Looking back at 2024

CERN at 70

This year marked the 70th anniversary of CERN, which we celebrated with a special issue in October. This project was led by Alison Wright, Senior Editor at the Reviews Cross-Journal Editorial Team, who curated a Viewpoint1 on seven physics milestones. A broader collection of articles about CERN can be found in our Collection. Besides highlighting their physics contributions, we also showcase how the CERN community has embraced the arts. We published a Q&A with Mónica Bello2, head of the Arts at CERN programme, which invites artists into residency programmes in Geneva. Another Q&A talks to Connie Potter and Rob Appleby3, editors of a collection of science fiction short stories that emerged from a collaboration with scientists and writers.

Other anniversaries

Several other anniversaries were also celebrated within our pages this year. To mark 20 years of the mechanical isolation of graphene, we published a Down to Business article4 looking at current trends in graphene commercialization and comparing them to the predictions that were made when graphene was first isolated and celebrated as a wonder-material (spoiler alert: the predictions were wrong). This year we also celebrated the long-running impact of Penrose tilings, 50 years since their introduction5, and Wigner crystals, 90 years since they were first predicted6. Our September issue marks 100 years of the Ising model, and includes a retrospective piece on the history of the model, as well as a series of Research Highlights on recent applications of the model in fields ranging from predicting elections to changing land use.

Engaging with politics

In April, we welcomed May Chiao as Senior Consulting Editor. May’s research background covers a broad range of condensed-matter physics and astronomy and she has many years of editorial experience, most recently as Chief Editor of Nature Astronomy. But May also brings her passion for promoting scientists’ engagement with politics. This interest has already resulted in an interview with Carlo Rovelli7, who helped launch an open letter to the world’s politicians calling for countries to spend a small proportion of their military budget to address climate change, poverty and pandemics. In this issue, she interviews Yangyang Cheng, a particle physicist now working on the history of science in China and US–China relations, who puts the current tensions between the two superpowers in context.

Engaging with other communities

In July, our Senior Editors Ankita Anirban and Zoe Budrikis attended the annual conference of the British Society for the History of Science — certainly a change from our usual conferences! They went because one of our goals for 2024 was to explore the human side of physics. Who practices it? What topics count as physics and who decides? How does funding get allocated? We want to engage with what the humanities can tell us about these questions.

Some of the answers are gathered in a Collection. Highlights include an overview of how the role of abstracts has changed over the years8, an exploration of whether the ubiquity of technology is to blame for the relative paucity of popular science writing about condensed matter9, the story of the friendship between Wolfgang Pauli and psychoanalyst Carl Jung10 and, in this issue, an account of how in the 1920s, promoters of domestic electricity usage led a physics outreach programme for British women.

Looking forward

The change we as a journal team felt most keenly was the departure of Iulia Georgescu, who had been at the helm of Nature Reviews Physics from the beginning. Our new Chief Editor, Nina Meinzer, brings new scientific expertise to our team with a background in optical physics, and they are keen to give a voice to early-career researchers. Nina is still in their first 100 days, but we are excited to see what course they will chart for the future of the journal. We expect 2025 to mark the start of a new chapter for the journal, and we look forward to sharing it with our readers.

Related Articles

Printable graphene inks with polypropylene carbonate for low-surface-tension solvents and mild-temperature post-processing

For dispersion stability, printable graphene inks commonly employ solvents with limited surface tensions or incorporate dispersant aids that require high-temperature post-processing, restricting printability and substrate compatibility. Here, printable graphene inks are introduced with low-surface-tension solvents and mild-temperature post-processing using polypropylene carbonate (PPC). Graphene is produced by liquid-phase exfoliation with PPC, and the exfoliated graphene/PPC is used to generate printable inks. As a dispersant aid, PPC improves graphene exfoliation, dispersion stability, and redispersability in solvents with low surface tensions (<30 mJ m–2), facilitating the formulation of desirable inks for efficient aerosol jet printing on diverse substrates. Moreover, the low decomposition temperature of PPC eases its thermal removal from printed graphene, allowing high electrical conductivity with a mild post-processing temperature of 220 °C. Consequently, the graphene inks enable the fabrication of fully-printed graphene micro-supercapacitors on heat-sensitive paper substrates, exhibiting high areal capacitances, cycling stability, and mechanical resilience against bending deformation.

Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries

Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most people trust scientists and agree that scientists should engage more in society and policymaking. We found variations between and within countries, which we explain with individual- and country-level variables, including political orientation. While there is no widespread lack of trust in scientists, we cannot discount the concern that lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority may affect considerations of scientific evidence in policymaking. These findings have implications for scientists and policymakers seeking to maintain and increase trust in scientists.

Group arts interventions for depression and anxiety among older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis

In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we assessed the efficacy of group arts interventions, where individuals engage together in a shared artistic experience (for example, dance or painting), for reducing depression and anxiety among older adults (> 55 yr without dementia). Fifty controlled studies were identified via electronic databases searched to February 2024 (randomised: 42, non-randomised: 8). Thirty-nine studies were included. Thirty-six studies investigated the impact of group arts interventions on depression (n = 3,360) and ten studies investigated anxiety (n = 949). Subgroup analyses assessed whether participant, contextual, intervention and study characteristics moderated the intervention–outcome relationship. Risk of bias was assessed with appropriate tools (RoB-2, ROBINS-1). Group arts interventions were associated with a moderate reduction in depression (Cohen’s d = 0.70, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.54–0.87, P < 0.001) and a moderate reduction in anxiety (d = 0.76, 95% CI = 0.37–1.52, P < 0.001), although there was publication bias in the depression studies. After a trim and fill adjustment, the effect for depression remained (d = 0.42; CI = 0.35–0.50; P < 0.001). Context moderated this effect: There was a greater reduction in depression when group arts interventions were delivered in care homes (d = 1.07, 95% CI = 0.72–1.42, P < 0.001) relative to the community (d = 0.51, 95% CI = 0.32–0.70, P < 0.001). Findings indicate that group arts are an effective intervention for addressing depression and anxiety among older adults.

Flash Joule heating for synthesis, upcycling and remediation

Electric heating methods are being developed and used to electrify industrial applications and lower their carbon emissions. Direct Joule resistive heating is an energy-efficient electric heating technique that has been widely tested at the bench scale and could replace some energy-intensive and carbon-intensive processes. In this Review, we discuss the use of flash Joule heating (FJH) in processes that are traditionally energy-intensive or carbon-intensive. FJH uses pulse current discharge to rapidly heat materials directly to a desired temperature; it has high-temperature capabilities (>3,000 °C), fast heating and cooling rates (>102 °C s−1), short duration (milliseconds to seconds) and high energy efficiency (~100%). Carbon materials and metastable inorganic materials can be synthesized using FJH from virgin materials and waste feedstocks. FJH is also applied in resource recovery (such as from e-waste) and waste upcycling. An emerging application is in environmental remediation, where FJH can be used to rapidly degrade perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances and to remove or immobilize heavy metals in soil and solid wastes. Life-cycle and technoeconomic analyses suggest that FJH can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions and be cost-efficient compared with existing methods. Bringing FJH to industrially relevant scales requires further equipment and engineering development.

Toward change in the uneven geographies of urban knowledge production

More than four-fifths of the global urban population live in the Global South and East. Most urban theories, however, originate in the Global North. Building on recent efforts to address this mismatch, this paper examines the geographies of urban knowledge production. It analyzes the institutional affiliations of contributions in 25 leading Anglophone journals (n = 14,582) and nine urban handbooks (n = 252). We show that 42% of the journal articles and 17% of the handbook chapters were authored outside the Global North. However, only 15% of the editor positions (handbooks: 10%) were held by scholars based outside the Global North. This indicates that Global Northern institutions still dominate knowledge gatekeeping, whereas authors are more diverse. Additionally, more empirical journals and those with fewer Northern board members tend to publish more non-Northern authors. Our findings underscore the need for greater epistemic diversity in gatekeeping positions and broader understandings of what counts as theory to better incorporate diverse urban knowledge.

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