AI tools that help researchers design new proteins have resulted in a boom in designer molecules. However, these proteins are being churned out faster than they can be made and tested in labs. To overcome this, multiple protein-design competitions have popped up, with the aim of sifting out the functional from the fantastical. But while contests have helped drive key scientific advances in the past, it's unclear how to identify which problems to tackle and how best to select winners objectively....
Nov 29, 2024•13 min
00:50 Fossilised faeces give news insights into dinosaurs’ diets and rise A huge collection of fossilised digestive contents has provided clues as to how dinosaurs grew to become the dominant animals on the planet. Why these animals rose to dominance has been unclear, with one theory proposing that a chance event wiped out other species, whereas another suggests that dinosaurs had adaptations that better allowed them to thrive. By analysing over 500 vomit and faeces fossils, researchers have bet...
Nov 27, 2024•32 min
00:45 A squid-inspired device for needle-free drug delivery Inspired by squids’ ability to shoot ink, a team of researchers have developed swallowable devices that can deliver tiny jets of drugs directly into the gut lining, circumventing the need for needles. Previous studies have shown that most people prefer to take medication in pill form, rather than as an injection, but many drugs are degraded as they pass through the digestive system. The team’s new swallowable devices overcome this issue...
Nov 20, 2024•29 min
00:46 The role of skull bone marrow in ageing During ageing, bone marrow in the skull becomes an increasingly important site of blood-cell production. This is in stark contrast to most bones where the ability of marrow to make blood and immune cells declines. Studies in mice and humans showed that ageing results in skull bone-marrow expanding, and in mice this marrow was more resistant to inflammation and other hallmarks of ageing. The team behind the work hope by understanding this process bett...
Nov 13, 2024•35 min
Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize shortlisted novel Orbital is set inside an International Space Station-like vessel circling 250 miles above Earth. It looks at a day-in-the-life of the crew, investigating the contrasts they experience during the 16 orbits they make around the planet, crossing continents, oceans and the line separating night and day. On the latest episode of Nature hits the books , Samantha joins us to discuss why the ISS is a rich setting for fiction, the challen...
Nov 08, 2024•26 min
00:46 Mitochondria divide their labour to help cells thrive Researchers have uncovered that mitochondria divide into two distinct forms when cells are starved, a finding that could help explain how some cancers thrive in hostile conditions. Mitochondria are cellular powerhouses, creating energy and vital metabolic molecules, but how they are able to do this when resources are limited has been a mystery. It turns out that in nutrient-poor situations, mitochondria split into two separate types, on...
Nov 06, 2024•28 min
This series was originally broadcast in 2020. Science and politics are not easy bedfellows - "Stick to the science" is a three part series which aims to find out why. In the third and final episode we try to get to the bottom of how journalists, communicators and policymakers influence how science is perceived. We discuss the danger of politicization and ask the question - can science be part of the political narrative without compromising its values? This episode was produced by Nick Petrić How...
Nov 03, 2024•24 min
This series was originally broadcast in 2020. Science and politics are not easy bedfellows - "Stick to the science" is a three part series which aims to find out why. In this episode we're asking how politics shapes the life of a working scientist. Be it through funding agendas, cultural lobbies or personal bias, there's a myriad of ways in which politics can shape the game; influencing the direction and quality of research, But what does this mean for the objective ideals of science? This ...
Nov 02, 2024•25 min
This series was originally broadcast in 2020. Science and politics are not easy bedfellows - "Stick to the science" is a three part series which aims to find out why. In this episode we delve into the past, and uncover the complicated relationship between science, politics and power. Along the way, we come up against some pretty big questions: what is science? Should science be apolitical? And where does Nature fit in? This episode was produced by Nick Petrić Howe, with editing from No...
Nov 01, 2024•29 min
00:48 Rebuilding mental health after the floods Researchers have been investigating the best ways to help people deal with trauma in the wake of a climate disaster. In April and May devastating floods surged across Rio Grande do Sul in the South of Brazil, affecting two million people and killing hundreds. As people try to put their lives back together scientists have been conducting surveys and investigating how to make sure that any mental health issues don’t become persistent. We hear from so...
