The hunter-gatherer lifestyle fosters a thriving gut microbiome

Hello Nature readers,
Today we learn that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle fosters a thriving gut microbiome and explore the Ukrainian plan to rebuild science after the war (and the fall of the Soviet system).

Hunter-gatherers’ diverse gut microbiome

A huge effort to sequence the microbiomes of hunter-gatherers, farmers and city-dwellers shows that the Western lifestyle seems to hobble the diversity of gut-bacteria populations. The microbiomes of the Hadza people — a hunter-gatherer society in northern Tanzania — have more than twice as many species as those of Californians. Foragers and farmers in Nepal seemed to occupy a middle ground in terms of gut diversity. Furthermore, the California gut-microbe species often contained genes associated with responding to oxidative damage — which might be a knock-on effect of chronic inflammation.

Elemental-analysis standard is unreliable

Scientific publisher Wiley has abandoned the accuracy standard for elemental analysis after a study found that it isn’t scientifically justifiable. Elemental analysis is a common chemistry technique to determine a material’s purity. Publishers usually require results to fall within a tight error margin of ±0.4%. This frustrates many researchers who need to ship off samples and pay for high-accuracy results. A team of researchers found that almost 11% of identical samples they sent to 17 commercial analysis laboratories failed to meet the standard.

The rebirth of Ukrainian science

The war is far from over, but Ukraine’s government is already considering how to rebuild science — and use the opportunity to move on from a Soviet-era system that gives little power to working scientists. Among the challenges: protecting Ukraine’s existing researchers and tempting those who have left to return. “Without science, Ukraine would be just another mainly agricultural country, and with all the war damage to our ecology, we can’t even hope to come to pre-war export quantities,” says theoretical physicist Oleksiy Kolezhuk, one of the key advisers to the government on reshaping the research system. “How on earth are we going to support ourselves and prosper, if we continue to neglect science?”

Futures: The incident at Penn Station

Investigators track a suspicious package to a shocking source in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.

Five best science books this week

Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a profound, sparkling global ocean voyage to understand the planet’s ‘blue machine’ and an intriguing analysis of the science of reading.

Podcast: The Y chromosome affects cancer

Loss of the Y chromosome in some cells, which occurs naturally with age, raises the risk of aggressive bladder cancer because Y-chromosome loss helps tumour cells to evade the immune system. In mice, cells lacking the Y chromosome create an environment that paralyses and exhausts T cells, which are a key part of the immune system. “But this exhausting environment made by the tumours could actually be their undoing,” physician Dan Theodorescu tells the Nature Podcast. The tumour cells become particularly vulnerable to chemotherapy treatments called immune checkpoint inhibitors.