Behind the scenes of Nature News and Views in 2024
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Hello, Noah Baker here, and welcome to The Nature Podcast. 2024 is drawing to a close, and in this special episode, we're going to take a look back at a couple of the papers which have made waves this year. And to do so, we are joined by some editors that you may not have heard from much in the past, from our News and Views team. We have Andy Mitchinson...

Hello. And Abby Klopper. Hi. To start with, of course, everybody knows what a news and views is and they read them on a daily basis. But just in case the listener doesn't, I would wonder if you could just fill us in quickly by what we mean when we say news and views. And then maybe after that, each of you could introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your focus here at Nature.

Okay, so News and Views is a section of Nature where we commission scientists to describe some of the best papers that have just been published in the scientific literature. You give people the news and you give people some views. That's absolutely right. And the views are really important here. The key thing we're trying to do is get experts to say why these papers are of interest to them. What's the real reason why these papers matter in the world of science? Yeah, that context, I think, is really...

really the addition that I get from News and Views. And actually, listeners to the Nature podcast may well have heard from these authors in the past, because quite often we'll feature their voices. Andy, before we go over to Abby, tell me what is your specialism within the News and Views team? Well, I'm a chemist by training. So I handle anything to do with molecules, very broadly speaking. So definitely any chemistry. I'll also handle molecular biology. And I

any aspects of, say, atmospheric chemistry or earth sciences that are related to chemistry or molecules. Cool. And Abby, what is your focus within the team? I am a physicist by training, so I take care of all the physics, the whole spectrum of physics, which is broad and lots of fun. I also do all the earth sciences stuff that doesn't fall in the chemistry bucket. Okay.

And I take care of lots of our climate science, climate change content, which is also sometimes a little overwhelming and mostly really fun. Okay, so the two of you, as well as the rest of your team, have pulled together an article, which people can read at nature.com forward slash news, in which you featured various news and views articles through the year that stuck in your minds for one reason or another. And we're going to discuss a couple of them here.

So many of these stories will possibly ring bells with people at home because we have covered them on the podcast. And as I say, you may have heard from some of these authors in the past because often they also make appearances on the show. But it's not often that you get the inside track from the editors.

what's going on behind the scenes, why do these stories stick in your memories, what about them made you excited or engaged or interested in the beginning, what did the authors say that you had to cut out. We're here to hear all of the salacious details and this is your chance to find out what nature editors think about the work that they commission and why they publish these articles. Maybe we'll go to Abby first because Andy did a brilliant introduction. What's the first article you've chosen to discuss on this show? I think this was

I could be wrong about that, sorry. But it's a story about a little moon that's spinning around Saturn. It's called Mimas. It's kind of a... This is sort of a story about the little guys for me. Little guys winning.

The biggest headline for this moon was that it kind of looks like the Death Star. It's got this big crater called Herschel. And everyone's like, yes, the Death Star moon. And then about a decade ago, some research came out that said there's this little shimmy that Mimas does as it goes around Saturn, a little wobble.

And that wobble could be due to a couple of different things. One, it could have an elongated rocky core in its centre, or it could have an ocean. That ocean's kind of more exciting. Yeah, so this was the bit that really grabs me, right? It's like there's an ocean on this moon, but it's an icy moon, so where does the ocean live? And that's very much what this paper has been delving into and then what your subsequent News & Views article delved into as well. So that was a decade ago. Everyone basically said, no.

That's madness. Like, that can't happen. And the reason that this is the little guy, as plural, is that the guy who put forward the proposal that it could be an ocean kind of didn't really get much support for the idea. And yet, this very year, in February, there's new evidence to suggest that he was exactly right. And he's no longer in research, which is a bit sad, but it's nice that he was right. Right.

I remember this story from the podcast, this kind of decade long vindication of an idea that was poo-pooed. And then in fact, hey, maybe it's real. And what did this new research do to find out that actually, you know what, this guy was right in the first place? They basically looked at the Cassini data again, which was the data that showed the initial wobble.

