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A video on Chandrayaan 2 India's Moon mission is projected at the media centre at Indian Space Research Organization

Media at the Indian space agency's tracking and command centre, which lost contact with its Moon lander on 7 September.Credit: Jagadeesh NV/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Indian Moon lander goes silent

India’s space agency lost contact with its Vikram Moon lander during the final few minutes of its descent early on 7 September. The Indian Space Research Organization is still trying to regain contact with the craft, which relied on an innovative automated landing system. On the plus side, the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft continues to gather its scientific data from orbit. Vikram is the second Moon lander this year to meet a sad fate: in April, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crash-landed on the surface.

Nature | 3 min read

History of Europe’s lost continent

Geologists have reconstructed a detailed history of Greater Adria — a continent that lies submerged largely below southern Europe. Researchers examined the surface remnants of Greater Adria to determine how the land mass broke away from the southern supercontinent of Gondwana about 240 million years ago, spun anticlockwise as it moved north and eventually collided with what is now Europe between 100 million and 120 million years ago.

Science | 5 min read

Reference: Gondwana Research paper

Germany puts €100 million on insects

Spurred by research that raised alarm all over the world, Germany has pledged €100 million (US$111 million) to protect insects. A 2017 study found that flying-insect biomass fell by 76% over 27 years in wildlife reserves in western Germany. The money will go to protecting habitats, decreasing light pollution and developing a nationwide insect monitoring network. The country also plans to phase out all use of the weed killer glyphosate.

Science | 5 min read

Reference: PLoS ONE paper

FEATURES & OPINION

Tackle the epidemic, not the opioids

Funding that is earmarked for fighting the opioid epidemic is just another example of the government playing ‘whack-a-mole’ against the drug du jour, writes behavioural medicine researcher Judith Feinberg. Offering a first-hand view from central Appalachia, Feinberg argues that short-sighted drug policies are failing to address the real problem: the fraying of the socio-economic fabric of the rural United States.

Nature | 5 min read

Can registers for animal studies reduce bias?

Millions of mice and rats are used in research each year. But one-third to one-half of animal experiments are never published, and of those that are, many are conducted too poorly to be reliable. Advocates for better animal research and reproducibility are promoting a strategy established in other fields to counter publication bias, improve investigations and increase transparency: study registries.

Nature | 6 min read

The trouble with face value

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society,” writes journalist Malcolm Gladwell — but when we fail to read others correctly, it can lead to catastrophe. His latest book probes mutual misunderstanding and violations of trust.

Nature | 6 min read

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“If the eternal dance of molecules

Is too entangled for us mortal fools

To follow, on what grounds should we complain?

Who promised us that Nature’s arcane rules

Would make sense to a merely human brain?”

Applied mathematician Peter Shore responds to physicist Sean Carroll’s assertion in The New York Times that physicists “seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have” — quantum mechanics.

(Read philosopher Robert Crease’s review of Sean Carroll’s new book in Nature.)

Cartoon shows woman pipetting at the table, with the caption: “Honey, we need to have a conversation about work-life balance.”