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Concept art for the Alan Turing £50 banknote.The Governor and Company of the Bank of England 2019
Alan Turing is the new face of the fifty
Pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing will be featured on the new design of £50 notes issued in England. Turing topped a field of scientific greats under consideration for the Bank of England’s largest denomination note, including X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, physicist Stephen Hawking and computing visionary Ada Lovelace. The honour further cements Turing’s legacy, which was unjustly tarnished by a conviction under homophobic anti-gay laws in 1952 (he was given a posthumous royal pardon in 2013).
China will hunt down ozone-killing chemicals
The Chinese government has presented a plan to help it track and reduce emissions of the ozone-destroying gas known as trichlorofluoromethane or CFC-11. Scientists tracked a mysterious spike of the banned chemical to China earlier this year. The Chinese environment ministry disputes that there is enough evidence to pin the recently discovered spike in emissions on China, but agrees that more data are needed to understand the problem.
Read more: Rogue emissions of ozone-depleting chemical pinned to China (Nature, from May)
Threatened sea turtles smash nesting records
Giant loggerhead sea turtles are making a welcome resurgence on the beaches of the southeastern United States. So far, researchers and volunteers have counted more than 3,500 nests in the state of Georgia alone — beating the 2016 record and showing a heartening increase since the low point of fewer than 400 nests in 2004. Scientists credit decades-long conservation efforts that stepped up protections for nests and required shrimp trawlers to fit their nets with turtle escape hatches.
FEATURES & OPINION
The rough road to US car regulation
“The story told by countless advertisements is that cars mean freedom,” writes technology-policy researcher Jack Stilgoe. “The paradox is that, when we drive, we are perhaps more constrained than in any other area of everyday life.” Stilgoe reviews a new book that explores how the car became a fact of life in the United States, and how US regulators shaped this essential component of the American dream in an attempt to mitigate its extraordinary dangers.
Medicine for the microbiome
Drug researchers are looking beyond the human genome to target the millions of genes in our microbiome. Scientists are seekling small-molecule drugs and biologics that alter the microbiome or its interaction with host tissues to treat diseases including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and inflammatory bowel disease. “Ignoring these genes and their protein products is akin to ignoring a major organ,” reports Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. “And an orally accessible organ, at that.”
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery | 13 min read
Chasing the cure for cancer (in dogs)
Dogs share much of our lifestyle and environment — and they also get cancer. A wave of studies is investigating how to treat and prevent the disease in our canine companions, with an eye on the potential benefits for humans, too.
