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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 6h

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...

Efficient and accurate search in petabase-scale sequence repositories - Nature

MetaGraph enables scalable indexing of large sets of DNA, RNA or protein sequences using annotated de Bruijn graphs.

www.nature.com

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 6h

🧪 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...

Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models - Nature

Stereotypes of age-related gender bias are socially distorted, as evidenced by the age gap in the representations of women and men across various media and algorithms, despite no systematic age differences in the workforce.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 13d

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...

Diverging fish biodiversity trends in cold and warm rivers and streams - Nature

In the past three decades, fish abundance, richness and uniqueness have diverged across cold and warm streams, and the effects on native fish communities of stream warming and increases in introduced fishes have magnified each other.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 13d

A study in Nature uncovers the mechanism behind a new metabolic class of drug for treatment of neuroblastoma 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reprogramming neuroblastoma by diet-enhanced polyamine depletion - Nature

Enhanced polyamine depletion in neuroblastoma models decreases translation of mRNA codons with adenosine in the third position, reprogramming the tumour proteome away from cell cycle progression and towards differentiation.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 13d

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...

The Biodiversity Cell Atlas: mapping the tree of life at cellular resolution - Nature

The Biodiversity Cell Atlas aims to create comprehensive single-cell molecular atlases across the eukaryotic tree of life, which will be phylogenetically informed, rely on high-quality genomes and use shared standards to facilitate comparisons across species.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 19d

Another study projects future mortality in the U.S. from wildfire-related PM2.5 using an ensemble of statistical and machine learning models and smoke-specific exposure-response functions.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wildfire smoke exposure and mortality burden in the US under climate change - Nature

Nature - Wildfire smoke exposure and mortality burden in the US under climate change

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 19d

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...

Global warming amplifies wildfire health burden and reshapes inequality - Nature

Nature - Global warming amplifies wildfire health burden and reshapes inequality

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 19d

Repeated head trauma causes neuron loss and inflammation in young athletes 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
and the paper 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Years of hits to the head prime the brain for decline

Repetitive head impacts trigger neuronal loss and disrupt blood vessels and immune cells long before the accumulation of neurotoxic tau protein.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 19d

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...

Learning the natural history of human disease with generative transformers - Nature

Delphi-2M forecasts a person’s future health, covering more than 1,000 diseases, provides insights into co-morbidity dynamics and generates synthetic data for the training of AI models that have never...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 19d

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...

Delegation to artificial intelligence can increase dishonest behaviour - Nature

People cheat more when they delegate tasks to artificial intelligence, and large language models are more likely than humans to comply with unethical instructions—a risk that can be minimized by ...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 27d

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...

Programmable antisense oligomers for phage functional genomics - Nature

Establishing antisense oligomers as versatile, non-genetic tools to silence phage mRNAs opens applications in basic research and biotechnology, as shown by identifying essential factors for propagatio...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · 27d

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...

Molecular subtypes of human skeletal muscle in cancer cachexia - Nature

Unbiased clustering analysis of the skeletal muscle RNAome in patients with cancer identifies two molecular subtypes, one of which distinguishes individuals with cachexia and indicates ...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Sep 3

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...

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Sep 3

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...

Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789 - Nature

Epidemiological methods are used to show that the Great Fear of 1789, a series of peasant insurrections in rural revolutionary France, was driven by deliberate political action rather than spontaneous...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Sep 3

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...

Global phenology maps reveal the drivers and effects of seasonal asynchrony - Nature

A global land surface phenology map predicts complex geographical discontinuities in flowering phenology, genetic divergence and harvest seasonality across a range of taxa.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 27

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...

The genomic origin of the unique chaetognath body plan - Nature

Genomic, single-cell transcriptomic and epigenetic analyses show that chaetognaths, following extensive gene loss in the gnathiferan lineage, relied on newly evolved genes and lineage-specific tandem ...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 27

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...

Discovery of a widespread chemical signalling pathway in the Bacteroidota - Nature

The N-acyl-cyclolysine system regulates the expression of co-localized operons encoding diverse secreted molecules in Bacteroidota.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 22

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...

Quantitative imaging of lipid transport in mammalian cells - Nature

Directional, non-vesicular lipid transport is responsible for fast, species-selective lipid sorting into organelle membranes.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 20

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...

New discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia - Nature

Hominin fossils from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area, Ethiopia, suggest that early Homo and Australopithecus species co-existed in the region more than 2.5 million years ago.

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 20

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...

A missing enzyme-rescue metabolite as cause of a rare skeletal dysplasia - Nature

In mammals, the enzyme TGDS produces UDP-4-keto-6-deoxyglucose, which binds to the catalytic pocket of UDP-xylose synthase, thereby regenerating the essential NAD+ cofactor of UDP-xylose synthase...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 19

We are hiring! Please spread the word!
2 September application deadline

Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Jul 23

Great opportunity to join the Nature team!

We are recruiting an Associate or Senior Editor who will be spearheading growth in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Biology content at Nature. Closing date 2 September 2025! 👇🧪

springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/SpringerNatu...

Associate or Senior Editor, Nature (biological, clinical, and social science)

Title: Associate or Senior Editor, Nature (biological, clinical, and social science) Organization: Nature Portfolio Locations: New York or Jersey City – Hybrid Working Model Closing Date: September 2n...

springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com

Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 18

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...

A diverse and distinct microbiome inside living trees - Nature

Microbiome analyses of living trees show that a single tree can host approximately one trillion bacteria, with microbial communities distinctly partitioned between heartwood and sapwood and with minim...

www.nature.com

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 18

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...

Stronger El Niños reduce tropical forest arthropod diversity and function - Nature

Time-series data from tropical forests tracking weather and declines in arthropod diversity and function show that fluctuations in species were largely dependent on their El Niño sensitivity and ecolo...

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Aug 5

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...

The Virtual Lab of AI agents designs new SARS-CoV-2 nanobodies - Nature

Nature - The Virtual Lab of AI agents designs new SARS-CoV-2 nanobodies

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Francesca Cesari @francesari.bsky.social · Jul 25

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...

Driving a protective allele of the mosquito FREP1 gene to combat malaria - Nature

Coupling of a FREP1 variant to a gene-drive system allows the spread of a host malaria resistance allele through the mosquito population.

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