Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here

Light sensors in Japan’s Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector capture faint flashes that occur when neutrinos collide with water atoms.Credit: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty

A Japanese government committee has approved ¥3.5 billion (US$32 million) to build the world's largest neutrino detector. Hyper-Kamiokande’s enormous water tank will enable it to detect unprecedented numbers of neutrinos, which physicists hope will yield groundbreaking discoveries. Japan will pay about 75% of Hyper-Kamiokande’s estimated ¥72-billion construction bill, with international partners pitching in for the rest. The experiment will also monitor the water for the possible spontaneous decay of protons in atomic nuclei, which, if observed, would be a revolutionary discovery.

Nature | 4 min read

US lawmakers have reached an agreement that would fund research on preventing gun violence for the first time in more than 20 years. A 1996 rule barred scientists from using federal funding “to advocate or promote gun control”, which led to a de facto ban on research into gun violence. If passed, the new law will evenly split US$25 million between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

Nature | 3 min read

More than 100 staff and students at two research institutions in China have been infected with Brucella bacteria, strains of which mostly occur in farm animals but can cause serious illness in people. The Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute says 96 staff tested positive for the infection, but most showed no signs of sickness. Another 13 students at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, who had previously worked at the Lanzhou facility, also had the infection. Investigations into the source of the outbreaks continue.

Nature | 3 min read

A new peer-reviewed science journal is giving children as young as six a platform to publish their work while being mentored by undergraduate and graduate researchers. Recent papers published in the Canadian Science Fair Journal describe new bioplastics, forest-fire detectors and a dyslexia-friendly reading tool. One student, Mac Dykeman, who lives on a farm, decided to investigate better options for transporting chicks when she became aware of the high death rate caused by the current boxes. She is now pursuing a patent on the safer box design she came up with for her science-fair project.

Nature Index | 5 min read

Features & opinion

Credit: Philip Pacheco/AFP/Getty

Nature media editor Tom Houghton (who also selects the photos for this newsletter) chose this long-exposure photograph as his pick of the best image of 2019. It traces the shower of embers from a skeletal tree ravaged during wildfires that swept California in October. “The visual effect gives the destruction an abstract beauty, which reminds me of the incredible photos of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano wreathed in lightning when it erupted in 2010,” says Houghton.

See more of the year’s best science images, selected by Nature’s photo team.

Nature | Leisurely scroll

“With such uncertainty, concentration and abstraction stand no chance,” writes Monica Moraes R. of the University of San Andrés in Bolivia. She is one of several correspondents who were invited by Nature to reflect on a year of civil unrest in many countries. Writing from Syria, Bolivia, Sudan, Iran, Chile, Egypt, Ecuador, Lebanon, Venezuela, Hong Kong and Catalonia, the correspondents tell of altered priorities, day-to-day challenges and hope in the dark times.

Nature | 9 min read

From Lonesome George — the last of the Pinta Island tortoises — to the ‘microjewel’ snail Plectostoma sciaphilum, which was wiped out by a cement company from its single hilltop habitat in Malaysia: these are the species that the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared extinct in the 2010s.

Gizmodo | 35 min read