Researchers have shown that machine learning can quickly design antivenoms that are effective against lethal snake-toxins, which they hope will help tackle a serious public health issue. Thousands of people die as a result of snakebites each year, but treatment options are limited, expensive and often difficult to access in the resource-poor settings where most bites occur. The computer-aided approach allowed researchers to design two proteins that provided near total protection against individual snake toxins in mouse experiments. While limited in scope, the team behind the work believe these results demonstrate the promise of the approach in designing effective and cheaper treatments for use in humans.

Research Article: Vázquez Torres et al.

How male wasp spiders use hairs on their legs to sniff out mates, and how noradrenaline drives waves of cleansing fluid through the brain.

Research Highlight: ​​​​​​​Male spiders smell with their legs

Research Highlight: ​​​​​​​How the brain cleans itself during deep sleep

News broke last week that in 2024, Earth’s average temperature climbed to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Although this is only a single year so far, we discuss what breaking this significant threshold means for the 2015 Paris climate agreement and what climate scientists understand about the speed that Earth is heating up.

Nature: ​​​​​​​Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?

NASA delays deciding its strategy for collecting and returning Mars rocks to Earth, and why papers on a handful of bacterial species dominate the scientific literature.

Nature: ​​​​​​​NASA still has no plan for how to bring precious Mars rocks to Earth

Nature: ​​​​​​​These are the 20 most-studied bacteria — the majority have been ignored

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

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In this episode of the Nature Podcast, we catch up on some science stories from the holiday period by diving into the Nature Briefing.

A much-critiqued study demonstrating the now-disproven idea that hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published.

Nature: Controversial COVID study that promoted unproven treatment retracted after four-year saga

Researchers have discovered that healthy skin — once thought to be a passive barrier — can actually produce antibodies that fight off infections. It’s hoped that the finding could one day lead to the development of needle-free vaccines that can be applied to the skin.

Nature: The skin’s ‘surprise’ power: it has its very own immune system

New estimates, based on data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, suggest that the ice on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa may be significantly thicker than previously thought. If these estimates prove accurate it could reduce the chances of Europa being habitable for extraterrestrial life.

Science: Surprisingly thick ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa complicates hunt for life

3D computer simulations of Australopithecus afarensis — an ancient hominin that lived more than three million years ago — reveals that while our relatives could run on two legs, they likely did so at a far slower pace than modern humans.

Nature: Humans evolved for distance running — but ancestor ‘Lucy’ didn’t go far or fast

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In this episode, reporter Miryam Naddaf joins us to talk about the big science events to look out for in 2025. We’ll hear about: the latest Moon missions, 30 years of the United Nations' COP climate summits, the return of Donald Trump, and more.

Nature: Science in 2025: the events to watch for in the coming year

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Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel prizes in 1991, after years of collecting examples of weird research that he included in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. The aim of these satirical awards is to honour achievements that “make people laugh, then think”.

While the initial response from the scientific community was mixed, last year the prize received more than 9,000 nominations. Several researchers who have won an ‘Ig’ say that it has improved their careers by helping them to reach wider audiences, and spend more time engaging with the public about their work.

This is an audio version of our Feature: How a silly science prize changed my career

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Nature Podcast: 27 March 2024

Research article: Agnew

Podcast extra: 01 May 2024

Collection: Sex and gender in science

Research Highlight: How to train your crocodile

Research Highlight: Ancient fish dined on bats — or died trying

Podcast extra: 09 August 2024

Nature Podcast: 03 July 2024

Research Article: Waddle et al.

News and Views: Mini saunas save endangered frogs from fungal disease

Nature News: Your brain on shrooms — how psilocybin resets neural networks

Nature News: NASA cancels $450-million mission to drill for ice on the Moon — surprising researchers

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The shifting orbit of one of Saturn’s moons indicates that the satellite has a subsurface ocean, contradicting theories that its interior is entirely solid. The finding calls for a fresh take on what constitutes an ocean moon.

Nature Podcast: 14 February 2024

News and Views: Mimas’s surprise ocean prompts an update of the rule book for moons

Millions of tonnes of ‘red mud’, a hazardous waste of aluminium production, are generated annually. A potentially sustainable process for treating this mud shows that it could become a source of iron for making steel.

Nature Podcast: 24 Jan 2024

News and Views: Iron extracted from hazardous waste of aluminium production

A design principle for buildings incorporates components that can control the propagation of failure by isolating parts of the structure as they fail — offering a way to prevent a partial collapse snowballing into complete destruction.

Nature podcast: 15 May 2024

Nature video: Controlled failure: The building designed to limit catastrophe

News and Views: Strategic links save buildings from total collapse

RNA-guided recombinase enzymes have been discovered that herald a new chapter for genome editing — enabling the insertion, inversion or deletion of long DNA sequences at user-specified genome positions.

News and Views: Programmable RNA-guided enzymes for next-generation genome editing

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In the first of our annual festive songs celebrating the science of the past year, we pay homage to Ozempic, or Semaglutide, that's able to tackle obesity, diabetes and potentially a whole lot more.

We gather an all-star cast and see how well they can remember some of the big science stories from 2024 in our annual festive quiz.

In the second of our festive songs, we look at CAR-T cells. These engineered immune cells have shown great promise at tackling cancer, but these treatments are not without their drawbacks.

Every year, Nature’s 10 highlights some of the people who have helped shape science over the past 12 months. We hear about a few of the people who made the 2024 list, including an economist who now needs to run a country, a Russian science-sleuth, a researcher who’s been sounding the alarm on Mpox, and a PhD student who won a salary bump for researchers in Canada.

News Feature: Nature’s 10

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Categorizing things is central to science. And there are dozens of systems scientists have created to name everything from the trenches on the sea bed to the stars in the sky.

But names have consequences — unintended or otherwise. In our new series What’s in a name we’ll explore naming in science and how names impact the world — whether that’s how the names of storms impact public safety, how the names of diseases impact patient care, or even how the names of scientific concepts can drive the direction of research itself.

In this first episode we’re looking at species names. The modern system of species naming began in the 1700s and has played a vital role in standardizing academic communication, ensuring that scientists are on the same page when they talk about an organism. However, this system is not without its issues. For example, there has been much debate around whether species with names considered offensive — such as those named after historical racists — should be changed, and what rule changes need to be made to allow this to happen.

We speak to researchers about the history of this naming system, how it’s applied and how it might evolve in the face of growing pressures.

Sources

For a full list of sources, please visit https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04200-9

Music credits

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Alon Marcus/Pond5

Groove Committee/Pond5

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Erik Mcnerny/Pond5

Earless Pierre/Pond5

Richard Smithson/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images

​​​​​​​Douglas Romayne/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images

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