Marina Vance: I’ve been working on air quality since I was an undergraduate student in Brazil — for more than 20 years. I was at Virginia Tech for eight years for my Ph.D and as a postdoctoral researcher, and then I came to the University of Colorado in 2016.

Growing up in Brazil, I’m from an island in a very humid place. Wildfires are not big where I’m from at all. And then living in Virginia, I wasn’t exposed to them either.

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Some 400,000 years ago, in what is now eastern England, a group of Neanderthals used flint and pyrite to make fires by a watering hole — not just once, but time after time, over several generations.

That is the conclusion of a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Previously, the oldest known evidence of humans making fires dated back just 50,000 years. The new finding indicates that this critical step in human history occurred much earlier.

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Earlier this year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a warning about the dangers of misinformation. Social media platforms are now rife with scientific falsehoods — that the Earth is flat, that climate change is a hoax, and so on. Misinformation can lead to large-scale harm, undermining public health and the well-being of the planet, the authors of the National Academies report said.

Continue reading “For Real, a Natural History of Misinformation” →

Last year, Ardem Patapoutian got a tattoo. An artist drew a tangled ribbon on his right arm, the diagram of a protein called Piezo. Dr. Patapoutian, a neuroscientist at Scripps Research in San Diego discovered Piezo in 2010, and in 2021 he won a Nobel Prize for the work. Three years later, he decided to memorialize the protein in ink.

Piezo, Dr. Patapoutian had found, allows nerve endings in the skin to sense pressure, helping to create the sense of touch. “It was surreal to feel the needle as it was etching the Piezo protein that I was using to feel it,” he recalled.

Continue reading “Mapping the Sense of What’s Going On Inside” →

Gene-editing therapies offer great hope for treating rare diseases, but they face big hurdles: the tremendous time and resources involved in devising a treatment that might only apply to a small number of patients.

A study published on Wednesday outlines a new approach that could make the process more efficient and less costly. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers presented a path toward a gene-editing strategy that could eventually be standardized for many different rare diseases, instead of personalized edits for each one.

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