Nature's News & Views roundup of 2025

0:07Hi listeners, Benjamin here. It's coming up to the end of the year and we're going to have a little look back at some of the things that were covered in Nature. And today, we're going to be focusing on our News and Views coverage that happened throughout the year. And to do so, I'm joined by a couple of folks from the News and Views team. Andy Mitchinson, Chief News and Views Editor. Hello. And Holly Smith, a Senior News and Views Editor here at Nature. Hi. We're going to talk about some of the stories that you both covered in the News and Views section today. But before we do, obviously our listeners know exactly what a News and Views article is.

0:44We love them. I certainly read them all the time. But Andy, in case anyone's forgotten, maybe you could just give a quick summary of what these are. So we commission experts to explain to non-experts about the best things that are happening in science today. We cover a lot of nature papers, but we'll cover papers from anywhere. And we basically get these experts to explain things to you so that you don't have to read the paper. I mean, super helpful and covering a huge array of topics. Let's talk about what you both focus on. Holly, why don't you go first? What's your sort of area that you cover in the News and Views?

1:16So I'm a biologist by training. So I cover half of our biology content that ranges from anything from neuroscience to genetics and even social sciences and environmental health, epidemiology, that kind of thing. Pretty small. Yeah, just like half of all biology. And Andy, chemistry is your bag right yeah i deal with chemistry which is not something i choose to admit at parties but not just chemistry anything that more or less involves molecules wow anything involving molecules is a fairly broad palette i would say yeah well let's talk about some of the news and views articles that stood out to you both this year and let's stick with molecules molecules in outer space and this is from back in january yes so this is all about the asteroid Bennu.

2:02So Bennu is a very useful asteroid for scientists because it has an orbit that brings it very close to Earth. And in 2023, NASA sent a spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx to Bennu to collect some samples. And then what happened then, even more incredibly, was that the samples were returned to Earth and protected from the atmosphere. Because what people don't realise, I think, quite often is that when you get samples from space, when they come into contact with Earth's atmosphere there's lots of gases and moisture and it can cause all the delicate materials that are in the asteroid to undergo chemical reactions or to do other things that basically mean that they kind of decompose and that means you can't analyze them in their pristine states but the great thing about this return mission as they call it is that it came back and it brought samples that were preserved exactly as they had been on the asteroid and then scientists look at them in their pristine state and learn things that they wouldn't have been able to have learned from for the sake of argument meteorites that had fallen to earth and already passed through the atmosphere and i covered this story actually back in chandry and spoke to one of the authors involved and this maybe gives a snapshot of what the very very early solar system and beyond was like exactly the thing about asteroids is that they're the remnants of these small bodies which were called planetesimals that went on to form the building blocks of planets.

3:23So if you look at asteroids, you can basically learn things about the materials that formed the solar system. And so one thing about these planetesimals is that a lot of them contains ices and organic materials, which are potentially of interest for various reasons. We'll come on to that later, I guess. Well, quite. And as I remember it, ice is kind of central to this story, but actually the lack of ice is what it's all about. So the interiors of a lot of these planetesimals actually had like their own central heating system. These were radioactive materials. These radioactive materials, they decay, that produces heat.

3:58And so you might think that planetesimals a long way from the sun would just have lots of ice in them. But in fact, there was water in there. And so there's been some analysis of samples returned from Bennu in the past that had shown that there are minerals in the asteroid that would have formed in the presence of water. but there's no water there now. So what happened to the water? And that's what this paper is digging into. So basically the scientists that were looking at these samples, they did all sorts of clever chemical and microscopy studies and they discovered salts that they compared with the salts that form in very saline lakes on earth.

4:38And by doing that comparison, they concluded that water was lost from the body that Bennu was formed from through evaporation. So in other words, there was enough heat in the central heating system to cause the water to evaporate away. And that's important for various reasons. And I'm sure you decided to cover this paper in the news interviews because it's inherently cool. An asteroid was fist bumped in a deep space and samples were brought back. But adding context to what that means was important because a lot of folks said well the reason that life is this on earth is because an asteroid put these chemicals on there but the news and views you commissioned kind of unpicked that a little bit it did yes absolutely so the news news author said that one of the interesting things about the chemicals that form the building blocks of life is that they actually find it very hard to form in the presence of water this might seem counterintuitive because you know obviously you need water for life but there are good chemical reasons why if you're trying to form these molecules in the first place, the presence of water just absolutely messes things up.

5:42And now you've got this mechanism that demonstrates how water could have been removed from those salt solutions to form minerals. And the removal of the water could have been the thing that actually triggered the formation of the building blocks of life. And so that's one really important thing about this paper. And in fact, there was another paper published at the same time as the paper in Nature. It was published in Nature Astronomy, which reported that, yes, there are the building blocks of life in Bennu. They found amino acids, they found nuclear bases, which are some other components that you find in DNA.

6:13And so, yeah, that's all really fascinating stuff to find. Another thing that the News and Views author pointed out, which wasn't reported in the paper, but he said there's been this mystery about the inner planets of the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. So basically, it's thought that these planets formed from these icy planetesimals that originally formed in the outer solar system, and then they migrated inwards towards the sun. But we actually know quite a lot about the chemical components of these planetesimals and in particular we know how much water would have been in them. And if you do the sums, what you find is that there would have been more water in these planetesimals than you actually find in the planets today.

6:53So how do you account for that imbalance? Well now we've got this evidence that water was lost and that could be the explanation. that could explain why there is as much water as there is in the inner planets of the solar system. And what I love so much about stories like this is that we know what the final jigsaw puzzle looks like, but how the pieces got into place, that's less well understood. So these little bits are helping maybe bring all that wonderful scene together, I suppose. Yeah, exactly. And you can learn so much about the early history of the solar system by doing exactly this type of analysis.

7:28and it's really important to emphasize that you would not have got this information unless you'd actually sent a spacecraft to the asteroid and brought it back and preserved these minerals that's why these missions are so important well let's move on to another news and views article holly one that you covered and i guess it is tangentially related in terms of the building blocks of life things like dna and rna and what i like about this news and view story is that it really is allowed to deep dive into a topic with quite a lot of moving parts and really unpick it. And it's about how cells do what they do.

8:01Exactly. Yes. So a big question in biology is how do you actually define a cell type? So for many years, scientists have been categorizing cells based on their shape, so their morphology and also their function. But it's very difficult to do that for a large number of cells like you'd get in a whole nervous system for example. So over the past few years scientists have been using snapshots of all the RNA that a cell is expressing to get an idea of all the proteins that are expressed in that cell and that gives them an idea of what the function is. But one question in biology is does that snapshot of RNA always equate to what a cell's function would be and that's the kind of question that the authors of this paper were looking to address.

8:47And quite a big thing then because this is one of those central things that biologists have just relied upon for a long time and I guess this is why this paper was of interest to you for a News and Views article. Right so nowadays there's loads of studies where scientists have been trying to create atlases of different tissues based on their RNA expression but this paper sort of brings into question whether we can actually categorize cells based on that RNA expression because genes are being expressed in a cell might not necessarily reflect what those cells are doing because cells change state over time during development and their sort of molecular profile changes.

9:23So this is sort of throwing a bit of a spanner in the works in a way. And so you talk then about atlases of human cells and things like that. In this case, the authors of the research paper were looking at fish. That's right. So they were looking at a model organism, the zebrafish, which is really useful because young zebrafish are see-through, so you can do experiments with fluorescent markers with them. And what they're doing is they're looking at a part of the brain called the optic tectum, which processes visual stimuli. So they characterize the neurons based on their transcriptomic profile, and then they also do functional studies with them to look at the function of the neurons.

