Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

A study published in PLOS Medicine estimates that the implementation of sugary drinks taxes in the UK in 2018 was associated with an 8 % reduction in obesity in English girls aged 10-11, particularly among those living in more deprived areas.

A study has analysed the citation patterns of 45 million scientific articles and nearly 4 million patents over the last 60 years. Its conclusion is that scientific and technological innovation is proportionally less and less disruptive, although this characteristic remains constant in absolute terms. The results are published in the journal Nature.

An international study led by Spanish researchers has succeeded in reconstructing the ancestors of the CRISPR-Cas system present in extinct bacteria from up to 2.6 billion years ago. The reconstructed systems work and are more flexible than the current ones. According to the authors, this could open up new avenues for gene editing. The results are published in the journal Nature Microbiology.

After two long weeks of negotiations and outside the official deadline, COP27 has reached an agreement to create a loss and damage fund to help the most vulnerable countries face the impacts of the climate crisis. However, other issues such as greater ambition in mitigation strategies to avoid exceeding 1.5ºC of warming and less dependence on fossil fuels have not achieved the commitment of all parties. 

A panel of experts set up by the journal The Lancet Oncology analyses the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on cancer treatment and research and makes recommendations to mitigate these problems. With an estimated one million cancer diagnoses lost across Europe in the past two years, the team warns that the continent is heading for a cancer epidemic in the next decade if health systems and cancer research are not urgently prioritised. 

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) today releases its Global Carbon Budget 2022 report. The main conclusion is that there is no sign of a decrease in global CO2 emissions and, at current levels, there is a 50 % chance of exceeding 1.5°C warming in nine years. The results will be published in the journal Earth System Science Data.

For the first time, the IceCube collaboration team has found evidence for high-energy neutrino emission from NGC 1068, an active galaxy 47 million light-years away with a supermassive black hole. The finding, made with the detector located under the Antarctic ice sheet, is published in the journal Science.

The Spanish Confederation of Scientific Societies (COSCE) has just published a report, submitted to the EU, which proposes and compares different possibilities for reform of the regulatory framework for genome editing techniques.

The IceCube collaboration, with its detector located under the Antarctic ice sheet, has used astrophysical neutrinos to search for changes in the structure of space-time. In the research, published in Nature Physics, the team analysed more than seven years of data and found no signs of a modified structure of space-time imprinted in the characteristics of these particles, a further step towards understanding quantum gravity. 
 

Research published in Nature Human Behaviour analyses changes in life expectancy since the advent of covid-19. Its findings show that some countries in western Europe, including Spain, regained some of their lost life expectancy, and others returned to 2019 levels. On the other hand, losses continued in Eastern Europe and the United States.