Nature

Gas expelled by revellers’ bodies accounts for about one-quarter of the methane emitted by the Munich Oktoberfest. Credit: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Environmental sciences 02 April 2020 Scientists cycled around the annual festival of beer and wurst to estimate its methane output. Every year, the famous beer-soaked, sausage-laden Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, produces large amounts of natural

Scientists have been struggling to solve one of Mars’ biggest mysteries: is or was there water on it, and where did its water originate? Researchers may have discovered a clue in the tiny slices of meteorites that plunged down to Earth from Mars. A new study recently published in the Nature Geoscience journal elaborates on this idea.  Mars

1. Gröbner, S. N. et al. The landscape of genomic alterations across childhood cancers. Nature 555, 321–327 (2018). Article Google Scholar 2. Zhang, J. et al. Germline Mutations in Predisposition Genes in Pediatric Cancer. N. Engl. J. Med. 373, 2336–2346 (2015). Article Google Scholar 3. Waszak, S. M. et al. Spectrum and prevalence of genetic

The NYC COVID-19 Engagement Portal was launched, Friday. This portal aims to provide New York residents with information and updates if they or someone they know has contracted coronavirus, according to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.   Other information that the portal provides includes symptoms experienced and persons who came in contact with someone who tested

Clinical research into treatments for COVID-19 is being boosted by multidisciplinary input, but it is crucial that the fruits of these labours are freely shared so that the world can benefit.Credit: Axel Heimken/AFP/Getty Although the coronavirus pandemic has become a threat to every country on Earth, world leaders are all at sea — showing few

Silent Spring author Rachel Carson helped inspire the global green movement.Credit: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Last week, academic and performance artist Colleen Webster was looking forward to doing her one-woman show on the life of the biologist, science writer and environmental pioneer Rachel Carson. “She was shy. She was humble. Devoted to family. Committed

The World Health Organization (WHO) has continuously expressed to the public that maintaining social or physical distancing as well as home quarantine are some of the steps to avoid spreading the virus. However, as the measures to keep the virus at bay become more stringent, mental health experts are warning that isolation and the loss of

Residents of Brussels have been told to stay at home, leaving the city’s streets empty.Credit: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty The coronavirus pandemic has brought chaos to lives and economies around the world. But efforts to curb the spread of the virus might mean that the planet itself is moving a little less. Researchers who study

Myelin is the protective covering or sheath that protects nerve cells, and is composed of fatty acids and protein. Medical scientists and researchers have always considered myelin as metabolically inert. However, a recent study by researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas Houston surprisingly found that it is dynamic. This

The elongated bristlemouth (Sigmops elongatus) is abundant in the oceans’ twilight zone.Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Paul Caiger The twilight zone contains the largest and least exploited fish stocks of the world’s oceans. Spanning from just below 200 metres to 1,000 metres deep, it is an interface between the well-studied marine life in the sunlit zone

London City Airport closed on 25 March owing to travel restrictions prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.Credit: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty When the US Congress passed a US$2-trillion economic-stimulus plan on 27 March, $25 billion in economic aid for passenger airlines was just a small piece of it. But for environmentalists and their allies in Washington DC, it

You are about to take the stage to speak in front of a large audience. As you wait, your heart starts to pound, your breathing quickens, your blood pressure rises and your palms sweat. These physiological responses are evolutionarily conserved mechanisms to prepare your body to fight against imminent dangers, or to run away quickly.

The demand for ventilators for a rapidly growing number of patients inflicted with the coronavirus around the world is at least ten times what is available at hospitals. Chinese ventilator makers such as Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co. had been busy with the surge of orders from around the world as countries demand machines in their

A 3D magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain.Credit: Tom Barrick, Chris Clark, SGHMS/SPL The Idea of the Brain: A History Matthew Cobb Profile (2020) The poet Emily Dickinson rendered the brain wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and about the weight of God. Scientists facing the daunting task of describing this organ

In the advent of a new global pandemic, COVID-19, roboticist and founding editor of Science Robotics, Guang-Zhong Yang, has expressed how robots could help in combating the spread of infectious diseases after being serviced by a robot during his 14-day self-quarantine. In an editorial featured in Science Robotics, lead experts in robotics agree that the outbreak of the

Michelle Cipicchio (right) trains two lab technicians at the Broad Institute to extract viral RNA from patient samples.Credit: Scott Sassone/Broad Institute Working around the clock, scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts can run about 2,000 COVID-19 tests per day. In places where testing is still scarce — which is

Geologists in Australia recently published a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which reported the discovery of the first known ancestor in the family tree where we and most animals belong. It is a worm-like animal and is the oldest known bilaterian, an organism having both a front and a back

A man with COVID-19 is treated at an intensive care unit in Rome.Credit: Antonio Masiello/Getty Fresh findings about SARS CoV-2 and the disease it causes: 27 March — Viral proteins point to potential treatments A list of the human proteins affected by the SaRS CoV-2 virus offers a guide to potential treatments for infected people.