And they, instead of looking at the wobble, which had already been done, they looked at the way that the orbit changed over time. So the ellipse rotates very slowly, much more slowly than the orbit. And the way that that was processing, which was backwards instead of forwards...

wasn't consistent with the idea of a rocky core, basically. But it sort of proceeded the year before last year, one of our News and Views authors had put forward a hypothesis that the ocean theory could be right if the ocean were really young. And so that kind of prompted, I think, in a lot of ways, renewed interest in this idea. And then the

weird procession ruled out the idea of the rocky core. Yeah, because that's one of the outcomes of this paper more broadly is that maybe astronomers need to rethink what they're looking for when they make a decision about whether or not something may or may not have an ocean on a moon in the first place, right? Sure. And I think that both Mattia and Alyssa make that point in the news interviews quite nicely that it's great to look to your intuition as a scientist but don't rely on it because...

things are different. Do you remember when you first saw this paper coming through and thought, you know what, I'm going to commission news and views on this? Like, why did you go to the authors you went to? Do you remember your reaction? I mean, the funny thing is that I didn't ask Alyssa, I asked Mathieu. And I was delighted by the fact that he asked Alyssa to pen the thing with him because she had this such a close tie to the

to the story. I mean, I can't remember exactly why, except for the fact that a sneaky ocean seems like a no-brainer for me in terms of, I mean, I'm not an astronomer, so much of what I read in the astronomy literature is pretty out there for me, like it's exciting, but then this just

is somehow so tangible, even though it's all the way over there. Absolutely. There's something about thinking about what a moon means. I think so many people will just think of our moon. Moons are quite diverse beings around the world and around the universe. And so we have another example of a moon that we did not expect. Maybe I'll move over now. Andy, you've got some papers as well. What's the first news and views you wanted to talk about? So the first paper I flagged up was published in Nature way back in January this year.

and it's about red mud.

So what is red mud? This is the hazardous waste that you get produced from processing the bauxite ore that you get aluminium from. And there are millions of tonnes of this red mud produced, you know, literally every year. And they just have to be stored in massive reservoirs. There are photos of this stuff. It just looks absolutely incredible. And there have been terrible circumstances where the reservoirs have been breached and this red mud has just contaminated the environment. It's really nasty stuff.

the world needs aluminium, so we just keep producing more and more of this red mud. Okay, so why do I like this paper? It's because it shows us that actually this red mud could be useful. So one of the reasons the red mud is red is because it's got iron oxide in it, iron oxide being the main component of rust. And if you've got iron oxide in there, then maybe you can actually extract iron from this red mud. And that's exactly what they do in this paper.

What they show is that you can just take red mud directly without processing it and you just blast it with an electric arc. So it's quite an impressive thing to see. The electric arc generates a plasma of hydrogen gas and it's the components of the hydrogen gas that react with the red mud and generate iron.

And it's quite neat because the iron just forms as a liquid under the conditions that the reaction occurs at. It separates out from the other components of the red mud. And so you can just kind of pour it off.

And the brilliant thing about this is that the iron is actually pure enough that you could use it to make steel. And so I think this is a great example of how you can take a really nasty waste product and actually show that you can do something useful with it. And incidentally, the other thing that you get out of this is a material that they call slag.

And that slag could also be used to make building materials. I personally like this because as a chemist, chemists get a bad press. You know, chemistry is blamed for a lot of the bad things in this world. But chemists are also the ones that can solve these problems. And so what I really liked about this is that it shows you that chemists are doing good in the world. You know, we're solving environmental problems and also...

If you make iron in this way, that potentially allows you to make steel by emitting fewer carbon emissions. So potentially it's good for the planet in that respect as well.

So it just seemed to me there was an awful lot to like about this paper. I remember we covered this on the podcast and I remember thinking, God, it just feels like every time you look at the story, there's another reason that it's useful in a different way. You know, you use this waste product, which is toxic. You get to have a lower carbon way of making steel and so on and so on and so on. I do really love these kinds of big industrial chemistry stories when they come up because often, as you say, they maybe get overlooked because it might be that there is a catalyst that is 0.2% more efficient

And sure, OK, that doesn't sound very sexy as someone reading the news, but that's a really big deal when you think about the scale of these productions. And here, this was a really tangible, a little bit like you were saying earlier on, Avi, it seems to be a really tangible way to understand how chemistry can make a significant difference here.