Oct 30, 2024•35 min
By the end of 2024 up to two billion people will have gone to the polls, in a pivotal year of elections around the globe. This is giving political scientists the chance to dive into each election in detail but also to compare the differing voting systems involved. They hope understanding the advantages and drawbacks of the systems will help highlight whether some are more likely to promote democratic resilience or to stave off corrosive partisanship. This is an audio version of our Feature: ...
Oct 25, 2024•19 min
00:48 The hidden cities of Uzbekistan Researchers have uncovered the scale of two ancient cities buried high in the mountains of Uzbekistan. The cities were thought to be there, but their extent was unknown, so the team used drone-mounted LiDAR equipment to reveal what was hidden beneath the ground. The survey surprised researchers by showing one of the cities was six times bigger than expected. The two cities, called Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, were nestled in the heart of Central Asia’s medieval...
Oct 23, 2024•30 min
In this episode: 00:46 An unusual γ-ray producing microquasar A type of binary-system known as a microquasar has been found to be firing out γ-rays at high energy-levels, which may make it a candidate to be a long-theorized natural particle-accelerator known as a PeVatron. These objects are thought to be a source of galactic cosmic rays, the origins of which are currently a mystery. Understanding how this microquasar works could also help researchers learn more about full-sized quasars — monstro...
Oct 16, 2024•30 min
00:55 Graphene Tongue Researchers have developed a graphene ‘tongue’ that uses AI to tell the subtle differences between drinks. Graphene has long been sought after as a chemical sensor, but tiny variations between devices have meant that it couldn’t be used very reliably. The team behind the ‘tongue’ got around this problem by training an AI to tell the difference between similar liquids regardless of variations between graphene devices. They hope that their work shows that it’s possible to use...
Oct 09, 2024•39 min
00:46 Physicists spot new types of high-energy radiation in thunderstorms Physicists have identified new forms of γ-ray radiation created inside thunderclouds, and shown that levels of γ-ray production are much higher on Earth than previously thought. Scientists already knew about two types of γ-ray phenomena in thunderclouds — glows that last as long as a minute and high-intensity flashes that come and go in only a few millionths of a second. Now, researchers have identified that these both occ...
Oct 02, 2024•31 min
The world's fastest supercomputer, known as Frontier, is located at the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This machine churns through data at record speed, outpacing 100,000 laptops working simultaneously. With nearly 50,000 processors, Frontier was designed to push the bounds of human knowledge. It's being used to create open-source large language models to compete with commercial AI systems, simulate proteins for drug development, help improve aeropla...
Sep 27, 2024•20 min
In this episode: 00:46 Unravelling why children with Down’s syndrome are at a higher risk of leukaemia Children with Down’s syndrome have a 150-fold increased risk of developing leukaemia than those without the condition. Now, an in-depth investigation has revealed that changes to genome structures in fetal liver stem-cells appear to be playing a key role in this increase. Down’s syndrome is characterised by cells having an extra copy of chromosome 21. The team behind this work saw that in liver...
Sep 25, 2024•22 min
In this episode: 00:45 The biggest black hole jets ever seen Astronomers have spotted a pair of enormous jets emanating from a supermassive black hole with a combined length of 23 million light years — the biggest ever discovered. Jets are formed when matter is ionized and flung out of a black hole, creating enormous and powerful structures in space. Thought to be unstable, physicists had theorized there was a limit to how large these jets could be, but the new discovery far exceeds this, sugges...
Sep 18, 2024•34 min
In this episode: 00:45 What ancient DNA has revealed about Rapa Nui’s past Ancient DNA analysis has further demonstrated that the people of Rapa Nui did not cause their own population collapse, further refuting a controversial but popular claim. Rapa Nui, also known as Easter island, is famous for its giant Moai statues and the contested idea that the people mismanaged their natural resources leading to ‘ecological suicide’. Genomes sequenced from the remains of 15 ancient islanders showed no ev...
Sep 11, 2024•42 min
The often repeated claim that "80% of the world's biodiversity is found in the territories of Indigenous Peoples" appears widely in policy documents and reports, yet appears to have sprung out of nowhere. According to a group of researchers, including those from Indigenous groups, this baseless statistic could be undermining the conservation efforts of the Indigenous People it's meant to support and prevent further work to really understand how best to conserve biodiversity. Two of the authors j...
