Nature Magazine – December 13, 2023:The latest issue cover features the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN), which presented nine papers that map the entire mouse brain in unprecedented detail.
The extravagantly feathered Seychelles paradise flycatcher lacks genetic diversity, which might hamper its resilience to climate change and other threats.
Nature Magazine – December 6, 2023:The latest issue cover features Internal Clocks – Blood proteins reveal age of human organs to help track health and disease…
The massive buried structures at Gunung Padang in Indonesia would be much older than Egypt’s great pyramids — if they’re even human constructions at all.
Ancient humans painted scenes in Indonesian caves more than 45,000 years ago, but their art is disappearing rapidly. Researchers are trying to discover what’s causing the damage and how to stop it — before the murals are gone forever.
Nature Magazine – November 29, 2023:The latest issue cover features trails left by satellites, including BlueWalker 3, a prototype communications satellite, as they pass across the sky.
Nature Magazine – November 23, 2023: The latest issue cover features how cryo-electron microscopy can reveal the structure of motor protein myosin filaments, which power the heart via muscle contraction.
Crispr, which may be the single most transformative biological technology of the twenty-first century, is a natural phenomenon, evolved over billions of years. It was first observed in the nineteen-eighties, when researchers noticed unexplained sequences of viral DNA in E. coli. Eventually, they realized that these sequences played a role in the bacteria’s immune system: they could find and destroy other pieces of viral DNA.
Literature bores me, especially great literature,” the narrator of one of John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” says. George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive Hamsun. There’s enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable Victorian portal “classic realism.” It was not classic—certainly not then—and not always particularly “real.”
Our annual look at 10 Breakthrough Technologies—including CRISPR for high cholesterol, battery recycling, AI that makes images, and the James Webb Space Telescope—that will have a profound effect on our lives. Plus care robots, 3-D printing pioneers, and chasing bugs on the blockchain.
The successful use of engineered white blood cells (cells that are removed from the human body, modified with receptors that allow them to recognize cancer cells, and then returned to the body) to fight and eliminate tumor cells has frequently been called revolutionary and has even allowed researchers the rare opportunity to refer to a cure for certain cancers.
For the first time a virgin birth has taken place in a mammal – a female mouse has given birth without any input from a male. The team explains how CRISPR gene editing has been used to create embryos from unfertilised eggs.
Taking a much-needed trip off the planet, the team discusses two stories from Mars, one from NASA’s Perseverance rover and another from China’s Zhurong rover. We also present an audio space-quiz you can take part in! Thanks to NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ISAE-Supaéro for the audio clips.
On the pod are Rowan Hooper, Penny Sarchet, Matt Sparkes, Adam Vaughan and Richard Webb. To read about these stories and much more, subscribe at newscientist.com/podcasts.
CRISPR is a technology that can be used to edit genes and, as such, will likely change the world. The essence of CRISPR is simple: it’s a way of finding a specific bit of DNA inside a cell. After that, the next step in CRISPR gene editing is usually to alter that piece of DNA.
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