Western scientists get rejected papers revealed quicker

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Lung cells in outdated mice behave as in the event that they have been iron poor, which limits their capacity for speedy, cancerous progress. This might clarify why lung tumours in older mice are smaller and fewer frequent than in youthful mice. The protein that impacts the iron metabolism in mice additionally exists in people, which may trace at why folks over 75 are much less more likely to get lung most cancers. Nevertheless it’s essential to notice that the mice’s most cancers was triggered all of the sudden with a genetic change: in people, cancer-causing mutations often accumulate over many years, says molecular oncologist Ana Gomes.

Nature | 5 min learn

Reference: bioRxiv preprint 1 & preprint 2 (not peer reviewed)

Authors in Western international locations are nearly 6% extra possible than these primarily based in different elements of the world to efficiently publish a paper after it has been rejected, based on an evaluation of 126,000 rejected manuscripts. These authors additionally discovered a house for his or her rejected manuscripts 23 days quicker on common. “Perhaps it’s one thing about being in the best networks and with the ability to get the proper of recommendation on the proper time,” says sociologist Misha Teplitskiy. Different components enjoying into the discrepancy could possibly be cultural. As an illustration, many journals are written in English, which places some researchers at an obstacle.

Nature | 4 min learn

Reference: SSRN preprint (not peer-reviewed)

Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) chew off injured nest mates’ limbs to save lots of them from lethal infections. It’s the primary instance of animals apart from people performing such life-saving amputations. “The ant presents its injured leg and calmly sits there whereas one other ant gnaws it off,” explains animal ecologist and examine co-author Erik Frank. “As quickly because the leg drops off, the ant presents the newly amputated wound and the opposite ant finishes the job by cleansing it.”

The New York Instances | 5 min learn

Reference: Present Biology paper

Options & opinion

Hundreds of persons are being displaced throughout the Arctic as wildfires, floods and different signs of local weather change threaten housing and infrastructure. To deal with each the housing and the local weather disaster, governments should hearken to Indigenous and native communities, argues geographer Julia Christensen. “Northern communities needs to be geared up to answer their very own wants by way of self-building, self-repair and community-led housing planning.”

Nature | 5 min learn

Tomorrow voters in the UK go to the polls. The incoming authorities should reconnect with the scientific neighborhood, argues a Nature editorial. It recommends that ministers take a world view of science, tackle a rising disaster in college funds and assure analysis autonomy.

Nature | 5 min learn

RNA-based pesticides promise to defend crops with much less injury to the surroundings and human well being than conventional poisons. By focusing on the genes in particular pests, they’ll depart pollinators and different species unscathed. The expertise first hit the market within the US final 12 months with SmartStax Professional, a corn selection that produces double-stranded RNA that disrupts a gene in corn rootworm (Diabrotica spp.). And a pesticide offered as Calantha, accepted by the US Environmental Safety Company in January, makes use of RNA interference to discombobulate a gene distinctive to the Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) and its shut family. Critics say extra work must be finished to make sure that RNA-pesticides don’t hurt non-target species.

Science | 12 min learn

The place I work

Area botanist N. M. Ganesh Babu conducts botanical surveys in forests throughout India with the assistance of native communities. His workforce consists of medical doctors in conventional drugs who know the cultural significance of the crops that they work with. “My grandparents and my mom had an amazing information of crops,” he says. “A lot inherited knowledge of this type has already vanished.” Babu and his colleagues have developed strategies to propagate nearly 800 wild species from seed, and have created an ethnomedicinal backyard spanning 20 acres that showcases the huge array of plant species utilized in numerous conventional well being practices — in addition to a native-plant landscaping enterprise on the college.

(Nature | 3 min learn) (Sayan Hazra for Nature)

Right this moment I’m leaping for pleasure on the information that hippos can fly — type of. When operating full-tilt, Hippopotamus amphibius have 4 toes off the bottom about 15% of the time. Hats off to evolutionary biologist John Hutchinson and his colleagues, who took on the “mind-numbing”, “boring” and “agonizing” work of analysing video footage of operating hippos body by body.

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Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Gemma Conroy and Katrina Krämer

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