CERN PUSHES TO
BUILD €21-BILLION
SUPERCOLLIDERCERN — Europe’s pre-eminent
particle-physics organization —
has taken a big step towards
building a 100-kilometre
circular supercollider to push
the frontier of high-energy
physics. The decision to pursue
the machine was unanimously
endorsed by the CERN Council,
the organization’s governing
body, on 19 June, following
the plan’s approval by an
independent panel in March.
The accelerator is expected
to cost at least €21 billion
(US$24 billion) and would
be a follow-up to the Large
Hadron Collider. It would be
built in an underground tunnel
near CERN’s location outside
Geneva, Switzerland, and smash
together electrons and their
antimatter partners, positrons,
by the middle of the century.
The design will enable physicists
to study the properties of the
Higgs boson and, later, to host
an even more-powerful machine
that will collide protons in the
second half of the century.
The decision is not yet a final
go-ahead, and CERN will need
global help to fund the project.
But the organization can now
focus on designing the collider
and researching its feasibility.
“I think it’s a historic day for
CERN and particle physics,
in Europe and beyond,” said
CERN director-general Fabiola
Gianotti.‘LAVA LAMP’ EFFECT
COULD MAKE DRUGS
MORE POWERFULResearchers have used a
phenomenon called phase
separation to concentrate
cancer-drug compounds into
precise spots within cells — a
discovery that could boost drug-
development efforts.
Like blobs in a lava lamp
or oil shaken in water, cell
components such as proteins
and RNA can self-organize into
liquid-like droplets known as
condensates. Research by a
team at the Whitehead Institute
in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
reveals that synthetic
compounds can be sequestered
in droplets in a similar way.
The effect could be exploited
to make certain drugs hit their
targets more effectively, while
limiting harmful side effects.
The researchers tracked
the dynamics of five cancer
drugs in test-tube experiments
and in human cancer cells in
culture (I. A. Klein et al., Science
http://doi.org/dz3g; 2020).
The group found that when
mixed with proteins known
to form condensates, drugs
such as cisplatin cluster into
highly concentrated droplets
(pictured).
The work could also help
efforts to find drugs to fight
COVID-19. In unpublished work,
the same team has found that
proteins from the coronavirus
clump together in condensates
that can absorb and concentrate
drug compounds.Nature | Vol 582 | 25 June 2020 | 465The world this week
News in brief
A group of mathematicians in
the United States has written a
letter calling for their colleagues
to stop collaborating with
police because of the widely
documented disparities in how
US law-enforcement agencies
treat people of different
races and ethnicities. They
concentrate their criticism on
predictive policing, a maths-
based technique aimed at
stopping crime before it occurs.
The letter, dated 15 June,
is addressed to Notices of the
American Mathematical Society
(AMS), and comes in the wake
of protests in the United States
and globally, sparked by the
killing of George Floyd by a
police officer in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, in May. More than
1,400 researchers have signed it
(see go.nature.com/3fkwxmb).
In recent years,
mathematicians, statisticians
and computer scientists have
been developing algorithms
that crunch data and claim to
help police reduce crime — for
instance, by suggesting where
crime is most likely to occur
and focusing more resourcesMATHEMATICIANS URGE COLLEAGUES TO
BOYCOTT POLICE WORK IN WAKE OF KILLINGSin those areas. Software based
on such algorithms is used by
police departments across the
United States, but many contest
its effectiveness.
“Given the structural
racism and brutality in US
policing, we do not believe
that mathematicians should
be collaborating with police
departments in this manner,”
the mathematicians write. “It
is simply too easy to create a
‘scientific’ veneer for racism.”
“The activity of collaborating
with the police is not something
we feel a mathematician
should be doing,” says
co-author Jayadev Athreya, a
mathematician at the University
of Washington in Seattle. (He
and the other writers emphasize
that the letter represents their
own views and not those of their
employers.)
The AMS says that it
“has no official position on
mathematicians’ involvement
in providing expertise to law-
enforcement agencies, or to
companies that do business with
such agencies”.L TO R: GINA FERAZZI/
LOS ANGELES TIMES
VIA GETTY; POLAR MEDIA; ISAAC KLEIN/WHITEHEAD INSTITUTE
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2020
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