Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here
Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death
A strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death pandemic in the 1300s, has been traced back to a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says palaeogeneticist and co-author Johannes Krause. The area was on the Silk Road trade route, which might have helped the plague to spread westwards.
Deserts are spreading in Central Asia
Deserts are spreading northwards in Central Asia as a result of global warming. A study has found that, since the 1980s, regions with a desert climate have expanded by as much as 100 kilometres in northern Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, in southern Kazakhstan and around the Junggar Basin in northwestern China. The effect of reduced rainfall and warmer temperatures will alter the plants that grow in these regions, and the animals that rely on them.
Reference: Geophysical Research Letters paper
First public statue of female scientist in Italy
Astronomer Margherita Hack has become the first female scientist to be honoured with a public statue in Italy. Hack, who was born in 1922 and died in 2013, was a high-profile figure for decades in the country, where she was a prominent science communicator and is credited with inspiring generations of young women to pursue a career in science. The bronze monument, by Italian artist Sissi, was unveiled on 13 June — a day after what would have been Hack’s 100th birthday — next to the main campus of the University of Milan.
Features & opinion
Africa’s outbreak sentinels
In Parrot’s Beak, a strip of land in Guinea that borders Sierra Leone and Liberia, agriculture and civil war is pushing people into close proximity with bats, increasing the risk of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola. Researchers and public-health leaders are taking a ‘One Health’ approach to tackle examples such as this, in which environmental, animal and human health intersect. Rwanda leads the way: it has clear plans and policies for dealing with zoonotic infections and has integrated One Health approaches into university curricula. It has also developed multidisciplinary rapid-response teams and has created decentralized laboratories in the animal and human health sectors to strengthen surveillance.
We have blinded the world
By flooding the world with light and sound, humans have waylaid migrating birds, muffled bats’ echolocation and lured turtle hatchlings away from the sea. We have also cut ourselves off from the nature that sustains us. “More than a third of humanity, and almost 80 percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way,” notes science writer Ed Yong. In an excerpt from his new book, Yong makes a rousing call to slash sensory pollution, illustrated by stunning animal portraits by Shayan Asgharnia.
Why we must delve into the microbiome
Ten years after the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Consortium published the first big survey of microbial diversity in the human body, we’ve only just begun, argues microbiologist Ruth Ley. “It’s time to build on this early work, and revamp the project to represent humanity in all its complexity,” she writes. “A vast new diversity analysis of humanity’s microbiome, and of the broader vertebrate microbiome, will finally place our own species’ data in the context of the tree of life.”