Nine metals in two dimensions

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Chemists have crammed a record nine metals into a type of 2D material called a MXene (pronounced ‘max-een’). The distant cousins of graphene have excited researchers because of their high electrical conductivity and other characteristics, which might open the door to designing a multitude of weird but useful substances.

Nature | 5 min read

US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr defiantly defended his controversial actions to upend public health at a Senate hearing yesterday that devolved at several points into a shouting match. Senators grilled Kennedy on turmoil and a leadership shakeup at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and on his efforts to scuttle research on mRNA vaccines. In response, Kennedy repeatedly alleged collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and scientists, and cited the high rates of chronic disease in the United States as justification for his agenda.

Earlier this week, nine former directors of the CDC, dating back to 1977 and serving under every Republican and Democratic president, wrote an opinion piece raising the alarm about the impact of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Nature | 5 min read & The New York Times | 5 min read

Read more: How to make America healthy: the real problems — and best fixes (Nature | 10 min read, from June)

Features & opinion

From the ochre that the earliest humans used to create cave paintings, to the ‘bone black’ made from the remains of North America’s once-mighty bison herds, environmental writer Stephanie Krzywonos delves into the tangled histories of iconic pigments.

Emergence | 23 min read

Futures: science fiction from Nature

In this week’s stories, a schoolchild in an orbiting habitat gets inspired by the tragic history of Earth in Different flames, and a young human learns to love her adopted alien children in Heart’s desire.

Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes an investigation of the solitary teenage boys hijacking the Internet, a history of the concept of natural extinction and an examination of the creativity that underlies mathematics.

Nature | 3 min read

Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) have developed the ability to create eggs of another species, Messor structor, to breed the hardy hybrid workers their colony relies on. It’s a surprising finding, even for an insect known for its often strange and unconventional reproductive strategies. “This is the first time, I think… we’ve found a species where a mother can produce offspring of two different species,” says entomologist Jessica Purcell, who has written an expert analysis of the new research. “But if it was going to happen in any system, it doesn’t surprise me that it happened in ants.”

Nature Podcast | 27 min listen

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Today Leif Penguinson is hiding among the spectacular hexagonal basalt columns and black sand of Reynisfjara Beach, Iceland. Can you find the penguin?

The answer will be in Monday’s e-mail, all thanks to Briefing photo editor and penguin wrangler Tom Houghton.

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Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

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