In this episode:
To protect themselves against viral infection, bacteria often use CRISPR-Cas systems to identify and destroy an invading virus’s genetic material. But viruses aren’t helpless and can deploy countermeasures, known as anti-CRISPRs, to neutralise host defences. This week, a team describe a new kind of anti-CRISPR system, based on RNA, which protects viruses by mimicking part of the CRISPR-Cas system. The researchers hope that this discovery could have future biotechnology applications, including making CRISPR-Cas genome editing more precise.
Research article: Camara-Wilpert et al.
Carved inscriptions suggest a queen named Thyra was the most powerful person in Viking-age Denmark, and the discovery of a puffed-up exoplanet that has just 1.5% the density of Earth.
Research Highlight: Runes on Viking stones speak to an ancient queen’s power
Research Highlight: ‘Super-puff’ planet is one of the fluffiest worlds ever found
Climate-change induced melting of Greenland’s vast ice sheet would contribute to 7m of sea level rise. But it has been difficult to calculate how the ice sheet will respond to future warming. This week, a team suggest that abrupt ice loss is likely if the global mean temperature is between 1.7 °C and 2.3 °C above pre-industrial levels. Keeping temperature rise below 1.5 °C could mitigate ice loss, if done within a few centuries, but even a short overshoot of the estimated threshold could lead to several metres of sea-level rise.
Research article: Bochow et al.
A massive reproducibility exercise reveals over 200 ecologists get wildly-diverging results from the same data, and how melting simulated lunar-dust with lasers could help pave the Moon.
Nature News: Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets
Nature News: How to build Moon roads using focused beams of sunlight
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Physicists finally observe strange isotope Oxygen 28 – raising fundamental questions
Audio long read: Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed?
Brain-reading implants turn thoughts into speech
Fruit flies' ability to sense magnetic fields thrown into doubt
Racism in health: the roots of the US Black maternal mortality crisis
How welcome are refugees in Europe? A giant study has some answers
How to get more women in science, with Athene Donald
Audio long read: Lab mice go wild — making experiments more natural in order to decode the brain
Facebook ‘echo chamber’ has little impact on polarized views, according to study
AI-enhanced night-vision lets users see in the dark
Disrupting snail food-chain curbs parasitic disease in Senegal
ChatGPT can write a paper in an hour — but there are downsides
Even a 'minimal cell' can grow stronger, thanks to evolution
Audio long read: ‘Almost magical’ — chemists can now move single atoms in and out of a molecule’s core
Do octopuses dream? Neural activity resembles human sleep stages
Why bladder cancer cells that shed their Y chromosome become more aggressive
What IBM's result means for quantum computing
A brain circuit for infanticide, in mice
AI identifies gene interactions to speed up search for treatment targets
Audio long read: Can giant surveys of scientists fight misinformation on COVID, climate change and more?
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