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Bare sand and dead tree trunks stand in a nearly empty dam near CapeTown. (Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty)
Cape Town scientists plan for ‘Day Zero’
Cape Town, South Africa, is poised to become the world’s first major city to run out of water after three years of severe drought. ‘Day Zero’ is estimated to arrive on 12 April, and scientists are scrambling to determine how the crisis will affect their research and daily lives.
Christoph Sator/ DPA/ PA
Philippines volcano
Mount Mayon in the Philippines has been erupting for two weeks, disrupting the lives of more than 74,000 people who have been forced to evacuate.
Hunter Hoffman, www.vrpain.com
Virtual reality comes of age
In a new book, psychologist Jeremy Bailenson expounds how virtual reality can let you experience a risk-free world, walk a mile in another person’s shoes — or, as in the image below, be distracted from physical pain. But the book shies away from exploring some of the technology’s darker sides, says reviewer Ramin Skibba.
“After 12 months in office, Trump’s impact on science can be neatly divided into two categories: bad things that people expected, and bad things that they didn’t.”
A Nature editorial says the one bright side of US President Donald Trump’s administration is the surge of political activity by scientists motivated to oppose him. (Nature)
Zhong Zhong, one of two cloned macaque monkeys. (Qiang Sun and Mu-ming Poo, CAS)
First ever cloned primates
After decades of trying, biologists have finally cloned primates — a pair of long-tailed macaque monkeys — using the technique that made Dolly the sheep. The team plan to create genetically identical primate populations for scientists to use as animal models of human diseases such as cancer.
3D imaging offers new viewsof antirrhinum (snapdragon) buds. (Karen Lee/Xana Rebocho/John Innes Centre)
The botanists are back
Molecular tools and DNA sequencing made some plant morphologists like Elizabeth Kellogg feel that their skills at analysing plant forms were obsolete. “It was like I had learned how to make illuminated manuscripts, and then somebody invented the printing press,” she says. But advances in imaging technology and gene editing are prompting a return to the study of plant forms to explain the evolution and function of plants.
The mysterious femur (long bone, centre right) was discovered in Chad in2001. (Alain Beauvilain)
Controversial bone will stay a mystery for now
A 7-million-year-old femur that could confirm the earliest known hominin will remain an enigma for now, after conference organizers rejected an abstract from two scientists who analysed the bone briefly in 2004. Few scientists have had access to the specimen since it was discovered in 2001, and it has never been thoroughly described in a published scientific paper.
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