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Credit: NASA

NASA staff captured the above image of rapid changes in air pressure that lead to jet planes’ sonic booms. See more of our picture editors’ picks for best science photos of the month.

Nature | A leisurely scroll

Researchers in Brazil are outraged by the government’s decision to freeze 42% of the science and communications ministry’s budget, which was already among the lowest in 14 years. Some research agencies could run out of cash as early as July. Researchers fear that the country’s ongoing funding crisis is forcing up-and-coming scientists to move abroad for work. “Our best and brightest are leaving the country,” says physicist Luiz Davidovich.

Nature | 4 min read

There is evidence of “systematic suppression of black excellence in recent years” at the University of Cape Town, says an independent report. The report was commissioned by the university following nationwide campus demonstrations in which students demanded an end to tuition fees and called for a decolonized curriculum. The commission’s findings have rekindled debate about how to transform the country’s historically white-dominated universities.

Nature | 6 min read

FEATURES & OPINION

“I am enjoying an emotion peculiar to academics,” writes cancer biologist Gerard Evan reviewing a new book on the thrilling, disappointing, promising field of tumour immunotherapy. “Let’s call it reverse schadenfreude: a combination of excitement, optimism, admiration, delicious irony and humility that comes with the realization that I got it wrong. Big time.”

Nature | 5 min read

At the memorial service for historian Thea Hunter, her friend and fellow adjunct professor Ruth Henderson “invoked the Japanese idea of karōshi: worked to death”, reports The Atlantic. After years of navigating the underpaid, overworked and often discriminatory career path of untenured academics in the United States, Hunter died from an ongoing medical condition (her job did not provide health insurance). “Thea was exploited by a system that consumes thoughtful, committed academics like our beloved friend, even as it is reluctant to admit it—color compounding the oppression one-hundredfold,” said Henderson.

The Atlantic | 23 min read

The periodic table would be better if turned on its head, argue chemist Martyn Poliakoff and colleagues. With the light elements at the bottom and the heavy ones at the top, the aufbau principle becomes more intuitive, “the electrons ‘fill up’ the lowest energy orbitals from the bottom, like water in a glass”. And properties such as atomic number would increase from the bottom to the top — where people expect to see increasing numbers, matching how most graphs are plotted. The new version would also place the first-taught elements closer to a child’s eye-level.

Nature Chemistry | 11 min read