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NASA’s headquarters are located in Washington DC; the building itself ias named after Mary Jackson, the agency’s first African American female engineer.Credit: John M. Chase/Getty
NASA has become the first US agency to pre-emptively fire career employees as part of a radical downsizing of the federal government led by US President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk in the name of improving efficiency. NASA had been spared, for unknown reasons, from the extensive lay-offs of probationary employees — those with little job protection because they have been in their positions for less than two years — seen at other agencies. NASA fired 23 people, closed two offices associated with feeding independent science advice to its topmost leadership, and ended work on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
Labradors’ ravenous appetites — and resulting tendency to gain weight — are driven by the activity of a certain gene variant. Researchers examined the genomes of 241 Labrador retrievers and found that for each copy of a particular variant of a gene, called DENND1B, the dogs had around 7% more body fat. The team found that the same gene variant was also associated with a higher body mass in people, which could partly explain why some people are predisposed to weight gain.
A cargo ship and oil tanker continue to burn after they collided in the North Sea yesterday morning, putting marine life at risk. The tanker, Stena Immaculate, was stationary and carrying jet fuel for the US military when it was struck by the cargo ship, Solong. Jet fuel has a “much higher toxicity” than oil and “the impact of that on life in the oceans would be devastating”, oceanographer Simon Boxall told The Guardian.
BBC | 5 min read & The Guardian | 6 min read
A new chapter has begun for two of the world’s most popular preprint platforms, bioRxiv and medRxiv, with the launch of a non-profit organization that will manage them. openRxiv, which will have a board of directors and a scientific and medical advisory board, takes over from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. It has “become so important that they should have their own organization running them, which is focused on the long-term sustainability of the servers, as opposed to being a side project within a big research institution,” says Richard Sever, the co-founder of both servers.
Submissions now open
Last year’s winning photo, taken on top of the icebreaker research vessel Polarstern, shows the delicate process of retrieving an instrument called a CTD (short for conductivity, temperature, depth) that had become trapped under sea ice off the coast of northeastern Greenland. (Richard Jones)
Nature’s annual #ScientistAtWork photo competition has begun! You could see your photo published in Nature, plus win a cash prize and a year’s subscription. Pics should show scientists taking part in their craft — in or out of the lab. Find out more information or check out previous years’ stunners.
Features & opinion
The evidence is pretty clear that drinking alcohol raises your risk of getting many cancers — a fact that prompted a call by the US surgeon general for booze to carry tobacco-style warning labels. It’s less clear how the risks change for patterns such as binge drinking, or for different age groups. There’s also the fiercely debated claim that a little tipple now and then improves heart health for some people. Most researchers now say that any possible health benefits are outweighed by the risks above low levels of drinking. “The bottom line is that alcohol is a generally unhealthy substance,” says alcohol epidemiologist Tim Naimi.
During a period when creative physicists were throwing wild guesses at quantum theory, Wolfgang Pauli came up with an idea that explained why matter behaves the way it does. His innovation: a new quantum number, spin. (Don’t try to picture it, another of Pauli’s innovations was not caring that the idea defies our classical intuition.) Pauli’s exclusion principle suggested, correctly it turns out, that some fundamental particles — such as electrons — can’t be in exactly the same state; if all their other quantum numbers are the same, they must have different spins. The exclusion principle won Pauli the Nobel Prize, “has come to play a central part in our understanding of the periodic table” and “has also provided a guide to more-exotic forms of matter”, write historians Olival Freire Jr and Thiago Hartz.
Infographic of the week
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is by far the biggest health funder in the world, and funds scientists that lead the world in biomedical discoveries. For decades, the NIH has also been the world’s biggest investor in research to tackle global health priorities such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria — which together kill more than 2.5 million people a year worldwide — as well as a host of neglected diseases. (Nature | 5 min read) (Source: G-FINDER project)
Today I’m enjoying a Nature cover in a whole new way — with headphones. The research featured on the cover this week reveals how mycorrhizal fungi create complex networks in the soil to exchange nutrients with the roots of plants. The accompanying audio was recorded using hydrophones underground and captures the “wonderful, wet and complex” sounds of the fungi and other organisms in the soil, in the words of evolutionary biologist and co-author Toby Kiers. The sounds were recorded by musician Cosmo Sheldrake, who’s also mixed them into a song.
While I groove to the sounds of the Earth, why not send us your feedback on this newsletter? Your e-mails are always welcome at [email protected].
Thanks for reading,
Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing
With contributions by Jacob Smith
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