In 1945, a young chemist called Werner Bergmann was diving off the Florida coast, scouring its waters for undiscovered marine life. One of the species he came across was a rather plain brown sponge. A colleague named the new-found creature Cryptotethia crypta, and Bergmann isolated from it two unknown compounds — spongothymidine and spongouridine. He

There is a new development on the theory that suggests that pangolins are the missing link between bats and humans in spreading coronavirus–the pangolins are not the culprit.  Scientists analyzed the viruses of pangolins (Manis javanica) captured in anti-smuggling activities in southern China. The study revealed that the identified coronaviruses in pangolins are different from

A vast ozone hole — likely the biggest on record in the north — has opened in the skies above the Arctic. It rivals the better-known Antarctic ozone hole that forms in the southern hemisphere each year. Record-low ozone levels currently stretch across much of the central Arctic, covering an area about three times the

A new study published in Nature Research stated that there are various types of cancer and its stages that may create microbial DNA signatures, which can be determined or identified in a person’s blood. This preliminary research was spearheaded by a team from the Centre for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California, San Diego.

The University of Rochester in New York saw protests in 2017 over the Florian Jaeger case.Credit: Rachel Jerome Ferraro/NYT/Redux/eyevine The University of Rochester in New York has agreed to pay a US$9.4-million settlement to researchers who sued the institution over how it handled allegations of sexual harassment against a cognitive science professor. The settlement, announced

A study on the Denman Glacier in East Antarctica has assessed the changes it has undergone during the last 22 years. This has been published in the Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The proponents of the study were from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA as well as scientists

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here Cracked-open and burnt fragments of pincers of the edible crab (Cancer pagurus)João Zilhão A pile of ancient kitchen rubbish shows Neanderthals had a highly varied diet. Digging in a seaside cave in Portugal, researchers found bones

Benjamin Thompson, Noah Baker, and Amy Maxmen discuss efforts to develop treatments for COVID-19. Download MP3 In this episode: 02:00 A push for plasma In New York, hospitals are preparing to infuse patients with the antibody-rich blood plasma of people who have recovered from COVID-19. This approach has been used during disease outbreaks for over

Stanford University researchers have developed a new device that enables them to observe real-time neural activity in the brain.  The researchers published their work on the device in Science Advances. Lead author and materials science & engineering graduate student Abdulmalik Obaid revealed how they designed new processes to create 3D silicon electronics that scales up easily. The device

The Lincoln Park campus of DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, is empty after being closed to faculty members over COVID-19 concerns. In this unprecedented time, many scientists must keep their research going from home — a steep challenge, but not an unmanageable one.Credit: Max Herman/NurPhoto/Getty As universities close down, heads of life-science laboratories are having

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here Clinical research has been disrupted as hospitals devote more resources to caring for people critically ill with COVID-19.Credit: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Scientists are rushing to launch clinical trials of experimental vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus —

A study on low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri by Mario Damasso and colleagues, published in Science Advances, analyzed the cyclical changes of the light emitted by the star Proxima Centauri. This star is the star nearest our Sun.  Research findings suggest that the star could be orbited by a so-called Super Earth as its second planet. For

Protein attachment to the membrane of a starfish egg cell occurs in rippling waves (video is roughly 100 times faster than actual speed). Credit: Fakhri Lab/MIT Physics 26 March 2020 Waves that travel through an egg’s outer membrane echo those seen in physical systems at much smaller — and much larger — scales. Some cellular

A closer look at the casualties caused by a novel type of coronavirus reveals that COVID-19 patients with cardiovascular or heart conditions appear to be especially vulnerable, according to Nature Review.  During the months succeeding the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in Hubei, China in December 2019, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has published the

Passengers quarantined on the cruise ship Diamond Princess.Credit: Eugene Hoshiko/AP/Shutterstock When COVID-19 was detected among passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the vessel offered a rare opportunity to understand features of the new coronavirus that are hard to investigate in the wider population. Some of the first studies from the ship — where some

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here Credit: MBARI Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) greet each other by turning on their internal bioluminescent organs. Researchers analysed hours of footage of roving groups of gregarious Humboldts and found that they sent signals to each other

Superbugs, or drug-resistant microbes, have become a significant health problem. Drug-resistant bacterial pathogens kill at least 700,000 people each year due to drug-resistant infections, which includes 230,000 deaths due to multi-drug-resistant TB or tuberculosis. It is projected that if action is not taken against it, the death toll could reach 10 million annually by 2050.

