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A composite image of a duck-billed platypus, one of the few complex organisms whose genomes have already been sequenced.Credit: Dave Watts/Nature Picture Library
“Why not sequence everything?”
The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence the genome of every complex organism on Earth — that’s 1.5 million species — and will probably cost $US4.7 billion. The project brings together more than a dozen existing ventures that focus on various slices of life, such as specific types of animal or the creatures of a particular country. Among the largest commitments to the effort so far is a plan by the the Wellcome Sanger Institute to decode the genomes of all the eukaryotic species in the United Kingdom, thought to number about 66,000.
AI predicts animal hosts of emerging viruses
Machine-learning software can predict which of 11 groups of animals — such as primates and rodents — are most likely to act as ‘reservoirs’ for a virus, hosting the disease without becoming overly ill themselves. Currently, researchers must generally depend on circumstantial evidence to connect an emerging virus, such as Ebola, to its animal reservoir. The software is based on the inference that genetically related viruses tend to be hosted by similar animals, and it also took into account signals indicating that a virus has adapted its genome to its host.
The rise of the political scientist
A political movement in the United States is focused on getting more scientists into public office. At least 70 scientist–candidates have launched bids for office at the state and local levels this election cycle. They’ve been endorsed by 314 Action, a non-profit and political-advocacy group named after the first three digits of Pi. Organizers hope that this will become a deep bench of up-and-coming policymakers with science and technology backgrounds who might contest for higher office in years to come.
Scientific American | 6 min read
Slot machine jingles encourage bigger risks
The flashing lights and cheerful music of a casino can induce people to raise the stakes. Scientists compared two versions of a game: one that showed an image of gold coins and played a jingle every time it paid out, and one that didn’t. Volunteers who played the flashy game chose riskier bets than people who played on the plain version.
Nature Research Highlights | 1 min read
Reference: The Journal of Neuroscience paper
Get more of Nature’s Research Highlights: short picks from the latest papers.
FEATURES & OPINION
Astrocytes have a distinctive 3D branching shape.Credit: National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, UCSD
Tapping into the brain’s star power
No longer just ‘brain glue’, astrocytes are being revealed as complex and diverse cells. Discover how a growing number of researchers worldwide are developing a set of tools to probe these cells selectively and reliably throughout the brain.
The Alzheimer’s outsider
“He thinks so far out of the box he hasn’t found the box yet,” says Alzheimer’s researcher Rudolph Tanzi of neurobiologist Robert Moir (it’s a compliment). STAT explores Moir’s ambitious approach to understanding the disease: that beta-amyloid plaques, commonly thought to be a root cause of Alzheimer’s, might actually be a defensive response to microbes in the brain.
Where are the WIMPs?
We have failed to find evidence for the most popular dark-matter-particle candidates, despite the enormous effort that has gone into searching for them. But this is “not a failure of science, but actually a triumph of the scientific method”, says physicist Gianfranco Bertone in this week’s Nature podcast. Explore the future of the field, and how probing dark matter with astronomical observations might open new doors. Also in the podcast this week: what decades of dead salmon do to trees, and space travel’s effect on the brain.
Nature Podcast | 23 min listen
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BOOKS & ARTS
The covert politics of cold-war science
From Soviet dissident scientists to a high-school biology curriculum sponsored by the CIA, a new book by science historian Audra Wolfe explores the cold-war struggle for the soul of science. The United States won the cold war partly by presenting democracy as a bastion of scientific freedom, argues Wolfe. Scientists, in turn, took advantage of the US government’s support, despite seeing themselves as apolitical.
Five best science books this week
Barbara Kiser’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a call for a rational future, 100 million years of European history, and the hidden horror of the dairy trade.
INFOGRAPHIC OF THE WEEK
SCIENTIFIC LIFE
A space researcher inspires in Africa
Astrophysicist Mirjana Pović has taught science to orphans in Rwanda, helped to organize a supportive community for women with HIV in Tanzania and excelled in her own research at the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute in Addis Ababa and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain. Nature speaks to Pović about her work and winning the inaugural Nature Research Inspiring Science Award. A companion prize, the Innovating Science Award, went to the Association of Hungarian Women in Science.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The mysterious stellar explosion, known as Cow.Credit: The ATLAS team
A supernova that became stupendously bright essentially overnight offer a close look at what is probably the birth of a neutron star or black hole.
