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Australia wild horse cull is not enough

Up to 10,000 feral horses, known as brumbies, might be killed or removed from Australia’s largest alpine national park under a draft plan to control the rapidly growing population of non-native animals. But the plan does not go far enough, say scientists. “Alpine wetlands continue to degrade even with very small numbers of feral horses,” says an open letter from the Australian Academy of Science. “Kosciusko [National Park] cannot begin to recover from drought, extensive bushfires and overgrazing if, as currently proposed, 3,000 feral horses remain.”

Nature | 6 min read

Honey bees ‘social distance’ to fight mites

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) change the way they interact with one another when infested with the mite Varroa destructor, a pathogen that can cause colony collapse. Researchers in Italy studied video recordings of the inside of hives and found that, in mite-infested hives, older members of the colony performed dances to direct other bees to food sources at the periphery, keeping them away from the centre — where young bees, the queen and brood cells are located. The researchers also observed more grooming activity, which can help to reduce the spread of parasites, at the centre of the infested hives.

The Guardian | 4 min read

References: Sciences Advances paper

Bat voted New Zealand’s bird of the year

A bat has put the cat among the pigeons by winning bird of the year in New Zealand. The pekapeka-tou-roa (representing both Chalinolobus tuberculatus, the New Zealand long-tailed bat, and Mystacina tuberculata, the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat) won the annual awareness-raising vote. The two species are the country’s only endemic land mammals, and won by a landslide. Conservation charity Forest & Bird is sanguine about the controversy over a bat winning a competition that celebrates birds. “It wouldn't be Bird of the Year without some scandal,” says spokesperson Lissy Fehnker-Heather.

The New Zealand Herald | 3 min read

Features & opinion

Pakistan’s nuclear architect

Scientists designing weapons of mass destruction rarely maintain high profiles: Abdul Qadeer Khan was the exception, writes Ehsan Masood for Nature. The materials scientist, who smuggled nuclear-weapons technology into and then out of Pakistan, attended scientific conferences and openly advertised his services. The world later learnt that he had also started the first freelance nuclear-weapons technology business, selling uranium-enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Despite confessing to wrongdoing on live television, he died a martyr for millions, restoring a poor country’s pride in matching richer nations in defence technology. He has died aged 85.

Nature | 5 min read

The vaccine shots heard around the world

Two new books follow key runners in the great vaccine race of 2020. In First Shots, journalist Brendan Borrell relates how the US government, and academics at the US National Institutes of Health, advanced national vaccine development — particularly that using messenger RNA to prompt cells to make antibodies that fight off the virus, in partnership with the biotechnology company Moderna. In A Shot to Save the World, journalist Gregory Zuckerman looks at more of the key vaccines, and takes a broader historical perspective, giving an assured account of the research, the ideas and the personalities. Taken together, the books give a flavour of some of the people and technologies that stepped up when it mattered the most, and the politics that smoothed or blocked their paths, writes reviewer Natasha Loder, health policy editor at The Economist.

Nature | 8 min read

Futures: science fiction from Nature

In this week’s helping of short stories for Nature’s Futures series:

• An artefact hunter discovers the sacred power of a priceless diamond in a world where the Sun harbours a vast intelligence in ‘Beware of rainbows’.

• A knowledge-smuggler considers how to balance the books in ‘The audit’.

Where I work

Inside the maximum-biosecurity laboratory at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, Danielle Bruna Leal de Oliveira looks into a digital microscope to observe the structural damage that SARS-CoV-2 does to cells from an African green monkey (Chlorocebus sabaeus). “Nowadays, we can watch molecular mutations as they occur, using computer software alongside advanced lab techniques,” says de Oliveira, a researcher in microbiology and virology. “We can detect the viruses that cause respiratory disease in just 15 minutes.” (Nature | 3 min read)