9:59And then they took the transcriptomic type and the functional type, and they tried to correlate them, and they found that they don't always overlap. Which in itself is an interesting result, but could have broader implications because it maybe upends some assumptions. And this is what your News and Views authors were looking at in terms of what context? Exactly, yeah. They were experts in the development of the nervous system. So a lot of the News and Views digs into how neurons that might be similar in terms of their transcriptome, in terms of the genes they're expressing, they might start to get different functions based on the kind of inputs from the local environment in the nervous system as it develops.

10:37And we do love a story where assumptions are flipped over like everyone thought it was x actually it might be y. What does your news and views article say about what this might mean more broadly? They kind of tap into this debate about taxonomy so how we categorize life forms whether it's species or in this case cell types and how that's useful in some aspects for kind of understanding how, for example, the nervous system is organised, how the body is organised, but it doesn't give a full picture because a cell type or its state changes through time and overdevelopment. And what do you think the impact of this might be?

11:16Obviously, the paper's out and the expert comment as well. Do we think this is going to lead to a shift in how biology is done? Well, that's a good question. It was one of our most read news and views of this year actually. I think probably because it's a pertinent question for many biologists looking at all different systems of the body in different species. Let's keep moving then and another story that you've chosen to highlight Holly is a climate story. Now we obviously cover a lot of climate change related stories on the Nature Podcast and I know you do in the news and views section as well but this one maybe isn't looking at perhaps these overarching planetary scale things going on.

11:56It's looking at what's happening to people in a specific place, in this case, a city in India. Yes, this is a study about Mumbai, which is affected by heavy rainfall. And what this study does, it kind of looks at the intersection of public health and climate change. So it's really about how death rates in Mumbai change as extreme rainfall events affect the city. And the effects of climate change can seem quite abstract to a lot of people, but really not in this case. Right, exactly. So in this paper, they really quantify how extreme climate events affect people's health, especially how it affects those who are more vulnerable in society.

12:40So they find that with extreme rainfall and flooding, the increased mortality disproportionately affects women, young children and people that are living in informal settlements where the infrastructure is not as effective at mitigating the effects of climate change. On obviously a really important topic, what was your thought process when this paper came in for why you wanted this one to be included and covered in the news and views section? Well we don't have that many papers about the intersection between social sciences and public health So this one really stood out to me because the real world impacts are there and they're quantified.

13:21And I think one of the interesting aspects of this paper is it looked not just at the immediate effects of flooding in terms of buildings being washed away and waterlogging. It looks at the long term health impacts. So effects on people becoming ill with waterborne diseases like diarrhea and how that disproportionately affects young children. and what you might think to be a single event actually has long-lasting effects in terms of people's health and their lives. And of course one of the jobs of the News and Views article is to provide context about what this might mean more broadly in this case as we move forward into whatever the climate future has in store for us.

14:00What else did the News and Views author bring? So this News and Views author is actually based in Mumbai and his research is about how being able to predict where rainfall will occur and how early warning systems will help the city of Mumbai prepare for extreme rainfall events. But he makes a point at the end that a combination of forecasting and urban planning, it has to come with acknowledging the people that are most vulnerable. And so that is a really important aspect of how we can protect the poorest people from the impact of climate change. Right. And emphasising the human aspect, as you say, is so important.

14:40And I'm sure we will see more of these papers coming forward as people do investigate this. Let's do one more for this year's roundup. Andy, let's go back to you. And it's a paper that as soon as I saw it, I was like, this is something. And we covered this in video and in pod as well. And there's a very easy way to describe this research in a sentence, Andy. What would that be? Duck on a rock. Absolutely. Well, not just duck on a rock, duck stuck to a rock. And a rubber duck at that, it has to be said. But what it's really about is about super sticky materials that can be used underwater. And so there's lots of situations where you need effectively glue-like materials that will work in wet environments.

