October 5, 2023: Rosalind Franklin deserves a Nobel Prize, this bionic arm can control all 10 fingers and September was the hottest month ever recorded. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Credit where Credit Is Due | It's time the Nobel Assembly awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize to British chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, writes Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, in this month's issue of Scientific American. Franklin died in 1958 and so was passed over for the prize in physiology or medicine when it was awarded in 1962 to biologists James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA.
What she did: Franklin provided essential quantitative data on the double helix structure in a report that colleagues passed to Watson and Crick. Later analysis of her laboratory notebooks showed that not only had she deduced the double-helix structure, she also recognized how the structure would be able to carry large amounts of genetic information.
What the experts say: Once the Nobel committee rights this wrong, says Oreskes, they should move on to recognize other women scientists who were passed over, including Jocelyn Bell Burnell (discovery of pulsars), Chien-Shiung Wu (proved quantum pair theory) and Lise Meitner (discovery of nuclear fission), to name a few. | | | Researchers have developed a bionic arm system that allowed a man with an above-elbow amputation to control every finger of a robotic hand. To create muscle signals to prompt the prosthetic, the researchers dissected the nerve bundles that carry signals from the man's brain to muscles in his upper arm. The fibers were then spread out and attached to new muscle targets in his remaining arm, including muscle tissue grafted from his thigh. They also anchored a titanium fixture into the remaining upper-arm bone, making the prosthesis more comfortable than typical fitted socket attachments.
Why this is cool: Most bionic limbs are controlled by electrical signals generated by muscles moving near the attachment site. But when an arm is amputated above the elbow, the remaining muscles aren't enough to control every joint in an artificial hand. Plus, prosthetics usually pick up muscle signals with electrodes on the skin's surface. For this new system, the researchers implanted electrodes directly on or within the muscles, passing wires through the titanium bolt and into the robotic arm.
What the experts say: The man has been using the prosthesis in his daily life for more than three years to grasp objects and pour drinks. "This is the first nerve-based prosthetic hand that the patient can go home with," says bioengineer Cynthia Chestek of the University of Michigan. | | | A person wears a prosthetic arm that is directly attached to his skeleton and neuromuscular system. After surgical reconstruction of his residual limb, the prosthesis allows him to control individual fingers of a bionic hand. Credit: Chalmers University of Technology/Anna-Lena Lundqvist (CC BY-ND) | | | • More states are requiring homeowners to disclose a property's flood risk and history when they sell it. But 18 states, including hurricane-prone Florida, have no flood disclosure requirements. | 4 min read | | | • The furor over the career of one of the winners of this year's physiology or medicine Nobel Prize distracts from all scientists' responsibilities to fix a broken academic reward system, writes C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. "We ignore our collective complicity in a system that offers rewards based on dubious standards," he writes. | 5 min read | | | September was the most anomalously warm month ever recorded, hitting about 0.5 degree C (0.9 degree F) hotter than the previous hottest September in 2020. Each cell in the grid above shows how much the temperature varied from average, a measure known as the temperature anomaly, on a day in 2023. The baseline period from which the anomaly is calculated was the average from 1991-2020. The September anomaly "is so far above anything we've seen before," says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist who works at the payment processing firm Stripe. On X, formerly known as Twitter, he called the feat "absolutely gobsmackingly bananas." | | | In the first half of the 20th century, it was common for Nobel Prize recipients to be in their 30s--which is unheard of these days, as most researchers now wait several decades until the Nobel committee acknowledges their work. Had she been alive and awarded the Nobel alongside Watson, Crick and Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin would have been a mere 42 years old. | This newsletter is for you! Let me know how you're liking it by emailing: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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