Daily briefing: Bunsen burners don’t waft bacteria away from workbenches

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Bunsen burners make poor air-cleansers

Bunsen burners, long used to cleanse airspaces and surfaces in labs of bacteria-laden particles, aren’t actually very effective at doing so, and might even make contamination worse. Researchers seeded the air above lab benches with the bacterium Gordonia rubripertincta and opened two Petri dishes — one near a lit Bunsen burner and one near an unlit one. They found that in several trials of differently sized burners, bacterial levels in dishes beside lit burners were as high as or higher than the other ones.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Microbiology Spectrum paper

NIH strikes deal with Dept of Defense

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has signed an agreement with the US Department of Defense to redirect research projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars from its institute for infectious diseases to military biodefence programmes. The 10-year agreement would establish a pathway to move funding out of the NIH “on a project-by-project basis”, said an agency spokesperson in a statement. But some researchers worry that shifting biomedical research to the military threatens the transparency and clinical translation that define NIH-funded work.

Nature | 6 min read

Boat-bashing orcas are probably just playing

The Iberian orcas (Orcinus orca) ramming boats off the coasts of Spain and Portugal are more likely to be playing than showing aggression, researchers say. Videos of orcas in the act show that perpetrators were almost always juveniles, and contact with boats was often gentle. Bumpers also occasionally brought ‘gifts’ such as pieces of fish to the boats. The findings could dispel a popular theory that the orcas are seeking revenge for injuries caused by boats. “If you want to avenge yourself, you don’t bring food, you know?” says orca researcher Janek Andre.

Science | 5 min read

Reference: Marine Mammal Science paper

Features & opinion

Newton’s ‘remarkable year’ of genius

In their new book, The Winding Trail to Newton’s Principia Mathematica, science historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold explore how Newton defied the ‘ten-year rule’ of creativity and genius. The rule suggests that artists and scientists must put in a decade of learning before they can make a breakthrough. But Newton’s masterwork, in which he proposed his laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation, followed hardly any study of maths or science, and he worked mostly alone.

Nature | 7 min read

Probing the proteome at cellular scale

Cells that seem identical can have very different fates, thanks to the proteins they contain. But most analyses of single cells focus on the transcriptome to explore gene expression in the cell. Now a technique that many protein biologists thought was the stuff of science fiction has arrived with a bang: single-cell proteomics, which profiles thousands of proteins in individual cells. For example, in tumour cells, “single-cell proteomics may help us understand why patients have different outcomes due to tumour evolution, immune responses and cell differentiation — all driven by cellular heterogeneity”, says mass spectrometrist Yu-Ju Chen.

Nature | 15 min read

A science that sticks up for people

The story of one community’s attempt to grapple with air pollution illustrates a way in which science can fail to serve its stakeholders: when people feel studied, but not actually helped. In an essay adapted from her new book, The Science of Repair: How People Who Believe in Facts Can Build a Better Future, environmental justice researcher Gwen Ottinger argues that “reparative science … involves itself in the work expected of reliable members of a moral community: recognizing wrongs, holding wrongdoers accountable, and fostering hope that people who have been wronged won’t be abandoned”.

Issues in Science and Technology | 17 min read

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