Tag Archives: Science Magazines
Cover Previews: Nature Magazine – April 14, 2022
- Editorial | 12 April 2022The war in Ukraine is exposing gaps in the world’s food-systems researchRussia’s invasion is the latest threat to the stability of world food supplies. Researchers must act now to halt the cycle of repeated food crises.
- Editorial | 13 April 2022Global science must stand up for Iran’s imprisoned scholarsIranian researchers are at risk as never before. Governments are urging quiet diplomacy. But a new book shows why public campaigns matter.
- World View | 12 April 2022University culture wars over race theory recall 1920s fight to teach evolutionArguments for quality work better than quibbles over facts.
- Adam Laats
- Research Highlight | 04 April 2022The miniature mice locked in an evolutionary battle of the sexesThe African pygmy mouse, which weighs only 3–12 grams, has a complicated sex-determination system that pits males against females.
- Research Highlight | 04 April 2022Your morning coffee is served up by the birds and the beesExcluding the winged creatures from the branches of coffee plants meant fewer flowers and smaller fruit.
- Research Highlight | 06 April 2022Keeping it cool: a laser delicately carves up a crystal without heatingLight-sensitive dye molecules make a crystalline material sliceable.
Preview: New Scientist Magazine – April 9, 2022
Cover Preview: Nature Magazine – April 7, 2022
Preview: New Scientist Magazine – April 2, 2022
Preview: New Scientist Magazine – March 26, 2022
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.
Boomers Daily 