Category: Imported News

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There is no nature anymore

When people talk about “nature,” they’re generally talking about things that aren’t made by human beings. Rocks. Reefs. Red wolves. But while there is plenty of God’s creation to go around, it is hard to think of anything on Earth that human hands haven’t affected.

Mat Honan

In the Brazilian rainforest, scientists have found microplastics in the bellies of animals ranging from red howler monkeys to manatees. In remotest Yakutia, where much of the earth remains untrodden by human feet, the carbon in the sky above melts the permafrost below. In the Arctic Ocean, artificial light from ship traffic—on the rise as the polar ice cap melts away—now disrupts the nightly journey of zooplankton to the ocean surface, one of the largest animal migrations on the planet. The remote mountain lakes of the Alps are contaminated with all kinds of synthetic chemicals. Polar bears are full of flame retardants. Cesium-137, fallout from nuclear bomb explosions, lightly rimes the entire planet. 

These examples are mostly pollution—nuclear, carbon, chemical, light—but I raise them not to highlight the ways human industry and technology degrade the environment but to note how the things humans build change it. Nobody really knows what the exact effects of all that will be, but my point is that no part of the globe is free of human fingerprints. We have literally changed the world.  

We’ve changed ourselves as well. Humans are especially adept at bending human nature. Everything about us is up for grabs—appearance, health, our very thoughts. Pharmaceuticals, surgeries, vaccines, and hormones give us longer lives, take away our pain, ease our anxiety and depression, make us faster, stronger, more resilient. We’re getting glimpses of technologies that will let us change who our children will become before they’re even born. Electrodes implanted in people’s brains let them control computers and translate thoughts into speech. Prosthetics and exoskeletons straight out of comic books restore and enhance physical abilities, while gene-­editing technologies like CRISPR are rewriting our very DNA. And meanwhile, people have taken the sum total of all the information we have ever written down and poured it into vast calculating machines in an effort—at least by some—to build an intelligence greater than our own. 

So what even is nature, or natural, in this context? Is it “environmentalist,” in the conventional sense, to try to preserve what one could argue no longer exists? Should we employ technology to try to make the world more “natural”?  

Those questions led us to approach this Nature issue with humility. We try to grapple with them all the time—MIT Technology Review is, after all, a review of how people have altered and built upon nature.

And it’s a place to think about how we might repair it. Take solar geoengineering, for example—a subject we have covered with increasing frequency over the past few years. The basic idea of geoengineering is to find a technological fix for a problem technology caused: Burning ­petrochemicals to fuel the Industrial Revolution turned Earth’s atmosphere into a heat sink, fundamentally breaking the climate. Some geoengineers think that releasing particulate matter into the stratosphere would reflect sunlight back into space, thus reducing global temperatures. After years of theoretical discussions, some companies have begun to actively experiment with such technologies. This might seem like a great way to restore the world to a more natural state. It’s also fraught with controversy and peril. It could, for example, benefit some nations while harming others. It may give us license to continue burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases. The list goes on. 

Nature isn’t easy. 

In our May/June issue, we have attempted to take a hard look at nature in our unnatural world. We have stories about birds that can’t sing, wolves that aren’t wolves, and grass that isn’t grass. We look for the meaning of life under Arctic ice and within ourselves—and in the far future, on a distant world, courtesy of new fiction by the renowned author Jeff VanderMeer. I don’t know if any of that will answer the questions I’ve been asking here—but we can’t help but try. It’s in our nature. 

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One town’s scheme to get rid of its geese

“Pull over!” I order my brother one sunny February afternoon. Our target is in sight: a gaggle of Canada geese, pecking at grass near the dog park. As I approach, tiptoeing over their grayish-white poop, I notice that one bird wears a white cuff around its slender black neck. It’s a GPS tracker—part of a new tech-centered campaign to drive the geese out of my hometown of Foster City, California. 

the United States with a dot on the California coast line
__________________________
THE PLACE
Foster City, CA
USA

About 300 geese live in this sleepy Bay Area suburb, equal to nearly 1% of our human population—and some say this town isn’t big enough for the both of us. Goose poop notoriously blanketed our middle school’s lawn, and the birds have hassled residents for generations. My own grandmother remembers when geese took over her garage for five whole minutes before waddling out. She says, “I wanted to kill them, but I thought I’d get in trouble.”

Indeed, that idea doesn’t fly here. City officials backed out of a previous plan to kill 100 geese following uproar from local environmentalists. Still, the poop creates a public health hazard; the birds need to go. 

So the city paid nearly $400,000—roughly $1,300 per goose—to Wildlife Innovations, a company that resolves conflicts between humans and wildlife, to haze the geese with gadgets. The company’s approach is “basically, making the geese less comfortable,” Dan Biteman, head of the goose management plan and senior wildlife biologist at Wildlife Innovations, tells me.

