When Y chromosomes become undoing: How the mice and men can fight cancers by escaping Fukushima’s wastewater
Some cancers are more deadly for men when they are on the Y chromosomes. The Spinoff Prize will be won by the science that says releasing Fukushima’s wastewater is a good idea.
The risk of bladder cancer increases due to the Y chromosomes being lost because it helps cancer cells evade the immune system. In mice, cells lacking the Y chromosome create an environment that paralyses and exhausts T cells, which are a key part of the immune system. “But this exhausting environment made by the tumours could actually be their undoing,” physician Dan Theodorescu tells the Nature Podcast. The tumour cells become particularly vulnerable to chemotherapy treatments called immune checkpoint inhibitors.
On the safety of submersibles in the case of Titanic wreckage: Can we be careful about what’s going on in research submarines?
Rescuers are scrambling to understand what went wrong on OceanGate’s submersible vessel Titan, which went missing on 18 June while carrying five passengers to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. Some of the equipment on research subs is a safety system. He says that he is worried that they didn’t notice some of the features in research submersibles, which were costly or uninteresting. It would be a bad idea to send a crewed sub after Titan, but “remotely operated robotic submersibles that work at 6,500 metres would be an ideal asset to get on site”, Girguis suggests. How do you get out to this remote location in the Atlantic in time?
Japan will soon start to slowly release into the Pacific Ocean water contaminated by the 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. There are some unanswered questions as to the sources of hydrogen-3 and carbon 14–but treatment has removed 62 of the 64 radioactive elements. Scientists say the risks are not very high. Nuclear power plants use the normal procedure of discharging tritium-contaminated water. Others are concerned that tritium could concentrate in the food web. Can the people promoting this show us that it’s safe for ocean health and human health? asks marine biologist Robert Richmond. “The answer is ‘no’.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02086-7
What we need to do to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030: Economist Ian Bateman and conservationist Andrew Balmford
Land-sparing could lessen farming’s impact on the environment without exacerbating harm elsewhere — and it’s cheaper than other approaches, write environmental economist Ian Bateman and conservation scientist Andrew Balmford. They argue that land sharing, rewilding and organic farming are riskiest when it comes to biodiversity loss. Crop yield can be reduced, which leads to increased food imports and environmental damage overseas. Land sparing involves joining up habitat patches alongside using yield-boosting methods in farmed areas. Governments must stop ignoring system-wide impacts to make better, evidence-based policy decisions, argue the researchers.
The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are at the heart of an international project that aims to end poverty and achieve equality while protecting the environment. World leaders agreed the goals in 2015 and set a 2030 deadline to achieve them. It looks as though all of the goals and only a small amount of the targets will be met this year. In September, world leaders will gather in New York City to come up with a rescue plan — and scientists are key to its success. A Nature editorial kicks off a series of articles on what needs to be done. The editorial states that if there is a small chance that we can still achieve the goals by 2030 we should take it with both hands.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02086-7
How South America got its start: bioinspiration, innovation, and the rise of a spaceport: from Devil’s Island to SanaHeal
When Algeria won its hard-fought independence from France, it also ejected the colonizers’ rocket launch site. France wanted a new location which was close to the equator. It turned to Devil’s Island, a ruthless French penal colony in French Guiana. Today the region is home to the Guiana Space Centre, the main spaceport of France and the European Space Agency. Karlijn Korpershoek talks about how missions like the James Watts Space Telescope were launched from this South American locale.
Bioadhesive company SanaHeal has won the Spinoff Prize — an award from Nature Research and Merck for early-stage university spin-off companies. Standard bandages don’t stick to some organs. Duct tape for surgery sticks and shrinks inwards to pull cuts closed and add mechanical reinforcement to promote wound healing. “Mechanistically, it does exactly the same thing that barnacle glues do,” says mechanical-engineer-turned-entrepreneur Hyunwoo Yuk. This is true bioinspiration. The book is 7 min read.
The officer of health equity says that there is more to it than simply measuring disease outcomes. Understanding people’s experiences is important. Nature takes 8 minutes to read.
Science, Politics, and Public Policy in the Ukraine: a Primer for Scientists and the Future of the Science (Science | 3 min read)
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a profound, sparkling global ocean voyage to understand the planet’s ‘blue machine’ and an intriguing analysis of the science of reading.
The scientific community desperately needs skilled pundits to defend science from conspiracy theorists, argues Science editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp — who has fallen into the trap of trying to debate absurd statements with detailed evidence. (Science | 3 min read)
The government of Ukraine is considering how to rebuild sciences and use the opportunity to move on from a soviet system that gives little power to working scientists. Protection of the existing researchers and temptation to return were among the challenges. Oleskiy Kolezhuk is a theoretical physicist and one of the key advisers to the government on reshaping the country. “How on earth are we going to support ourselves and prosper, if we continue to neglect science?”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02127-1
Elemental analysis in a Western lifestyle hobbles the biodiversity of the Hadza and Nepalese: Evidence from microbiome sequencing
The accuracy standard for elemental analysis has been abandoned by Wiley after a study found it wasn’t scientific. Elemental analysis is a common chemistry technique to determine a material’s purity. Publishers usually require results to fall within a tight error margin of ±0.4%. Many researchers find this inconvenient because they need to pay for high-accuracy results. A team of researchers found that almost 11% of identical samples they sent to 17 commercial analysis laboratories failed to meet the standard.
A huge effort to sequence the microbiomes of hunter-gatherers, farmers and city-dwellers shows that the Western lifestyle seems to hobble the diversity of gut-bacteria populations. The microbiomes of the Hadza people — a hunter-gatherer society in northern Tanzania — have more than twice as many species as those of Californians. Foragers and farmers in Nepal seemed to occupy a middle ground in terms of gut diversity. Furthermore, the California gut-microbe species often contained genes associated with responding to oxidative damage — which might be a knock-on effect of chronic inflammation.