In this week’s issue: We’re about to see the first full-colour images from the James Webb Space Telescope – here’s what we can expect Available at newsstands and via our app for digital and audio editions. https://newscientist.com/issue/3394/
This week in Nature: Higgs at 10 – Probing the properties of the most elusive particle in physics.
Browse the full issue: https://go.nature.com/3ReNGLb
The cover shows an artistic representation of various cancer cells. The large-scale gains, losses and rearrangements of DNA seen in chromosomal instability are a typical feature of cancer — but there is no comprehensive framework to decode the causes of this genomic variability and their possible links to disease. In this week’s issue, Florian Markowetz, Geoff Macintyre and their colleagues present such a framework with a compendium of 17 signatures of chromosomal instability that can be used to predict how tumours might respond to drugs and that help to identify future therapeutic targets. The team created the compendium by examining 7,880 tumours representing 33 types of cancer. In a separate paper, Nischalan Pillay and colleagues examined 9,873 cancers to generate
The promise of a new diet that can add as much as a decade to your life is certainly tempting – and might well be proven to work – but for now should be swallowed with a pinch of salt
The pioneering probes are still running after nearly 45 years in space, but they will soon lose some of their instruments
By Tim Folger
Oil and gas representatives influence the standards for courses and textbooks, from kindergarten to 12th grade
By Katie Worth
Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways
By Rachel Yehuda
Global warming fueled rampant overgrowth of microbes at the end of the Permian period. Such lethal blooms may be on the rise again
By Chris Mays, Vivi Vajda and Stephen McLoughlin
A debate over conflicting measurements of key cosmological properties is set to shape the next decade of astronomy and astrophysics
By Anil Ananthaswamy
Overheating is a major problem for today’s computers, but those of tomorrow might stay cool by circumventing a canonical boundary on information processing
By Philip Ball
To study inequality is to confront a world of contrasts: excessive wealth next to palpable poverty; sickness abutting health. The COVID pandemic has exposed and worsened many such disparities. This week, Nature presents a special collection of articles focusing on the researchers trying to quantify and reduce inequality. Whether they are measuring the effects of the pandemic or testing interventions to lift people out of poverty, the message is simple: gathering the right information will help to mitigate the harm caused by inequality.
Cover image: Mike McQuade.
Table of Contents
The cover image shows plants growing at altitude on Altar Volcano in Chimborazo, Ecuador. Extreme altitudes pose challenges for most forms of life, and flowering plants are no exception. But flowering plants have been found growing as high as 6,400 metres above sea level. In this week’s issue, Michael Holdsworth and his colleagues reveal a molecular mechanism that helps plants to adapt to the extremes of altitude. The researchers studied a range of plants, representing four diverse clades of flowering plants — thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), tomato, poppy and the grass
Brachypodium distachyon. They found that plants use genetic adaptations to adjust their sensitivity to atmospheric oxygen, whose partial pressure decreases with altitude. By decoding the ambient oxygen level, the plants are able to sense the altitude at which they grow and optimize internal biochemical processes.
Cover image: Cristian Miño, Ecuador.
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