15:28So you might think of something obvious, like maybe an offshore structure like an oil rig or a ship, you might need to stick something to it. Or maybe less obvious things like in surgery, where you need to be able to basically seal up wounds using some kind of sticky material. And so there is a lot of interest in using these water-based gels, which are known as hydrogels, to be these really super sticky materials. That's what this paper was looking at and in particular it's trying to find a way of using AI inevitably to improve the way that we can design materials. Now the problem here is that for many of the ways that you use AI nowadays you need a large data set of information before you can actually train your model and that's one of the key problems that this addresses.

16:10So there was no data basically in this field about how you would design a super sticky hydrogel and so what the authors did here was they turned to the natural world as so many people do and they looked at organisms that already make their own super sticky glues that they use in wet environments so you can think about things like mussels and bacteria for example that thrive in wet environments and which have to sort of stick to things to stay alive what they did was they looked at these proteins these super sticky proteins that occur in nature to try and work out what are the fundamental characteristics of these materials that make them as sticky as they are having done that analysis they designed hydrogels that mimics the characteristics of the super sticky natural materials.

16:53And that gave them about 180 hydrogels that they then synthesized. They characterized them to work out their properties. And the data set they got from that was enough to actually then train a machine learning model that they then used to do further iterations of design. And this story, it really has a lot of things which are just so interesting, right? So you say machine learning. It's learning from nature. is actually making a tangible thing. And we are flipping about it, but the way they tested it is something. Yeah, that's right. After they did several iterations of this machine learning guided process, they came up with these amazing materials that were sticky underwater, that retained their stickiness for a long period of time.

17:35They did some practical things like they took a three metre pipe and drilled a hole at the bottom, filled it with water, and then slapped on one of these sticky gels. And they found that it stopped the water from coming out of the pipe instantaneously and it could carry on doing that for at least five months without any problem. But the key thing, the thing that everybody wants to talk about is they also showed that you could stick a rubber duck to a rock on the seaside and the rubber duck would not be blasted away by the tides or the waves. It was just there. It was sitting there with this zen-like appearance on its face, staring out into sea, regardless of whatever the sea was throwing at it.

18:13And Andy, why did you choose to cover this paper in the News and Views section? So the key reason I chose this is because, joking aside, this is a really important development in the field. As I said before, it's really hard to use machine learning to design soft materials. And this, although it was used to create sticky underwater gels, could be used to design lots of other things as well. And the News and Views author made the point that you might think nowadays that AI is just still being scoped out as a method and people are sort of tentatively trying things out. But actually, no, in material science, at least, it's already there.

18:48It's this big tool that people are using it all the time. It changes the way that people think about doing their research. And this is a really good example of that. So that was the key reason for me. But, you know, you've got to say, full marks to the authors for coming up with a demonstration of their gels that really, really cuts through everything and that people can understand. And, you know, I have to say that there was a really surreal period in the office where wherever I went, I could see this rubber duck. You know, we used a picture of the rubber duck as one of the figures for the News and Views.

19:17I spent a lot of time looking at photos of rubber ducks stuck to a rock. And seemingly wherever I went in the office, you know, the multimedia team were doing a video about it. I could see there was a rubber duck on their screens. I went to the sub editors. They were looking at the rubber duck that was going on the cover. And so I have to really thank the authors for creating that very special moment during the year where there were just rubber ducks everywhere. Wonderful. Well, listen, let's leave it there. We've covered a lot of ground there. My goodness. Your team has chosen a bunch of articles from the year that have stood out to you for a variety of reasons, doc-based or other.

19:51Tell us about it. Okay. We like to give an overview of the year, so we pick a news and views from each month of the year. If you want a reminder of all the fantastic stuff that happened in science in 2025, this is a great place to start. And listeners, we will put a link to that in the show notes so you can find all of those. and of course there will be many more news and views articles next year for us to talk about i'm sure but for the time being all that's left to say is andy and holly thank you so much for joining me thank you thanks very much