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The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite looks for exoplanets around stars roughly 60 parsecs from Earth.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre

Astronomers have discovered a world only a little bit bigger than Earth that orbits in a nearby star’s habitable zone — the region in which liquid water could exist. Astronomers have identified only a handful of such exoplanets. The world orbits a star about 31 parsecs from our planet, and is the first such body to be discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which launched in 2018. Although the world is similar in size to Earth — and could be rocky — astronomers say it is likely to be very different from our planet because the light in which it is bathed is fainter.

Nature | 3 min read

An advertisement posted by a senior adviser to the new UK government calls for scientists, mathematicians and “super-talented weirdos” to work for the prime minister and to help make “rapid progress with long-term problems”, and cites several scientific papers. Discover the research involved and hear from authors cited in the post, who tell of feelings of surprise, delight and caution about this unusual approach to including science in policymaking.

Nature | 6 min read

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency are among the US federal agencies in which men earn more money than their female counterparts. Researchers combed millions of employment records and found that this wage gap is partly due to hiring methods that circumvent rules intended to ensure equity. For example, in 2008, 61% of men at the NSF were not paid according to the standard government pay scale, compared with just 30% of women.

Nature | 5 min read

In November, NASA scientists completed field tests in Antarctica of a rover that they hope will one day crawl beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The two-wheeled prototype floats, so it travels pressed up to the underside of the ice (which makes the story worth reading just for the pictures).

The New York Times | 5 min read

Features & opinion

Physicists, avoid flashing up equations without explanation. Biologists, don’t be flummoxed by physicists’ maths (or arcane inside jokes). Physicist Sarah Bohndiek and biologist Ken Kosik, who have both bridged the divide between the life and physical sciences, offer their tips for engaging with the other side.

Nature (for biologists) | 7 min read & Nature (for physicists) | 7 min read

Is a paper trustworthy? Three researchers who flagged issues that contributed to the retraction of dozens of bone-health papers join forces with a specialist in institutional investigations to create a checklist to help answer that very question. The ‘REAPPRAISED’ checklist aims to help readers, journal editors and anyone else assess whether a paper has flaws that call its integrity into question.

Nature | 10 min read

Download the ‘REAPPRAISED’ checklist as a PDF.

“This vaccine … from the beginning to the end — it should have never happened. On so many levels … against all odds, it made it,” says pathogen researcher Gary Kobinger. STAT explores how a therapy that once sat languishing in a lab in Canada became the first vaccine against Ebola.

STAT | 21 min read

Read more: ‘Make Ebola a thing of the past’: first vaccine against deadly virus approved (Nature, from November)