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The dark caves that blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) call home is an extreme environment in which food is scarce. As a result, the fish lead a famine-and-feast way life that has led them to adapt in a remarkable way, as Nicolas Rohner, Cliff Tabin and their colleagues reveal in this week's issue. The cavefish carry a mutation in the insulin receptor that would cause severe type 2 diabetes in humans. The resulting high blood-glucose levels seem to cause no ill effects in the fish, which are healthy and have a normal lifespan. The authors speculate that the fish have evolved compensatory mechanisms in their regulation of glucose that allow them to survive in their challenging environment. Cover image: Paulo Oliveira/Alamy
Safeguarding our lives online requires skills and experiences that lie beyond masculine stereotypes of the hacker and soldier, says Winifred R. Poster.
Some Mexican cavefish have a mutation in an insulin receptor protein that affects blood-glucose regulation. The same mutation causes diabetes and health problems in humans, but the diabetic cavefish thrive.
A single spin in silicon is strongly coupled to a microwave-frequency photon and coherent single-spin dynamics are observed using circuit quantum electrodynamics.
Deep neural networks and Monte Carlo tree search can plan chemical syntheses by training models on a huge database of published reactions; their predicted synthetic routes cannot be distinguished from those a human chemist would design.
Analysis of rare de novo mutations in gene regulatory elements suggests that 1–3% of patients with neurodevelopmental disorders carry such mutations in elements that are active in the fetal brain.
Single-cell recordings show that CGRP-expressing neurons in the parabrachial nucleus in mice respond to both noxious stimuli and signals of feeding satiety.
A screen of more than 1,000 drugs shows that about a quarter of the non-antibiotic drugs inhibit the growth of at least one commensal bacterial strain in vitro.
Galaxies normally have far more dark matter than normal matter, but the dynamics of objects within the ultra-diffuse galaxy NGC1052–DF2 suggest that it has a very little dark matter component.
Fe3Sn2 hosts massive Dirac fermions, owing to the underlying symmetry properties of the bilayer kagome lattice in the ferromagnetic state and the atomic spin–orbit coupling.
Ancient shorelines on Mars must have formed before and during the emplacement of the Tharsis volcanic province, instead of afterwards as previously assumed, suggesting that oceans on Mars formed early.
Cavefish populations of the Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, carry a mutation in the insulin receptor gene that renders them insulin- and starvation-resistant relative to surface populations of the same species.
Genetic similarity among late Neanderthals is predicted well by their geographical location, and although some of these Neanderthals were contemporaneous with early modern humans, their genomes show no evidence of recent gene flow from modern humans.
Three transient receptor potential channels (TRPA1, TRPV1 and TRPM3) mediate sensitivity to acute noxious heat in mice in a redundant system; mice lacking all three show severe deficits in heat sensing, whereas double-knockout mice do not.
Using optical mapping and 3D ultrasound, the dynamics and interactions between electrical and mechanical phase singularities were analysed by simultaneously measuring the membrane potential, intracellular calcium concentration and mechanical contractions of the heart during normal rhythm and fibrillation.
Hepatocytes secrete DPP4, which promotes adipose tissue inflammation and insulin resistance in obese mice, suggesting a new specific target for treatment of metabolic disorders.
Decreased expression of histidine phosphatase LHPP, a novel tumour suppressor, results in increased global histidine phosphorylation and hepatocellular carcinoma.
Finely tuned optogenetic control of engineered Saccharomyces cerevisiae enhances the biosynthesis of valuable products such as isobutanol in laboratory-scale fermenters.