Francesca Cesari
Chief Biological, Clinical and Social Sciences Editor of Nature
Any views expressed here are my own
- A unified 1 Mb DNA model with genome‑wide, single‑base outputs: AlphaGenome advances variant effect prediction across expression, chromatin, TF binding, and splicing modalities. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A new study projects future impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa through 2050, using 25 years of data on climate, extreme weather, malaria burden and control interventions, and socioeconomic environment. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Muscularis macrophages help maintain gut homeostasis but also spread α-synuclein along the gut-brain axis, promote T cell expansion, and drive Parkinson’s disease progression in mice, a Nature paper reports. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Two registered clinical trials in Nature report the successful use of the GLP-1 and glucagon receptor co-agonist Mazdutide for type 2 diabetes.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A paper in Nature reports the prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease Neuropathological Changes in a Norwegian population-based cohort, assessed using a blood-based biomarker🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- An article in Nature assesses the effect of Australian protected areas on vegetation in adjacent areas, and finds evidence of a positive spillover effect, that is, increases in a given vegetation type relative to what would be expected from the broader landscape.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A meta-analysis of 34,000 individuals identifies reproducible associations between gut microbial species and diet and health markers. The associations were used to generate a ranking of species that are either positively and negatively associated with health markers.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Ancient DNA analysis at the important archaeological site of Shimao city in northern China provides insights into the social organization and burial practices in a Neolithic community🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A study in Nature finds that 0.37 million tonnes of wild meat are extracted annually in Amazonia.This amount of wild meat can meet nearly half of protein and iron dietary requirements for rural people and a substantial portion of their needs for B vitamins and zinc.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- How related is economic inequality to mental health? This meta-analysis shows a complex picture in which this relationship is only evident among low-income populations and in contexts of high inflation. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- How do video glitches impact hiring decisions, trust in a medical provider, and parole decisions? A study published in Nature finds that these glitches negatively impact these decisions by breaking the illusion of face-to-face contact 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Speech sounds like vowels and consonants in native and foreign languages elicit similar neural responses in the superior temporal, but only during native listening does this area encode word boundaries, frequency, and language-specific information. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Marburg virus is a highly virulent/transmissible filovirus with no vaccine/treatments and recent outbreaks in Africa. Scientists have isolated/characterized a highly potent neutralizing monoclonal antibody effective against Marburg and related viruses Dehong and Ravn.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A Nature paper details a new AI model called EchoPrime, which can read and interpret echocardiograms 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A study looks at the mortality impacts of unmanaged rainfall and future sea level rise, with disproportionate risk for children, women, and residents of slums in a developing megacity🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Computer vision, on which many AI applications rely on, is based on non-consensual datasets, compromising fairness and accuracy in AI. Now, an ethically curated, diverse human-image data set, sets a new standard for responsible data curation and trustworthy AI. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A paper in Nature reports high-resolution structures of aSyn fibrils 1B and their in vivo seeding product 1BP. They appear remarkably similar, suggesting a high-fidelity conformational replication process to perpetuate MSA-like pathology 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Snake bites kill/debilitate 1000s of people annually in Sub-Saharan African. A new nanobody cocktail is shown to be highly effective against 17 of the most dangerous African snake species. Unlike other anti-venoms it also protects against venom-induced dermal necrosis🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A new study in published in Nature presents a comprehensive resource of immunological changes occurring during normal aging 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Where do invertebrates without calcium-rich bones or shells store their calcium? In the fruit-fly, at least, it’s the malpighian tubules, where calcium is mobilised by a neuropeptide hormone called Capability. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- An article in Nature reports that ecosystem energy flow, through food consumption by wild birds and mammals, has decreased by over one third in sub-Saharan Africa since around 1700 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A short-necked sauropodomorph from a new Triassic locality in Argentina shows sign of the neck extension that characterised its larger, later cousins.🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A vaccine central in A(H5) influenza virus antigenic space confers subtype-wide immunity 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A paper in Nature presents MetaGraph, which indexes petabase-scale biological sequences for accurate and efficient searches across vast sequence space 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- 🧪 Women are represented as younger than men across occupations/social roles in data from Google,Wikipedia,IMDB, Flickr,YouTube and LLMs.The bias is strongest for occupations with high status/earnings.ChatGPT perpetuates this bias when generating and evaluating resumes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- An article in Nature tracks trends in freshwater fish biodiversity in streams and rivers across the US over the last three decades and finds that fish biodiversity diverged across cold and warm streams, with a disproportionately large impact on cold streams.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A study in Nature uncovers the mechanism behind a new metabolic class of drug for treatment of neuroblastoma 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- In a Perspective article in Nature the Biodiversity Cell Atlas describes its plans and goals for mapping the tree of life with single-cell genomics technologies🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A new study projects global burned areas and wildfire emissions using a machine learning–based approach, and estimates their impact on related mortality 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Repeated head trauma causes neuron loss and inflammation in young athletes 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/d41... and the paper 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A study in Nature presents Delphi-2M, a medical AI tool for predicting future health-related events using data from medical records. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Do people cheat more when they delegate tasks to AI? A Nature paper shows that they do, and that LLMs are far more likely than humans to carry out unethical instructions (though it was possible to minimize this by including task-specific prohibitive guardrails).🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A new study in Nature reports the development of programmable antisense oligomers (ASOs) to silence genes of both DNA and RNA phages, and is applied to understand the functions and phenotypes associated with key genes in jumbo phage ΦKZ 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A study in Nature presents a new classification of human skeletal muscle subtypes in cancer cachexia, based on transcriptomics, including a comparison between human and rodent datasets. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- The ant Messor ibericus lays eggs that develop into males of two different species. Females of one of the species clone males of the other. This may be the first known case of a male-only clonal lineage that reproduces solely through other species’ ova.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Using epidemiological methods, a new study finds that the spread of the Great Fear during the French Revolution was not a result of emotional distress but rather the apparition of multiple independent locations. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A study in Nature provides new global maps of land surface phenology that document the diversity, convergence and asynchrony of ecosystem function 👇🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A paper published in Nature presents genomic datasets for chaetognaths that illuminate the evolutionary history of these animals and their body plan. They also allow for their phylogenetic placement 👇🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A new chemical signalling system in species belonging to the Bacteroidota phylum regulates a range of distinct biosynthetic gene clusters and operates in an analogous manner to the quorum sensing systems of the well-studied Proteobacteria. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- The >1000 lipid species found in eukaryotic cells have vital functions. Using a combination of microscopy, spectroscopy and modelling, scientists report the first quantitative map of retrograde flux of individual lipids in cells. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- New discoveries of an Australopithecus and Homo from Ethiopia dated to around 2.5 million years ago showed that the two genera were more or less contemporaneous.🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- An unusual metabolite-based mechanism serves as protective layer against dysfunction of essential enzymes. A metabolite produced by the enzyme TGDS is crucial for rescuing the activity of UXS1 in low-NAD⁺ environments - its deficiency leads to Catel-Manzke syndrome.🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- We are hiring! Please spread the word! 2 September application deadline
- A new study sheds light on the microbiome in the wood of living trees. A single tree can host ~1 trillion microbes in its wood with heartwood and sapwood maintaining distinct profiles and with minimal similarity to other plant tissues or nearby ecosystem components. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- An article in Nature reports long-term declines in tropical forest arthropod diversity and function that may be linked to El Niño occurrence 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- The Virtual Lab - an AI-human collaboration for sophisticated, interdisciplinary scientific research. Using a team of LLM scientist agents guided by an LLM principal investigator and human feedback, it designed new promising nanobody binders for SARS-CoV-2 v🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A new FREP1 variant blocks malaria in mosquitoes without harming them. Linked to a gene drive, it could spread resistance and aid eradication—no drugs or insecticides needed. 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- A paper in Nature presents CRAFT-seq, a plate-based assay for testing the functional effects of genetic variants on cell state and function by combining CRISPR editing, flow cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- An AI tool called Aeneas can predictively complete Latin inscriptions and relate them to others. In a way, it's like an algorithm that says that if you liked this inscription, you might want to look at these other ones. So interesting! 🧪👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