Sep 06, 2024•14 min
In this episode: 00:45 Why a 'nuclear clock' is now within researchers’ reach Researchers have made a big step towards the creation of the long theorized nuclear clock, by getting the most accurate measurement of the frequency of light required to push thorium nuclei into a higher energy state. Such a timekeeper would differ from the best current clocks as their ‘tick’ corresponds to the energy transitions of protons and neutrons, rather than electrons. Nuclear clocks have the potential to be mo...
Sep 04, 2024•31 min
The 'file-drawer problem', where findings with null or negative results gather dust and are left unpublished, is well known in science. There has been an overriding perception that studies with positive or significant findings are more important, but this bias can have real-world implications, skewing perceptions of drug efficacies, for example. Multiple efforts to get negative results published have been put forward or attempted, with some researchers saying that the incentive structures in aca...
Aug 30, 2024•18 min
In this episode: 00:31 Chatbots makes racist judgements on the basis of dialect Research has shown that large language models, including those that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, make racist judgements on the basis of users’ dialect. If asked to describe a person, many AI systems responded with racist stereotypes when presented with text written in African American English — a dialect spoken by millions of people in the United States that is associated with the descendants of enslaved African A...
Aug 28, 2024•21 min
For millennia, humanity has obsessed about halting ageing and, ultimately, preventing death. Yet while advances in medicine and public-health have seen human life-expectancy more than double, our maximum lifespan stubbornly remains around 120 years. On the latest episode of Nature hits the books , Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan joins us to discuss what scientists have learnt about the molecular processes underlying ageing, whether they can be prevented, and why the quest for longevity also ne...
Aug 22, 2024•31 min
00:46 Old AIs can’t learn new tricks An algorithm that reactivates dormant ‘neurons’ in deep learning based AIs could help them overcome their inability to learn new things and make future systems more flexible, research has shown. AIs based on deep learning struggle to learn how to tackle new tasks indefinitely, making them less adaptable to new situations. The reasons for this are unclear, but now a team has identified that ‘resetting’ parts of the neural networks underlying these systems can ...
Aug 21, 2024•20 min
00:48 The mystery of Stonehenge’s Altar Stone Stonehenge’s central stone came from Northern Scotland, more than 600 miles away from the monument, according to a new analysis of its geochemistry. It is commonly accepted that many of the rocks that make up the iconic neolithic monument came from Wales, 150 miles from the site. Previously, it had been thought that a central stone, called the Altar Stone, had also come from this area, known as the Preseli Hills. The new work suggests that the ancien...
Aug 14, 2024•23 min
AIs built on Large Language Models have wowed by producing particularly fluent text. However, their ability to do this is limited in many languages. As the data and resources used to train a model in a specific language drops, so does the performance of the model, meaning that for some languages the AIs are effectively useless. Researchers are aware of this problem and are trying to find solutions, but the challenge extends far beyond just the technical, with moral and social questions to be ans...
Aug 09, 2024•37 min
00:48 Plant trait diversity in drylands A study reveals that, unexpectedly, plants display a greater diversity of traits in drier environments. Trait diversity is a measure of an organism's performance in an environment and can include things like the size of a plant or its photosynthetic rate. Whilst there are good data on this kind of diversity in temperate regions, an assessment of drylands has been lacking. The new study fills this knowledge gap and finds that, counter to a prevailing expect...
Aug 07, 2024•26 min
00:45 Increasing the energy efficiency of light-based computers Computer components based on specialised LEDs could reduce the energy consumption of power hungry AI systems, according to new research. AI chips with components that compute using light can run more efficiently than those using digital electronics, but these light-based systems typically use lasers that can be bulky and difficult to control. To overcome these obstacles, a team has developed a way to replace these lasers with LEDs, ...
Jul 31, 2024•33 min
In India, a group of researchers raced to develop a CRISPR-based genome editing therapy to save the life of a young woman with a rare neurodegenerative disease. Despite a valiant effort, the pace of research was ultimately too slow to save her life. While many are convinced that these therapies could offer hope to those with overlooked genetic conditions, it will likely take years to develop the techniques needed to quickly create bespoke treatments, something people in need don't have. This is ...
Jul 26, 2024•23 min
