Introducing meat-rice, the grain with added muscles

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View this email in your browser Thursday 15 February 2024

Hello Nature readers, Today, we discover meat-cell-infused rice, learn that smoking has a lasting effect on the immune system and find out what the most detailed X-ray map of the sky tells us about dark matter.

This rice contains animal cells that use the grains as a scaffold to grow on. The pink colour is a result of an acidity monitor added to the cell-culture medium. (Yonsei University)

Introducing: meat-rice Beef muscle and fat cells have been grown in the lab using rice as a supporting material — with edible results. "It was definitely different from regular rice," says chemical engineer and study co-author Sohyeon Park. "It was more nutty and harder." The beef-rice has a slightly higher fat and protein content than standard rice and could find use as a supplement for food-insecure communities. Nature | 4 min read Reference: Matter paper

Why Latin America is on fire A combination of a strong El Niño climate pattern, rampant planting of non-native trees and climate change all have contributed to the deadly wildfires that tore through Chile, Colombia and Argentina this year. "We are very worried, because each new fire is bigger, more threatening and with an ever-greater impact," says environmental scientist Francisco de la Barrera. Some researchers are calling for preventative action such as reducing fire risk on the edges of cities by replacing invasive trees with native species that are less susceptible to fire. Nature | 5 min read

Smoking scars immune system for years The impact of cigarettes on the immune system lingers long after people have stopped smoking. Researchers measured 1,000 people's immune responses by exposing blood samples to various molecules or pathogens. Apart from cigarette smoking, having a relatively high body mass index and having previously been infected with the typically benign cytomegalovirus also seem to affect the immune response. "It makes me wonder how much detail we should consider when we are looking at targeted therapy or personalized medicine," says geneticist Vinod Kumar. Nature | 4 min read Get the expert view from genomics researcher Yang Luo and Simon Stent in the Nature News & Views article (6 min read, Nature paywall) Reference: Nature paper

Dark matter shaped the cosmos A reconstruction of nearly 9 billion years of cosmic evolution supports the standard model of cosmology, which suggests that mysterious dark matter is the main factor shaping the Universe's structure. Astronomers traced the X-ray glow of distant galaxy clusters using the most detailed X-ray map of the sky, captured by the eROSITA space telescope. It allowed them to calculate parameters such as 'lumpiness' — how much the total mass of matter has concentrated in the cosmic web at any given time due to gravity, especially that of dark matter. Nature | 5 min read Reference: arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

In this map of a celestial hemisphere, colours reflect the wavelengths of X-rays. Hot gas haloes surrounding galaxy clusters, as well as black holes, have broad-band emissions (white); diffuse emissions have long wavelengths (red); and in the central regions of the Milky Way, dust blocks longer-wavelength emissions, so that only short-wavelength X-rays are visible (blue or black). Multi-coloured clouds are supernova remnants. (MPE, J. Sanders for the eROSITA consortium)

Features & opinion

Global well-being needs mental health Mental health is part of the UN Sustainable Development Goal for 'good health and well-being'. But there is a large gap between what is needed and what is available, says psychiatrist Shekhar Saxena. In some countries, including India and the United States, suicide rates among young people are rising rapidly. "It reflects the society that we live in where a young person does not feel that life is worth living," says Saxena. He argues that socioeconomic policies and community-led initiatives are needed to prevent mental disorders early. Nature Careers Podcast | 29 min listen

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What happened to Indigenous Canarians? Scientists are starting to piece together the story of the first human settlers of the Canary Islands, who arrived from North Africa some 1800 years ago. Life on the dry volcanic islands was probably challenging — one island's population crashed around the 9th century, and many skulls bear the marks of violence. But the islanders were remarkably adaptable, reinventing tools in the absence of metal ores and creating elaborate art. "I imagine the lives of those people as profoundly linked to the natural world," says archaeobotanist Jacob Morales. Canarians remained largely isolated until Europeans arrived in the 14th century and all but erased them. Only traces of their genetics remain in modern islanders, who have on average between 15% and 20% of DNA from Indigenous sources. Science | 12 min read

Nature is calling all engineers Nature's editors feel that engineering research has been underrepresented, even neglected, in the journal — something they want to change. "We want the world of engineering to know that its research, whether as a proof of concept or at the implementation stage, will be considered," says a Nature editorial. Nature | 5 min read

Where I work

"I was supposed to study aspects of abalone farming, but soon found the indigenous or invasive worms that sometimes live on abalone far more interesting," says marine biologist Carol Simon. Since 2009, she has helped to describe 21 species of these South African bristle worms that were new to science. "Some are so tiny that you can only see them clearly under a microscope. Others are an arm's length long and as thick as my thumb." (Nature Africa | 3 min read) (Carol Simon)

Quote of the day "A vine takes hours to turn toward sunlight, a bristlecone [takes] hundreds of years to mature. Each organism's clock — its sense of time — is so different from ours that we can't even sense it." Most people suffer from 'plant blindness' and consequently 'time blindness', says philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats. An 'arboreal clock' incorporates time as experienced by some of the oldest trees on the planet, to help humanity reconnect with its environment. (Noema | 13 min read)

Today, I'm excited to find out that the reason many birds' legs look so strangely skinny has a lot to do with evolutionary adaptations to flight: birds' thighs essentially became part of the torso while their lower legs and feet are operated by bundles of superthin tendons. Help this newsletter to take wing by sending your feedback to briefing@nature.com. Thanks for reading, Katrina Krämer, associate editor, Nature Briefing With contributions by Gemma Conroy and Sarah Tomlin

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