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Animals that survive the fires, like this wombat pictured in New South Wales, will struggle to find food and shelter.Credit: Wolter Peeters/The Sydney Morning Herald/Getty

“It is deathly silent when you go into a forest after a fire,” says ecologist Michael Clarke, who has studied the effect of fires on Australian ecosystems since one tore through his field site 15 years ago. “Apart from the ‘undertakers’ — the carrion eaters like currawongs, ravens and shrike-thrushes — picking off the dead bodies, there’s nothing much left in the forest. It’s a chilling experience.” Clarke spoke to Nature about why this years’ bush fires are different, creating new challenges for wildlife and recovery.

Nature | 5 min read

Many faculty members and students at Canadian universities were among the people killed when Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 crashed shortly after take-off from Tehran on 8 January. Universities across the country have lowered flags to half mast and planned gatherings to honour the dead. Of the 176 people on the flight, 138 were connecting to Canada, which does not have any direct flights with Iran.

Nature | 4 min read

Read biographies of many of the people who lost their lives, including 18 PhD students. (The Globe and Mail)

A second example of a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) has been traced to its origin — a nearby, “fairly ordinary” spiral galaxy. FRBs last for only milliseconds, making them incredibly difficult to trace — only four have been localized, including one other repeating one. The newly measured FRB’s home galaxy is quite different from those of the other four, deepening the mystery of what causes the extragalactic signals.“Identifying the host galaxy for FRBs is critical to tell us about what kind of environments FRBs live in, and thus what might actually be producing FRBs,” says astrophysicist Sarah Burke-Spolaor. “This is a question for which scientists are still grasping at straws.”

The Independent | 4 min read

Explore the possible explanations (and why it’s probably not aliens) with astrophysicist Matthew Bailes in the Nature News & Views article.

Reference: Nature paper

Using any single day of weather observations, researchers can now detect the fingerprint of externally driven climate change and conclude that Earth as a whole is warming. Climate scientists compared how the effects of human-caused warming, predicted by statistical learning and climate model simulations, compared to a global snapshot of the actual weather. They found an anthropogenic signal of global warming for any single day since mid-2012. When looking at annual data, the signal is clear at the global scale since 1999.“We’ve always said when you look at weather, that’s not the same as climate,” says climate physicist Reto Knutti. “That’s still true locally; if you are in one particular place and you only know the weather right now, right here, there isn’t much you can say.” However, “global mean temperature on a single day is already quite a bit shifted. You can see this human fingerprint in any single moment”.

The Washington Post | 5 min read

Explore the research and implications with climate scientist Seung-Ki Min in the Nature Climate Change News & Views article.

Reference: Nature Climate Change paper

Features & opinion

Geneticists must consider their responsibilities to the people held in US immigration detention centres who might be forced to hand over their DNA to the government, argues public-health geneticist Charleen Adams. “Given that the proposed policy casts migrants as would-be criminals, the genetics community has a duty to discuss how the US government plans to use our field’s staple technology,” argues Adams.

Genetics Society of America blog | 12 min read

From Mars missions to modified mosquitoes, the Nature Podcast explores what science has in store for the new year.

Nature Podcast | 10 min listen

Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts or Spotify.

Books & culture

Credit: Getty

The long-awaited novel from science-fiction giant William Gibson forces us to think about what future we wish for, says reviewer Liesbeth Venema. The book shuttles mind-bendingly between the future of our own timeline and the present day in a world where Donald Trump never became US president, Brexit never happened — and the world is beset by catastrophe.

Nature | 4 min read

A tiny desert ant (Cataglyphis spp.) has navigational skills that would put a human’s to shame. Neuroethologist Rüdiger Wehner’s sumptuous new book explores how the creature develops a sophisticated repertoire of navigation behaviour from a toolkit of relatively simple elements.

Nature | 5 min read

Five best science books this week Barbara Kiser’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes how to age well, a culinary journey, and why you’re not as gullible as you thought. Nature | 3 min read

Where I work

Martyn Poliakoff is a green chemist at the University of Nottingham, UK.Credit: Leonora Saunders for Nature

Chemist Martyn Poliakoff says he usually greets visitors to his office by apologizing for the mess. The clutter includes hundreds of plastic bottles acquired during a long-running project to make greener plastic and dozens of items illustrating his role as a popularizer of the periodic table. “I think that having lots of pictures, lots of toys hanging around is a good way of relaxing the mind and fostering innovation,” says Poliakoff.