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Credit: Mikhail Kapychka
Mayfly invasion, ripples in the sky and a jumping squid
Mayflies typically live for only one day. For many of those that emerged from the Dnieper River in Mogilev, Belarus, in 2013, it was a wasted day. This year’s winner of Nature’s #ScientistAtWork photography competition shows a biologist photographing the insects that became stranded on a road next to the river, possibly mistaking it for the water’s surface. See the other winning images of scientists doing their thing.
Cancer geneticists tackle troubling ethnic bias in studies
A crop of large studies is attempting to counter a long-standing bias in cancer research: most studies and genetic databases are populated mainly by data from people of European descent. This knowledge gap exacerbates disparities in cancer incidence and outcomes around the world — in the United States, for example, African American men are about twice as likely as white men to die of prostate cancer. Nature explores how scientists are trying to close the gap.
“Dead corals don’t make babies”
The unprecedented back-to-back mass bleaching events that have hit Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are also destroying the reef’s ability to reproduce. So many adult corals died from heat stress in 2016 and 2017 that too few larvae were produced to seed the damaged areas with new coral. Also at risk are the thousands of other species that rely on the reef. “There's only one way to fix this problem,” says coral researcher Terry Hughes, "and that's to tackle the root cause of global heating by reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero as quickly as possible.”
FEATURES & OPINION
Eagle Nebula’s ‘Pillars of Creation’, NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (2015).Photographs provided by Aperture.
Curating the cosmos: a lens on nature
A new book by curator Marvin Heiferman takes us on a glorious tour of scientific images from a dizzying array of disciplines. Get a glimpse of the wonders within in our picture-packed review.
The stealthy spread of drug-resistant fungi
The Candida auris fungus is deadly, impervious to major antifungal medications — and on the move. Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City had to partially destroy a room where a patient died from the fungus last May; the Royal Brompton Hospital in London shut down its intensive-care ward for 11 days in 2016 because of the fungus. The New York Times explores the secretive panic playing out in hospitals around the world — and how farming’s fungicide addiction might be to blame.
The New York Times | 15 min read
“Too many women have to run the gauntlet of abuse and leave”
Neurologist BethAnn McLaughlin, one of science’s most visible campaigners against sexual harassment, tells The Guardian why she does what she does. “The biggest success of the #MeTooSTEM site is in us actually finding each other,” she says.
QUIRKS OF NATURE
