News at a glance

In science news around the world, South Sudan announces it has eliminated Guinea worm disease despite the civil war that is ravaging the country. Uber suspends its research on autonomous vehicles (AVs) after a pedestrian is struck by one of its AVs and dies; a person was sitting behind the AV's steering wheel, but the car was said to be in self-driving mode. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change establishes a task force to consider ways to improve gender equity within the organization, such as recruiting more female scientists to serve as authors of its authoritative reports on climate science. U.K. researchers develop the first wearable magnetoencephalography brain scanner, which can detect the weak magnetic fields emitted by communicating neurons in real time, offering an alternative to large, bulky scanning machines that require research subjects to lie inside and remain still.