embeddings’, which can be easily searched for features such as tree species, buildings and groundwater, Brown said. The data are packaged in 10-metre squares covering land surfaces and coastal regions across Earth. “This allows AlphaEarth Foundations to provide a more complete, consistent and highly detailed picture of our planet’s evolution,” Brown added. “The scale is unprecedented, for sure, and I give the team enormous credit for pulling this off,” says Solomon Hsiang, who studies global environmental policy at Stanford University in California and co-founded a competing AI model known as MOSAIKS2. At the same time, Hsiang says, it’s not entirely clear from the available data how to assess the model’s performance and compare it with others in this space. He urges Google to release not just the processed information but also the actual data from its testing, so that other researchers can gain a better understanding of them “and build on what they have accomplished”. Ultimately, the onus will be on individual researchers to assess the accuracy of the data and any limitations as they probe particular attributes of Earth, Murray says. Google says it has already provided the information that scientists need to assess the model and its performance.

Pore-forming proteins in allergens make the body cough and sneeze.Credit: Wavebreak Media ltd/Alamy The sneezing, itchy eyes and coughing elicited by some allergens are caused by proteins creating holes in airway cells, reports a study published this week in Nature1. The findings challenge scientists’ understanding of how allergies are triggered, says Feargal Ryan, who studies host–microbe interactions at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Before this, the mechanism that triggers immune responses to allergens was not really understood. Researchers focused mostly on how a single allergen elicits a reaction, rather than looking for a generalizable mechanism. The results could also change allergy-treatment strategies, which typically target the allergen directly or downstream immune responses. Now, researchers can start looking for ways to target the hole-creating proteins that are initiating the immune response, Ryan says. Pore-forming proteins Researchers based in Beijing, China, identified two proteins in the mould Alternaria alternata, which causes allergic reactions in about 5% of people, that trigger the airway inflammation seen during allergic reactions. Together, the proteins, called Aeg-S and Aeg-L, create a pore in the membranes of cells lining the nose, throat and lungs. This allows calcium ions to enter the cells and release molecules that alert the immune system to danger. The damage to cell membranes from these pore-forming proteins could be a “common signal that our body uses to recognize something as an allergen”, says co-author Mo Xu, who studies immune responses at Tsinghua University. To test how the proteins stimulated the immune system, the team treated lung cells with the proteins. Administering the proteins at the same time triggered a similar response as administering an extract of A. alternata, but this response was not seen when the proteins were given one at a time. The researchers also tested whether the proteins could cause an allergic airway inflammation in mice. Six hours after mice were given the proteins intranasally, the rodents showed immune responses similar to those triggered by exposure to A. alternata. The team also observed signs that the mice had developed a respiratory allergy, such as increased levels of serum immunoglobulin E (IgE) — an antibody produced in response to allergens — after the mice were given the proteins every three days for two weeks. This response wasn’t seen when the proteins were administered separately, or when mice were exposed to genetically modified mould lacking either protein. Common trigger The team suspected that other allergens with pore-forming proteins would also induce an immune response. When the researchers exposed mice to pore-forming proteins from the airborne mould Aspergillus niger — an allergen — and the venom of the sea anemone Actinia equina, they observed an immune response similar to that induced by Aeg-S and Aeg-L. They also found that allergic airway inflammation was triggered by pore-forming proteins from the earthworm Eisenia fetida, the king oyster mushroom Pleurotus eryngii, the bacterium Clostridium perfringens and the fungus Laetiporus sulphureus. The findings suggest that allergens that are unrelated to each other can trigger allergic reactions in the same way, because they have pore-forming proteins that have been conserved by evolution, says Ryan. “This is a new way of thinking about allergens,” he says. Future treatments could look at whether there’s a way to block or inactivate those proteins and stop the reactions, he adds. Xu says his team are investigating which immune-response pathways are activated after pore-forming proteins damage cell membranes, and whether allergens with proteins that don’t form pores, such as those in dust mites or pollens, use the same pathway.

