I wonder if there's anything ending August 2023 that causes many groups to publish right around this time, maybe a lot of PhDs are trying to graduate and are pumping out papers, or maybe a bunch of grants are ending?
Probably a lot of the latter and also a lot of conferences seem to be making their big 'proper' in-person return since after covid. It's turning out to be a pretty heavy paper-writing time. Many people I know have 2-3 papers to write and submit over this and next month.
Edit: That said, this work seems to have likely been done sometime last year and was only just published in Nature in July. The PhD student coauthors appear to have gotten their doctorates last year.
So maybe all these seemingly big developments are just seeming to be clustered because it's just that Nature, being such a high impact journal, has published recently.