Now, there are caveats to this story as well. You know, the big electric arcs that you suggest are very impressive to look at, but they obviously use quite a lot of energy. What were the News & Views authors suggesting when it comes to giving context to this study? You know, energy needs to be used to create it. How scalable is it? These are all the questions we usually ask when it comes to big industrial processes. So I think one of the key things is that the experiments were done on a fairly small scale. I think it was just a few grams of material.

And obviously, you need to be able to scale this up to the ton scale or more than that in order for it to be useful. So there's an awful lot of work is going to have to be done to scale it up and turn it into an industrial process. And the other big question about this is, is it actually going to be economically feasible? One issue you get with a lot of fundamental research is that people show that something is possible in principle, but that doesn't necessarily mean to say that it's actually practical in the real world.

But one of the nice things about this paper is they actually did an economic analysis, like a cost analysis. And that demonstrated the process should be economically viable at an industrial scale. But even so, you know, you're going to have to do things on the pilot scale and bigger before you can actually show that that's the case for sure. Do you think that in...

Three years' time, five years' time, ten years' time, you're going to be publishing a News & Views article saying, hey, look at this common practice of extracting steel from red mud that we now use all over the world? It would be really nice to think so, but I mean, I'm not sure that I could really predict...

You're a true scientist. You don't make predictions based on nature. Sorry to be disappointing. That's absolutely fine. It's the chemist in you being very appropriately evidence-driven. I appreciate that. Okay, Abby, maybe I'll come back to you again. There's a whole ton of stories that you've highlighted in your article at the end of the year. Give us another one. What's next? How to build buildings that don't fail, which is really quite a departure for nature. We've been trying to strengthen our engineering offering for quite a while now.

but this is civil engineering, man. It'll leap even for us. So, you know, robotics and electronics, yes, but civil engineering is something different. So this was a very cool paper that immediately jumped out at me. It's essentially a design principle for how do you build a building so that if one part of it fails, the whole thing doesn't come crashing down. And of course, there are, you know, a bunch of examples of that.

not happening or rather of the whole thing collapsing that we can think of in recent times. And these guys basically came with this idea of a structural fuse, which is sort of an analogy to an electrical fuse that just cuts the system into sort of modular pieces so that when one part fails, it doesn't propagate the failure. I remember this story because...

as much as it grabbed you it also grabbed us we had a video on this and there was a podcast on this there were some amazing videos and this idea of controlled failure I think where you control one particular part of the failure maybe you let that break like a fuse rather than trying to protect the entire thing to protect the broader structure it seems in so many ways counterintuitive to have a building that's designed to break in a particular way but actually if you think about

it in the same way that a fuse makes sense. This makes an awful lot of sense. How do they go about doing this? Yeah, I mean, the other analogy that the authors use, which didn't resonate with the News & Views author evidently, was the idea of a lizard shedding its tail to

to sort of deter predators, which is a bit more of a stretch, but kind of evocative. Yeah, I remember this. So whereas historically, maybe you want lots of interconnection between loads and loads of parts of your building so that force and damage can be...

spread across the whole building. Here, these joists were designed to break under a particular amount of pressure. So rather than pulling the entire building down because everything was interconnected, you could both share the load most of the time. But if the pressure was too extreme, it would break just in that one place and it wouldn't spread that force across the rest of the building. Yeah. You mentioned that this is an unusual publication for Nature.

Why is it that nature doesn't publish these kinds of big experiments? I mean, we'd like to think that we try to publish the most important work in science and big buildings are pretty important in research. So why is it that this is new for nature, do you think? Absolutely. I mean, I think that's probably a question for the editors handling the manuscripts. But my impression is that...

Nature has for such a long time been embedded in sort of fundamental science and engineering hasn't really been something that we've tapped as much. It also is a question of how different researchers publish their work. So engineers and computer scientists, I think, rely on conferences to disseminate their research. So it's about, you know, changing those ways as well. But yeah, I mean, the idea that they had...

built a prefab concrete building to test this. It was something that was quite unusual for nature. So that was another thing that really stood out to us, whereas we're used to seeing, kind of as Andy was just saying, these small-scale proof-of-principle experiments. In this case, they've made a full-size building, like a kind of a full-size...

of it looked a little bit like a multi-storey car park. And then they broke it to show that it worked. They modelled it and they broke it. And it was really shockingly accurate how close their model was to what actually happened in real life. I mean, the thing that I really liked about this, particularly in working with Sarah Orton on this piece, is that

is sort of getting a sense of what civil engineers are up against in terms of the responsibility they have, you know, to get things right. And one thing that really struck me about her approach to this piece was that she was really concerned about propagating the myth or giving the impression that this...

this was some kind of design to fail principle. And that was interesting to me. And we sort of went back and forth on a bit and I went, well, you know, that's kind of what it is. And she was like, no, it's like we're not designing to fail. We are designing to sort of decouple bits of the building. And the reason that she was okay to about this is because I think engineers in general have a huge backlash from certain people

pockets of society who seem to think that some buildings are designed to fail in their theoretical view of the world. So that was interesting to me because I didn't really understand that pressure on engineers. Absolutely. That's something that we discussed a lot when we were making the video as well is I think the phrase we used was hierarchy of failure rather than designed to fail. So it was sometimes disasters happen that are

so huge that there are very few buildings that would be able to stand up to them. So let's think about how the building might fail in terms of a hierarchy of damage. So which is better, build a building that's incredibly strong, but if it's a big enough impact, then the whole thing will still go down?

And then in that scenario, there's no escape routes for anyone inside. There's no ways to evacuate and so on. Or you say, hey, look, if something that big comes, then it's going to damage the building anyway. So at least we could only let it damage this part of the building and still allow people to get out safely, reduce the amount of cost, reduce the amount of damage, maybe even be able to rebuild this afterwards without it being so expensive.

So I think hierarchy of failure that is outside of the controls of engineers is different from designing the building to fail in the first place. Because, of course, nobody wants a building to fail. That's just a very bad business practice. So I'm going to take another switch back over here. Back to Andy again. You have another story for us. So I'm going to talk about genome editing. Of course. Brilliant. We love talking about genome editing here at The Nature Podcast. We have to talk about genome editing. It's been so successful over the past, what, 10 years or so? Yeah.

but there's still more to do. So one of the longstanding aspirations of biologists has been that they want to be able to take big chunks of DNA sequences and edit them in one go. So in other words, you might want to take a long sequence and insert it into a particular region of DNA, or you might want to take that section and invert it, you know, turn it around. You might just want to take it out and delete it completely.

But at the moment, it's not so easy to do that. You know, the existing methods only allow you to make relatively small edits involving small chunks of DNA. And so by analogy with, say, a word processor, you can imagine how annoying it would be if you wanted to take like a whole paragraph and cut and paste it. And all you could do is actually just take out one word at a time. So that's the kind of problem they were trying to solve. But in genetics, there's

There's been a lot of research from people trying to find a way of actually being able to make these large-scale edits. And one of the things that people have been looking at is recombinase enzymes. So these recombinase enzymes...

They exist in nature. They already do these large-scale edits. But the question is, how can you actually work with these things to create a system that allows you to edit something at will? In other words, can you program these enzymes to do exactly what you want to target, specifically the sequences that you want?

And what this work reports, actually, there are two papers that are reported in this News and Views. And the first of these two papers reports the discovery of erythromycin enzyme that is controlled by an RNA molecule, which they call a bridge RNA molecule. And the good thing about this is that you can program the RNA molecule really, really easily. You know, scientists are fantastically good nowadays at programming

constructing RNA molecules and DNA molecules to any sequence that they want. And so you can do that with this bridge RNA molecule. You can basically just engineer it to target specific sequences and that controls your recombinase enzyme and it just targets it like a homing missile to the particular region of the genome that you want. The second paper provides you with structures of the particular biological complex that's responsible for all of this editing.

And the good thing about that is that you get lots of mechanistic information about what's going on that basically should allow you to be able to make this an even better editing system in the future. So two really important papers and...

two papers that I know attracted a huge amount of interest when they were published, as indeed did the News and Views. This is one of the most popular News and Views from this year. Yeah, and it has an amazing headline, I have to say, Programmable RNA-Guided Enzymes for Next Generation Genome Editing. I mean, it's super sci-fi. I actually have a rule against comparing things to sci-fi, and I shouldn't have done that, but I did.

These are big claims that are made here. Herald, a new chapter for genome editing. And in something that is as impactful, as you mentioned, as genome editing is, it's really important for us to capture these stories and try to give that context when they're published as papers. Can you remember when this first came across your desk? What your reaction was? Well, actually, to give you a bit of an insight into how we do News and Views, we often don't get these things across our desk. We have a meeting once a week.

where the editors that handle the manuscripts come and they talk to us and they pitch to us what they think are some of the most exciting things that they've recently accepted. And I can't tell you how much fun these meetings are. You know, as an editor to sit there,

while these editors are telling you about some of the best research from every area of science, and they're just throwing these stories at you. Oh, it's just amazing. I can't tell you how good a feeling it is to come away from a meeting and just think, oh, wow, there's all these exciting things that are going to be published, and they're all going to make the news, and we can talk about them. We get to hear about them first. So...

That was the first time that I heard about these papers when the manuscript editor that had handled the papers was presenting them to us. And she was really excited, you know. She knew that the referees who'd looked at the paper were also incredibly excited by this. As I say, it's...

it's one of those things that biologists have wanted to do for a long time and this provides a way of potentially doing that. Yeah, I think this is something that I assume that people at home listening to this and people reading Nature are aware of but the number of expert eyes these pieces of content go through before they get to your eyes is mad. You know, there's the scientists that did them, there's the referees that are going through and providing insight to improve them, there's the manuscript editors who have this

brilliant overview that then pitch it to the News & Views editors, and you have this overview of your community. And then you get in touch with your News & Views authors who also have this depth of experience, and that comes back and we hone it into something that makes sense. I mean, this is why these pieces of content are so valuable, in my opinion, is that they have so many expert eyes that go on them to make sure that they are telling the story in an appropriate way. So what's next for RNA guided enzymes? I'm going to say, Andy, in five years time,

Are you going to be coming on and say, hey, this is how all genome editing is done now, using these programmable RNA guided enzymes? So I feel a bit more confident saying something about this one. I do actually think that maybe in like five, 10 years time, this could actually be, you know, really useful working system that people are using, basically, because it's already been demonstrated that you can do this, you know, so the most

arguably the most famous gene editing system at the moment is CRISPR and it took oh I'm gonna I can't remember exactly how long maybe 10 years exactly

CRISPR anniversary, 10 year anniversary was last year. Yeah, the anniversary of anyway, basically, you can go from the fundamental discovery such as this to a really useful genome editing system in a relatively small number of years. Folks, I think we could keep talking about exciting news and views for hours more, but we have a limit to how long we can speak for. So I'm going to suggest we round up there. Is there anything that you'd like our

podcast listeners to take away for 2025 what should they look forward to what's exciting are there things that you're excited to commission on in the coming months coming years yes but we can't tell you because we'd break cargo I'm very excited about lots of things I'm working on but I cannot tell you all the more reason to come back and listen to the nature podcast and go on and read nature news and views we'll put links to all these news and views in the podcast but for now thank you so much Andy it's been brilliant talking to you bye now

This has been a podcast extra, rounding up some of the highlights of the news and views section this year. If you'd like to hear more content like this, please do get in touch. You can email us at podcastatnature.com or on most of the socials. Look for Nature Podcast or Nature News and you should find us there. Happy holidays and see you in 2025.

But, Abu, when do we make my nuggets? In a minute.

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