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.
We 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?
So 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.
It is, yeah.
Well, let's talk about some of the News & 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.
So 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 And protected from the atmosphere, because what people don't realize, I think, quite often, is that when you get samples from space, when they come into contact with this atmosphere, there's lots of gases and moisture.
And it can cause all the delicate materials that are in the asteroids to undergo chemical reactions or to do other things that basically mean that they kind of decompose.
And that means you can't analyse them in their pristine state.
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 January 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.
So 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.
And 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.
And 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 and views 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 exists 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.
And 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 and which reported that yes, there are the building blocks of life in Bennu.
They found amino acids, they found nuclear bases, which are some of the components that you find in DNA.
And so, yeah, that's all really fascinating stuff to find.
Another thing that the News & 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.
So 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.
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.
And it's really important to emphasise 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 & 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 & Views 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.
Exactly, yes.
So a big question in biology is how do you actually define a cell type?
So for many years scientists have been categorising 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.
And 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.
Cells change state over time during development and their molecular profile changes.
So 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 characterise the neurons based on their transcriptomic profile, and then they also do functional studies with them to look at the function of the neurons.
And 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 & 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 & 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.
And we do love a story where assumptions are flipped over, right?
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 categorise 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 organized, how the body is organized, but it doesn't give a full picture because, because a cell type or its state changes through time and over development and what do you think the impact of this might be?
Obviously 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 & View section as well.
But this one maybe isn't looking at perhaps these overarching planetary-scale things going on.
It'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.
So 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.
And 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.
What 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 is 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.
And I'm sure we will see more of these papers coming forward as people do investigate this issue.
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.
So 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.
So there was no data basically in this field about how you would design a super sticky hydrogel.
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.
You can think about things like mussels and bacteria, for example, that thrive in wet environments and which have to 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.
And 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, it's 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.
They 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.
And Andy, why did you choose to cover this paper in the news and views section?
Yeah.
So the key reason I showed 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 & 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.
It's this big tool that people are using 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 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.
I 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 duck based or other.
Tell us about it.
OK, 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 interviewing.
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.
