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Illustration by Fabio Buonocore
How gut microbes drive brain disorders
Evidence is building that the trillions of bacteria in the gut could have profound effects on the brain, and might be tied to a whole host of disorders. What was once a fringe theory — the gut–brain axis — is seeing an explosion of interest. Now, researchers are working to separate hope from hype to develop better and easier treatments for brain diseases.
Credit: Nik Spencer/Nature
Court nixes EPA’s controversial data rule
A US court has voided the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s controversial scientific ‘transparency’ rule. The rule would have prevented the EPA from basing regulatory decisions on studies for which the full underlying data are not publicly available. It had been widely panned by researchers and science advocates, who said it was a Trojan horse aimed at preventing health and environmental regulations from going into effect.
The Washington Post | 4 min read
Disability discrimination in grant funding
In May 2020, Justin Yerbury narrowly missed the cut for an annual grant funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council. Yerbury, who studies neurodegenerative disorders, has motor neuron disease. The feedback he received on his grant application showed that the assessors were underwhelmed by his publication record. “This made me mad,” Yerbury wrote on Twitter. “How could someone think that I could physically produce more than what I had done given my disability?” Yerbury has since successfully appealed the rejection and his case has prompted the Australian funding agency to revise its policies. His experience illustrates recent research showing the funding barriers facing researchers with disabilities or long-standing health conditions.
Features & opinion
James Gillray’s 1802 illustration explores fears about using cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox.Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Old cartoons skewer science
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists such as William Hogarth and James Gillray skewered the social and political tensions around emerging scientific, medical and technological ideas, from electricity to vaccination. Historian Patricia Fara explains the layers of meaning alongside some of the most notable examples.
A cosmological conundrum
Theoretical physicists are devising new solutions to a decades-long cosmic mismatch. Vacuum energy, caused by ‘virtual’ particles popping in and out of empty space, is thought to be behind the Universe’s ever-faster expansion. But quantum theory suggests a vacuum energy so massive that galaxies would never have formed. Theory’s inability to explain the vacuum energy’s oddly small measured value is known as the ‘cosmological constant problem’. Some theorists think this is a non-issue. Others are tweaking the fundamental theories and hypothesizing new ones (such as that space-time is made of foam). “It's generally regarded as one of the most awkward, embarrassing, difficult problems in theoretical physics today,” says physicist Antonio Padilla.
Scientific American | 13 min read
Image of the week
Nathan Myhrvold has a PhD in physics, was the chief technology officer at Microsoft for 14 years and founded a food company known for its high-resolution photographs. It all came together when he created a camera specifically to take the highest resolution photos ever of snowflakes. To keep them frozen long enough to be snapped, the snowflakes are captured on an artificial sapphire slide, which is less conductive than a normal glass microscope slide. The LED flash is cooler and a thousand times faster than a typical camera flash. (Smithsonian Magazine | 7 min read)Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC
