Francesca Cesari

Lasting Lower Rhine–Meuse forager ancestry shaped Bell Beaker expansion - Nature A distinctive population with high hunter-gatherer ancestry persisted 3,000 years later than in most European regions, contributing to later Lower Rhine–Meuse Bell Beaker users.

Hunter-gather ancestry persisted widely well until after the arrival of farming in the Rhine-Meuse region and may have contributed to the Bell Beaker expansion in the area, a Nature paper reports 👇🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reduced cyclin D3 expression in erythroid cells protects against malaria - Nature Population-level analyses and in vitro experiments show that a specific genetic variant of cyclin D3 inhibits the growth of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum in erythrocytes, and sugg...

A genetic variant in Cyclin D3 that was historically under positive selection in Sardinians impairs parasite growth in erythroblasts, suggesting that malaria – now eradicated in Sardinia – was the selective pressure. See paper published in Nature 👇🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? People with aphantasia are offering a window into consciousness.

A feature in Nature examines the research about aphantasia, which is the experience of people with no mental imagery, and how it could offer a window into consciousness. #Neuroskyence 🧪

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

Targeting the somato-cognitive action network (SCAN) rather than motor regions doubles efficacy of TMS treatments for Parkinson’s disease. Seems that various DBS targets for Parkinson’s are selectively connected to the SCAN rather than effector-specific motor regions.🧪
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Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

A unified 1 Mb DNA model with genome‑wide, single‑base outputs: AlphaGenome advances variant effect prediction across expression, chromatin, TF binding, and splicing modalities. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Projected impacts of climate change on malaria in Africa - Nature Projected impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa by 2050 highlight the urgent need for climate-resilient malaria control strategies and robust emergency response systems to safeguard pr...

A new study projects future impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa through 2050, using 25 years of data on climate, extreme weather, malaria burden and control interventions, and socioeconomic environment. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Intestinal macrophages modulate synucleinopathy along the gut–brain axis - Nature Muscularis macrophages, housekeepers of enteric nervous system integrity and intestinal homeostasis, modulate α-synuclein pathology and neurodegeneration in models of Parkinson’s disease, and understa...

Muscularis macrophages help maintain gut homeostasis but also spread α-synuclein along the gut-brain axis, promote T cell expansion, and drive Parkinson’s disease progression in mice, a Nature paper reports. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two registered clinical trials in Nature report the successful use of the GLP-1 and glucagon receptor co-agonist Mazdutide for type 2 diabetes.🧪
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Prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the community - Nature The prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease neuropathological changes is reported based on blood-based biomarkers in a Norwegian population-based cohort.

A paper in Nature reports the prevalence of Alzheimer’s Disease Neuropathological Changes in a Norwegian population-based cohort, assessed using a blood-based biomarker🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Protected area management has significant spillover effects on vegetation - Nature Analysis of effect sizes of vegetation spillovers from protected areas in Australia shows that 71% of over 3,063 analysed protected areas had a positive spillover effect, and that these effects c...

An article in Nature assesses the effect of Australian protected areas on vegetation in adjacent areas, and finds evidence of a positive spillover effect, that is, increases in a given vegetation type relative to what would be expected from the broader landscape.🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gut micro-organisms associated with health, nutrition and dietary interventions - Nature Comprehensive large-scale studies of multi-national populations identified microbiome species consistently associated with favourable and unfavourable health markers, informing future studies of the h...

A meta-analysis of 34,000 individuals identifies reproducible associations between gut microbial species and diet and health markers. The associations were used to generate a ranking of species that are either positively and negatively associated with health markers.🧪
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Ancient DNA from Shimao city records kinship practices in Neolithic China - Nature Sequencing of 144 ancient genomes from Shimao city and its satellites presents pedigrees among tomb owners spanning up to four generations showing predominantly patrilineal descent structure across Sh...

Ancient DNA analysis at the important archaeological site of Shimao city in northern China provides insights into the social organization and burial practices in a Neolithic community🧪
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Healthy forests safeguard traditional wild meat food systems in Amazonia - Nature Data provided by Amazonian peoples are used to estimate the value of wild animals as a source of food, including its spatial distribution and nutritional value, providing information that will be key ...

A study in Nature finds that 0.37 million tonnes of wild meat are extracted annually in Amazonia.This amount of wild meat can meet nearly half of protein and iron dietary requirements for rural people and a substantial portion of their needs for B vitamins and zinc.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health - Nature A meta-analysis of 168 studies reveals that economic inequality is not significantly associated with subjective well-being or mental health.

How related is economic inequality to mental health? This meta-analysis shows a complex picture in which this relationship is only evident among low-income populations and in contexts of high inflation. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Video-call glitches trigger uncanniness and harm consequential life outcomes - Nature Glitches in video calls can have a negative effect on the judgement of the people involved and correspond to worse outcomes in major areas of life such as job interviews and parole hearings.

How do video glitches impact hiring decisions, trust in a medical provider, and parole decisions? A study published in Nature finds that these glitches negatively impact these decisions by breaking the illusion of face-to-face contact 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe - Nature The human superior temporal gyrus processes acoustic–phonetic properties of speech regardless of whether the language is familiar to the listener, but only encodes word boundaries and language-sp...

Speech sounds like vowels and consonants in native and foreign languages elicit similar neural responses in the superior temporal, but only during native listening does this area encode word boundaries, frequency, and language-specific information.
🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Marburg virus is a highly virulent/transmissible filovirus with no vaccine/treatments and recent outbreaks in Africa. Scientists have isolated/characterized a highly potent neutralizing monoclonal antibody effective against Marburg and related viruses Dehong and Ravn.🧪
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A Nature paper details a new AI model called EchoPrime, which can read and interpret echocardiograms 🧪👇
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A study looks at the mortality impacts of unmanaged rainfall and future sea level rise, with disproportionate risk for children, women, and residents of slums in a developing megacity🧪
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Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking - Nature The Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE, pronounced ‘Feebee’)—an image dataset that implements best practices for consent, privacy, compensation, safety, diversity and utility—can be used respon...

Computer vision, on which many AI applications rely on, is based on non-consensual datasets, compromising fairness and accuracy in AI. Now, an ethically curated, diverse human-image data set, sets a new standard for responsible data curation and trustworthy AI. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Synthetic α-synuclein fibrils replicate in mice causing MSA-like pathology - Nature Synthetic fibril strain 1B is a pathogen that is capable of self-replication and inducing glial cytoplasmic inclusions in vivo in mice, and the structural features of 1B may underlie the pathology of ...

A paper in Nature reports high-resolution structures of aSyn fibrils 1B and their in vivo seeding product 1BP. They appear remarkably similar, suggesting a high-fidelity conformational replication process to perpetuate MSA-like pathology 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nanobody-based recombinant antivenom for cobra, mamba and rinkhals bites - Nature A recombinant antivenom composed of eight nanobodies provides broad protection against venom-induced lethality and dermonecrosis in mice challenged with venoms from cobras, mambas and rinkha...

Snake bites kill/debilitate 1000s of people annually in Sub-Saharan African. A new nanobody cocktail is shown to be highly effective against 17 of the most dangerous African snake species. Unlike other anti-venoms it also protects against venom-induced dermal necrosis🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-omic profiling reveals age-related immune dynamics in healthy adults - Nature This multi-omic longitudinal analysis of the healthy human peripheral immune system constructs the Human Immune Health Atlas and assembles data on immune cell composition and state changes w...

A new study in published in Nature presents a comprehensive resource of immunological changes occurring during normal aging 🧪
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Neuroendocrine control of calcium mobilization in the fruit fly - Nature The peptide hormone Capa is responsible for regulating extracellular fluid Ca2+ levels in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Where do invertebrates without calcium-rich bones or shells store their calcium? In the fruit-fly, at least, it’s the malpighian tubules, where calcium is mobilised by a neuropeptide hormone called Capability. 🧪
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Energy flows reveal declining ecosystem functions by animals across Africa - Nature An ecosystem energetics approach, quantifying trophic energy flows across species, offers a unified framework for linking animal biodiversity loss to changes in ecosystem function and Earth system pro...

An article in Nature reports that ecosystem energy flow, through food consumption by wild birds and mammals, has decreased by over one third in sub-Saharan Africa since around 1700 🧪
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A long-necked early dinosaur from a newly discovered Upper Triassic basin in the Andes - Nature Discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of Huayracursor jaguensis, a Carnian dinosaur from the Northern Precordillera Basin in northwestern Argentina provides evidence of increased body size and early...

A short-necked sauropodomorph from a new Triassic locality in Argentina shows sign of the neck extension that characterised its larger, later cousins.🧪👇
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A vaccine central in A(H5) influenza antigenic space confers broad immunity - Nature A high-resolution antigenic map of influenza A(H5) haemagglutinin (HA) enables the design of immunogenic and antigenically central vaccine HA antigens that elicit antibody responses broadly covering t...

A vaccine central in A(H5) influenza virus antigenic space confers subtype-wide immunity 🧪👇
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.

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...

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.

🧪 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...

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.

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...