1. Burton, A. & Torres-Padilla, M.-E. Chromatin dynamics in the regulation of cell fate allocation during early embryogenesis. Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 15, 723–735 (2014). 2. Wu, J. et al. The landscape of accessible chromatin in mammalian preimplantation embryos. Nature 534, 652–657 (2016). 3. Dahl, J. A. et al. Broad histone H3K4me3 domains in

The calls to shift to a plant-based diet to help mitigate climate change are getting louder. Farmer Daniel Slabbert and their supporters, however, look at it differently. They believe cows and cropland to help save the planet. In South Africa, there are still plenty of grasslands or veld. Farmers such as Slabbert are practicing regenerative agriculture,

Credit: Sergio Barrios/EyeEm/Getty The proportion of researchers who report disabilities in grant applications for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) fell by more than one-third from 2008 to 2018, finds a study. It also determined that applicants who do disclose a disability are slightly less likely to win a grant than are those who

In managing any outbreak, including the coronavirus pandemic, it is crucial to determine the number of infected people and the number of those who exhibit various levels of severity of illness. The answers may be provided by both diagnostic tests and blood testing. A blood test will detect both active infections and past infections based

Health-care professionals are working to exhaustion so that the sick get immediate relief. Researchers are working continuous shifts too.Credit: Paolo Miranda/AFP/Getty Like many of you, we’re struggling to comprehend the new world we find ourselves in. For decades, we’ve been publishing research and news about emerging infectious diseases and the potential havoc a pandemic can

Credit: Getty Giving a talk can open doors to new collaborations, increase your chances of funding success and make it more likely that other people will respond to your ideas. But scientific presentations are too often confusing, boring and overstuffed. Here are some suggestions, based on our experience as speakers, audience members and presentation trainers,

For over a decade, the white-nose fungus has devastated populations of bats all over eastern Canada and the United States. Millions of bats have died from the disease called the white-nose syndrome or WNS. Scientists have identified the cause as the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which they think entered the region accidentally from Europe.  Asian and

1. Treutlein, P., Genes, C., Hammerer, K., Poggio, M. & Rabl, P. In Cavity Optomechanics: Nano- and Micromechanical Resonators Interacting with Light (eds Aspelmeyer, M., Kippenberg, T. J. & Marquardt, F.) 327–351 (Springer, 2014). 2. Rabl, P. et al. Strong magnetic coupling between an electronic spin qubit and a mechanical resonator. Phys. Rev. B 79,

(Photo : Pixabay)Dog owners were in a panic last week from two reported cases of pet dogs being tested positive for COVID-19 in China and Hongkong. Public health and animal experts maintain there is little evidence that dogs get COVID-19. There is also no evidence indicating that these pets transmit COVID-19 to humans or animals.

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here Artist’s reconstruction of the world’s oldest known modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis, in its original environment.Phillip Krzeminski An extraordinary fossil skull belonged to the oldest modern bird ever found. The duck-sized Asteriornis maastrichtensis lived 66.7 million years

In the ancient ice sheets near Earth’s poles, tiny bubbles trapped in the compacted layers of snowfall provide a natural archive of air from ages past, but one that is not straightforward to read. Forty years ago, the glaciologist Robert Delmas and colleagues developed a technique for reliably measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in

Understanding what causes colorectal cancer (CRC) could help to combat this disease of the colon. Writing in Nature, Pleguezuelos-Manzano et al.1 report evidence that strengthens a previously suspected connection to a type of gut bacterium. The authors implicate this microbe by pinpointing bacterial ‘fingerprints’ in DNA alterations found in CRC cells. Certain bacteria produce genotoxic

Scientists recently found one primary reason why sea turtles get attracted to plastic and eat them– plastic smells like food. This ocean plastic debris and garbage that are covered with marine organisms such as algae are delicious-smelling to marine turtles. We know that plastic is deadly to turtles that ingest it. Because of unbridled human