The need for such conflict resolution is on the rise as land development collides with changes in animal behavior. Though overpopulation of Canada geese is a national nuisance in the US, such tensions also surface with other species in this country and elsewhere, including grizzlies on the Montana prairies, coyotes on San Francisco streets, and savanna elephants in Tanzania parks. 

So the people whose job it is to deal with recalcitrant critters are bringing on the gadgets.

Back in Foster City, I spot a black camera mounted to a tree trunk at Gull Park by the lagoon. They’re in seven parks around town, programmed to snap photos every 15 minutes and transmit them back to Wildlife Innovations HQ. If they detect geese, a biologist immediately drives over to disperse the birds. One team member uses devices like lasers or drones; another brings along a goose-hating border collie named Rocky. 

An orange foam pontoon boat with yellow eyes and sharp-looking jagged teeth
Belligerent birds must grapple with the Goosinator.
ANNIKA HOM

As a special measure, staff deploy the “Goosinator,” a small, remote-controlled neon-orange pontoon boat with a fearsome dog-like mouth painted on its bow, meant to evoke geese’s fear of coyotes and bright colors. It comes with attachable wheels and can zoom around on land or water to chase birds away. Biteman tells me the company is thinking about mounting speakers on trees and flying drones that will screech the calls of goose predators like red-tailed hawks or golden eagles. 

The company received federal permits required by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to stick GPS trackers on 10 geese, too. This way, staff can surveil the geese and research their behavior and movements. 

At local goose hangouts, signs that look like “Wanted” posters alert the public to the new plan. As I watch some culprits graze (and defecate) on a church lawn, I think to myself: Enjoy it while it lasts. 

Annika Hom is an award-winning independent journalist. She’s written for National Geographic, Wired, and more.

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3 things Michelle Kim is into right now

Isegye Idol

If you thought K-pop was weird, virtual idols—humans who perform as anime-style digital characters via motion capture—will blow your mind. My favorite is a girl group called Isegye Idol, created by Woowakgood, a Korean VTuber (a streamer who likewise performs as a digital persona). Isegye Idol’s six members are anonymous, which seems to let them deploy a rare breed of honesty and humor. They play games (League of Legends, Go, Minecraft), chitchat, and perform kitschy music that’s somewhere between anime soundtrack and video-­game score. It’s very DIY—and very intimate. And the group’s wild popularity speaks to the mood of Gen Z South Koreans, famously lonely and culturally adrift—struggling to find work, giving up on dating, trying to find friendships online. Isegye Idol shows what a magical online universe people can build when reality stops working for them.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Pavel Talankin didn’t have the easiest life as a schoolteacher in the copper-­smelting town of Karabash, Russia; UNESCO once called it the most toxic place on Earth. But video he shot, partially in secret, makes it clear he loved it—the smokestacks, the cold, the ice mustache he’d get walking around outside, and, most of all, his bright-eyed students. That makes it all the more painful when a distant, grinding war and state propaganda change the town. An antiwar progressive with a democracy flag in his classroom, Talankin had to deal with a new patriotic curriculum, mandatory parades, visits from mercenaries—and the loss of the creative space he’d built with his students. Talankin’s footage tells his story in this Oscar-winning documentary from director David Borenstein, and what struck me most is how strange it is being an adult around kids. We shape them in profound ways we might not even recognize.

Repertoire by James Acaster

I am the kind of person who will pay $150 to watch a comedian in a smelly theater in San Francisco that charges $20 for a can of water—because I am crazy enough to hope that standup will not die. In February, I saw the British comedian James Acaster perform live … and it was a mediocre show. But Repertoire, his 2018 miniseries on Netflix, is gold. Shot shortly after Acaster went through a breakup, the four-part show features him portraying, among other characters, a cop who goes undercover as a standup comedian, forgets who he is, and gets divorced. And then things get weird. “What if every relationship you’ve ever been in,” Acaster asks, “is somebody slowly figuring out they didn’t like you as much as they hoped they would?” If the best comedy comes from paying attention to the hellhole that you’re in, I wish Acaster many more pitfalls.

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Antigen‑Stabilized Nanobody Probes Enable On‑Demand, Multicolor Protein Imaging

Fluorescent probes have reshaped how biologists study living systems, making it possible to watch viruses invade cells, follow the cell’s internal waste‑disposal machinery, and track the signaling events that fuel tumor growth. Yet even with decades of innovation, a fundamental limitation has persisted: most fluorescent nanobody probes glow whether or not they are bound to their targets. That constant background haze can blur the very molecular details researchers are trying to resolve.

