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Tag Archives: Science Magazines
Cover Previews: Nature Magazine – March 24, 2022
Volume 603 Issue 7902, 24 March 2022
Star dater’s guide to the Galaxy
The cover image shows a view of the Milky Way captured at Nambung National Park in Western Australia. To understand how the Galaxy formed requires precision age dating of the stars that it contains. In this week’s issue, Maosheng Xiang and Hans-Walter Rix of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, present an analysis of the birth dates for nearly 250,000 stars in their subgiant evolutionary phase, when they can serve as precise stellar clocks. The researchers found that the individual ages of the stars ranged from about 1.5 billion to more than 13 billion years old. Tripling the age-dating precision for such a large stellar sample allowed the researchers to infer the sequence of events that initiated our Galaxy’s formation. Using this information, Xiang and Rix were able to determine that the oldest part of our Galaxy’s disk had already begun to form about 13 billion years ago, just 800 million years after the Big Bang, and that the formation of the inner Galactic halo was completed some 2 billion years later.
Cover Preview: Nature Magazine – March 17, 2022
Volume 603 Issue 7901, 17 March 2022
For more than 50 years, scientists have been trying to understand the relationship between DNA sequence, gene-expression phenotype and fitness to decipher principles of gene regulatory evolution. In this week’s issue, Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav, Carl de Boer, Aviv Regev and their colleagues present a framework for understanding and engineering regulatory DNA sequences that takes a step towards this goal. The researchers built this framework around an ‘oracle’ they developed using a deep neural network model that predicts gene expression given a promoter DNA sequence. The neural network was trained using the expression measurements for tens of millions of promoter sequences. The result was an AI oracle that predicts expression from sequence well enough to study the evolutionary history and future evolvability of regulatory DNA sequences, as well as to design regulatory DNA sequences for synthetic biology applications. The cover offers a visual representation of the evolutionary properties of sequences at the extremes of the evolvability spectrum.
Previews: New Scientist Magazine – March 19, 2022
Preview: New Scientist Magazine – March 12
Cover Preview: Nature Magazine – March 10
Cover Preview: Science Magazine – March 4
Cover Preview: Nature Magazine – March 3
This Week
- Editorial | 28 February 2022Wanted: better systems for turning evidence into actionThe pandemic created a colossal demand for scientific evidence to inform decision-making. Now researchers are mapping out what went wrong and what needs to change.
- Editorial | 01 March 2022Nature is trialling transparent peer review — the early results are encouragingLast year, nearly half of Nature authors agreed to publish anonymous referee reports. We hope that more will consider doing so this year.
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