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Volume 555 Issue 7698, 29 March 2018

The dark caves that blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) call home is an extreme environment in which food is scarce. As a result, the fish lead a famine-and-feast way life that has led them to adapt in a remarkable way, as Nicolas Rohner, Cliff Tabin and their colleagues reveal in this week's issue. The cavefish carry a mutation in the insulin receptor that would cause severe type 2 diabetes in humans. The resulting high blood-glucose levels seem to cause no ill effects in the fish, which are healthy and have a normal lifespan. The authors speculate that the fish have evolved compensatory mechanisms in their regulation of glucose that allow them to survive in their challenging environment. Cover image: Paulo Oliveira/Alamy

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  • Some Mexican cavefish have a mutation in an insulin receptor protein that affects blood-glucose regulation. The same mutation causes diabetes and health problems in humans, but the diabetic cavefish thrive.

    • Sylvie Rétaux
    News & Views
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Article

  • A single spin in silicon is strongly coupled to a microwave-frequency photon and coherent single-spin dynamics are observed using circuit quantum electrodynamics.

    • X. Mi
    • M. Benito
    • J. R. Petta
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  • Deep neural networks and Monte Carlo tree search can plan chemical syntheses by training models on a huge database of published reactions; their predicted synthetic routes cannot be distinguished from those a human chemist would design.

    • Marwin H. S. Segler
    • Mike Preuss
    • Mark P. Waller
    Article
  • Single-cell recordings show that CGRP-expressing neurons in the parabrachial nucleus in mice respond to both noxious stimuli and signals of feeding satiety.

    • Carlos A. Campos
    • Anna J. Bowen
    • Richard D. Palmiter
    Article
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