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A genome study offers insights into rats’ uncanny ability to conquer cities such as New York, where there are thought to be about 2 million of the creatures. Geneticists identified dozens of genes involved in diet, behaviour and movement that might have helped rats to thrive in the Big Apple. “As both an evolutionary biologist and a New Yorker, I can’t help but be amazed by the ways that rats have adapted to urban environments,” says population-geneticist Arbel Harpak.

Nature | 4 min read

After a mysterious four-month fading streak, Betelgeuse could be on its way to regaining its shine. Easily recognizable as the right ‘shoulder’ in the constellation Orion, the star had lost more than two-thirds of its brilliance by mid-February — a difference noticeable to the naked eye. Astrophysicists have since noticed the star brighten by around 10% from its dimmest point. The reasons for the dimming remain a puzzle.

Nature | 4 min read

Features & opinion

Although artificial-intelligence companies market software for recognizing emotions in faces, psychologists debate whether expressions can be read so easily. Influential research in the 1960s and 1970s suggested that emotional expressions are universal, and the idea stood largely unchallenged for a generation. Many researchers now think that the picture is a lot more complicated, and that facial expressions vary widely between contexts and cultures.

Nature | 11 min read

Peer review is a cornerstone of science, so we need data to study and improve it, argue 29 bibliometricians and representatives of publishers. They urge journals, funders and scholars to work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review. “Accumulating the sort of data we envisage might seem like a pipe dream,” they say, but examples of data sharing and collaboration outside scholarly publishing show that it is possible.

Nature | 4 min read

A student in Sébastien Vidal’s lab accidentally stabbed himself with a syringe containing a residual amount of dichloromethane, one of the most common organic solvents used in a synthetic chemistry laboratory. The student almost lost his finger. Vidal shares a first-hand account of the accident (with somewhat gruesome photos of the injured finger) to spread the word of the danger of this compound and urge the scientific community to develop safer methods.

ACS Central Science | 8 min read

Infographic of the week

Figure 1 | Human foot arches. The longitudinal arch of the human foot has been proposed2,3 to have a key role in providing stiffness for the foot, an attribute that enables humans to walk on the ground on two feet. Venkadesan et al.1 report that another foot arch — the transverse arch, which is in the vicinity of the metatarsal bones — makes a major contribution to foot stiffness.

The longitudinal arch has long been considered a crucial structure that provides stiffness to the human foot. Now the transverse arch is stepping into the spotlight, with a proposed central role in the evolution of human foot stiffness. (Nature | 6 min read)

Reference: Nature paper