A new imaging platform developed by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies aims to eliminate that problem entirely. The technology, described in Nature Methods in a paper titled “Synthetic multicolor antigen-stabilizable nanobody platform for intersectional labelling and functional imaging,” uses engineered fluorescent nanobodies that become brightly fluorescent only when they bind their intended protein targets. These “on‑demand” probes, known as VIS‑Fbs (visible-spectrum target-stabilizable fluorescent nanobodies), illuminate proteins inside living cells and animals with far greater clarity than conventional tools.

“The key advantage of our approach is that the signal appears only where the target protein is present,” said Vladislav Verkhusha, PhD, co‑corresponding author and professor of genetics at Einstein. “That eliminates the background glow that has long limited the precision of intracellular imaging.” His collaborator, Axel Nimmerjahn, PhD, professor and the Françoise Gilot‑Salk Chair at Salk, added, “This work establishes a versatile platform for imaging proteins with high specificity and minimal background. It opens new opportunities to study how molecular and cellular processes unfold in real time across diverse biological systems.”

Nanobodies have become increasingly valuable for live‑cell imaging because they can be engineered to bind specific proteins with high affinity. But their ongoing fluorescence has remained a stubborn obstacle. The VIS‑Fb design solves this by making the probes unstable when unbound; they rapidly degrade unless they encounter their target. Binding stabilizes the nanobody and triggers bright fluorescence, reducing background noise by as much as 100‑fold. The team also created VIS‑Fbs that span nearly the entire visible spectrum, from blue to far red, enabling simultaneous tracking of multiple proteins or cellular processes within the same cell.

The researchers developed a modular engineering platform, instead of a single probe, capable of generating VIS‑Fbs for a wide range of targets and experimental needs. They integrated more than 20 fluorescent proteins and biosensors into multiple nanobody scaffolds, creating a flexible system that supports multicolor imaging, light‑switchable variants for precise temporal control, and functional readouts of ions and metabolites. This allows the probes not only to show where proteins are but also to show what those proteins are doing in real time. According to first author Natalia Barykina, PhD, “The VIS‑Fb approach allows us to identify and track specific cell populations in living organisms based on the proteins they express, rather than just their location.”

In mice, VIS‑Fbs allowed for high‑contrast imaging of neuronal and astrocyte activity during behavior. In zebrafish embryos, the probes captured rapid developmental changes and responses to drugs that modulate signaling pathways. “Our results show that this imaging platform offers a much clearer and more precise view of how proteins behave inside living systems,” Verkhusha said. “It opens the door to studying complex biological processes, such as cell signaling, development, and disease progression, in new ways.”

The post Antigen‑Stabilized Nanobody Probes Enable On‑Demand, Multicolor Protein Imaging appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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Opinion: NASA’s plans for living in space should prioritize immunology and infectious disease

In the aftermath of the successful Artemis II mission, NASA is moving forward with the next steps of its plans to establish a base on the moon. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, crews will be operating at the lunar base within the next decade with an even more ambitious long-term goal: Mars. 

Human health in the space environment will be an important factor in these efforts. Among the concerns NASA should consider is the potential impacts of immunology and infectious disease. 

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Are MAHA snacks really better for you? Nutrition experts parse a grocery aisle gold rush

Vani Hari has 2.3 million followers on Instagram, and about as many ideas for healthy food swaps. An entrepreneur and influential food activist in the Make America Healthy Again movement, Hari gives regular shout-outs to substitutes for snacks that contain corn syrup, seed oils, and other ingredients on health-conscious Americans’ blacklist.

For Valentine’s Day, YumEarth choco yums instead of artificially dyed M&Ms. (“Let me say these treats are BETTER, but they are still candy,” Hari writes.) For Super Bowl parties, Jackson’s avocado oil potato chips rather than Lay’s. Looking for a less processed alternative to Chick-fil-A’s frosted lemonade? Why not make your own with lemon-flavored protein powder from Hari’s own brand, Truvani. At least one attempt at a healthy food swap struck out with Hari: PepsiCo’s recently debuted dye-free line of Cheetos and Doritos. “This is dumb,” she wrote on Instagram. “Creating a whole NEW product, instead of FIXING their old product.” 

Though the vast majority — 84% — of Americans said eating healthfully was at least moderately important to them in a recent Deloitte survey, most admit their own habits fall short of their aspirations. The $156 billion packaged snack industry has spotted a business opportunity in catering to people seeking a more enlightened way of noshing. 

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Opinion: Behind every miracle drug is a story

Have you ever wondered how many drugs are behind the counter at your local pharmacy?

According to Thomas Goetz — a journalist, entrepreneur, and host of the new podcast “Drug Story” —  “there are over 3,000 drugs behind a typical pharmacist counter.” And behind each drug is a story.

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