Feature Article

Scientists — just like everybody else — have little idea what will happen now that the United Kingdom has voted to exit the European Union. (Editorial)

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Can a heterotrophic organism be evolved to synthesize biomass from CO2 directly? So far, non-native carbon fixation in which biomass precursors are synthesized solely from CO2 has remained an elusive grand challenge. Here, we demonstrate how a combination of rational metabolic rewiring, recombinant expression, and laboratory evolution has led to the biosynthesis of sugars and other major biomass constituents by a fully functional Calvin-Benson-Bassham (CBB) cycle in E. coli.

Dietary guidelines recommend avoiding foods high in saturated fat. Yet, emerging evidence suggests cardiometabolic benefits of dairy products and dairy fat. Evidence on the role of butter, with high saturated dairy fat content, for total mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes remains unclear. We aimed to systematically review and meta-analyze the association of butter consumption with all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes in general populations.

The Amazon is ready to burn. After an unusually dry rainy season, the southern section of the rainforest is heading into winter with the largest moisture deficit since 1998. This has set the stage for an unusually intense fire season, according to a forecast issued on 29 June that is based on sea-surface temperature trends in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

On 4 July, NASA intends to finish a job that started with the agency’s Galileo mission 21 years ago. At 8:18 p.m. Pacific time, the Juno spacecraft will ignite its main engine for 35 minutes and nudge itself into orbit around Jupiter. If all goes well, it will eventually slip into an even tighter path that whizzes as close as 4,200 kilometres above the planet’s roiling cloud-tops — while dodging as much of the lethal radiation in the planet’s belts as possible.

Hydrogeochemical investigation has been carried out in the granitic terrain of Siddipet area, Medak district, Telangana State, India with an aim to understand the distribution of fluoride in the groundwater and to understand the relationship of fluoride with other major ions, and also to identify the high fluoride-bearing groundwater zones. 104 groundwater samples were analyzed in the study area for fluoride and other major ions like calcium, magnesium, chloride, carbonate, bicarbonate, sodium, potassium, sulfate, and nitrate in addition to pH and electrical conductivity.

The long-lasting Sahel drought in the 1970s and 1980s caused enormous human and socio-economic losses, driving extensive research on its causes. Although changes in global and regional sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are thought to be dominant drivers of the severe Sahel drying trend, the mechanisms for the recent recovery trend are not fully clear yet, but are often assumed to be akin to the previous SST–Sahel drought linkage.

Significant land greening in the northern extratropical latitudes (NEL) has been documented through satellite observations during the past three decades. This enhanced vegetation growth has broad implications for surface energy, water and carbon budgets, and ecosystem services across multiple scales. Discernible human impacts on the Earth’s climate system have been revealed by using statistical frameworks of detection–attribution.

High precipitation quantiles tend to rise with air temperature, following the so-called Clausius–Clapeyron scaling. This CC-scaling relation breaks down, or even reverts, for very high temperatures. In our study, we verify this reversal using a 60-year period of summer data in Germany. One of the suggested meteorological explanations is limited moisture supply, but our findings indicate that this behavior could also originate from simple undersampling.

The Safai Karamchari Andolan traversed 500 districts of the country with the message "stop killing us." The participants, manual scavengers who clean dry latrines, sewers and septic tanks, are forced to carry on this dehumanising work despite laws against it. Will the Swachh Bharat campaign succeed in addressing the issues connected with manual scavenging?