The NISAR satellite (artist’s rendering) will measure physical shifts on Earth’s surface that are as small as one centimetre.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech An astonishingly high-resolution satellite that launched today will soon map changes on Earth’s surface in unprecedented detail — tracking everything from sinking croplands to crumbling ice sheets and flood-ravaged terrain. It is the biggest-ever collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), carrying with it scientists’ dreams of studying our dynamic planet. Billion-dollar NASA satellite launches to track Earth’s water In the coming days, the US$1.2-billion satellite, called NISAR, will unfurl a 12-metre-wide circular antenna and begin bouncing radar signals off Earth. Launched from Sriharikota, India, NISAR will scan nearly all of the planet twice every 12 days, and measure vertical physical shifts on the ground that are as small as one centimetre, even through clouds and at night. Watching NISAR launch is like being “a parent attending the graduation ceremony of his son!” says Deepak Putrevu, who co-leads the mission’s science team for ISRO. “It’s so exhilarating to witness.” But for NASA, that excitement is tinged with a dollop of worry as US President Donald Trump pushes to slash the agency’s budget for Earth-science missions by over 50% in the fiscal year 2026. NISAR itself is slated to receive monies to operate as expected, but it might be one of the last of its kind to launch for years: the White House wants to cancel most of NASA’s upcoming flagship Earth-observing missions “to achieve cost savings”. And it wants to shut down several missions that are already operating and gathering key information about changes on Earth. “This is the size of cut that would fundamentally gut our capacity” to improve understanding of the changing planet, says Dylan Millet, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Minnesota in St Paul who chaired a NASA advisory committee on Earth sciences until March, when NASA disbanded it. A boost for disaster response NISAR — which stands for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar — will use two radar instruments operating at different wavelengths, one built by NASA and one by ISRO, to map Earth’s changing ice and land surfaces. Globally, the satellite will be able to identify changes in soil moisture, forest biomass and glaciers, among other things. NISAR will be able to measure the movement of ice on Antarctica (shown in this colour map) in detail.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio And it will help with response to disasters such as floods, earthquakes and landslides, by providing up-to-date information about how Earth has behaved. “You can begin to build up an ability to see disasters as they unfold at a very rapid pace, and that should help with identifying areas of concern for first responders,” says Paul Rosen, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA and ISRO began collaborating on NISAR in the early 2010s, when it became clear that both US and Indian scientists wanted to fly a major radar mission, Rosen says. If all goes well with the antenna unfurling and other tasks, NISAR should begin providing science data within 90 days. The mission is slated to operate for at least three years. An uncertain future What will happen after that is a bigger question, at least for NASA. NISAR was supposed to be the trailblazer in a series of major Earth-observing satellites, aimed at measuring, among other things, the roles of clouds and aerosols in climate change, and biological and geological interactions across the planet. Five key climate and space projects on Trump’s chopping block These missions had been identified as top priorities for US Earth-science researchers in two ‘decadal survey’ wishlists, released in 2007 and 2018. NASA’s Earth-science director, Karen St. Germain, told Nature that the decadal surveys “reaffirm the importance” of information gathered by NISAR and similar missions. “Our passion is to do the most advanced science we can do with the budget we’re allocated,” she said, highlighting two other NASA Earth-science launches in the past few years, of satellites to measure water elevation and ocean colour. “We think that we are actually entering a pretty rich golden age of new types of data that can answer questions we’ve never been able to answer before,” she added. If Trump’s proposed cuts go forward, some researchers say, NASA stands to lose the opportunity to do science that will be most important as global warming increases the risks of extreme weather and other hazards. “We should be collecting that data so that we can make informed decisions and plan for the future,” says Millet, who, along with other members of the disbanded advisory group, published a letter in Science this month decrying the potential cuts1. Turning off long-running science instruments, such as a carbon dioxide tracker on the International Space Station that the Trump team is targeting, is also a mistake, many researchers say. “Significant gaps in the historical climate-data record will constitute an unprecedented challenge,” says Bernard Pinty, an atmospheric scientist who formerly worked with the Climate Change Service in the European Commission’s Copernicus Earth-observing programme. St. Germain said at a press briefing on 29 July that ending long-running measurements is a natural consequence of missions approaching the end of their lives: “It is very much the case that some satellites retire as new ones come on.” The fate of NASA’s Earth-science missions now rests in the hands of the US Congress, which holds the ultimate power to allocate federal money and, during Trump’s first presidency, rejected nearly all of his proposals to cut NASA research. For the next fiscal year, a Senate appropriations committee has indicated that it would fully fund most future Earth-science missions at NASA — but the House of Representatives seems willing to go along with the majority of Trump’s proposed cuts. Scientists will watch in anticipation as the two chambers of Congress reconcile these disparate views and agree on the final budget in the coming months.