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Credit: Brett Gundlock for Nature

For nearly a decade, scientists could only watch by satellite as gold hunters in La Pampa, Peru, mowed down some of the most biodiverse rainforest on the planet. The government has stamped down on illegal mining, but all that’s left is a barren, mercury-polluted wasteland. Researchers are studying this inadvertent experiment in an attempt to see whether the area will return to rainforest — or evolve into an entirely new human-made ecosystem.

Nature | 7 min read

Mycologist Mabel Torres, the leader of Colombia’s first science agency, says she has created a fungus extract that can treat cancer. Torres describes the extract as “like a tea” and says that some people with cancer have entered into remission after taking the brew for a few months. “At no time have I simplistically proposed that this species [could] be the cure for cancer,” said Torres in a statement.

Nature | 5 min read

Features & opinion

CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing has become a fixture in the laboratory, but has turned out to be more difficult than initially thought — at least as a therapeutic technique — in people. An approach that uses RNA can tweak proteins without making permanent changes to a person’s DNA (or burdening them forever with editing errors). A handful of start-up companies are beginning to use RNA-editing systems to develop potential treatments for everything from genetic diseases such as muscular dystrophy to temporary maladies such as acute pain.

Nature | 12 min read

“Deadlines lose meaning when you deal with evolutionary timescales,” jokes molecular biologist Harmit Malik in a wide-ranging interview. Malik reveals his thoughts on the pros and cons of science on Twitter, how he undid his greatest mistake and how a generous professor changed his path from chemical engineering by offering him a one-on-one class in molecular biology.

Current Biology | 11 min read

Image of the week

Nanfang Yu and Cheng-Chia Tsai/Columbia Engineering

Butterfly wings are for more than flapping and showing off: they are loaded with living cells that can sense temperature and provide real-time mechanical feedback to enable complex flying patterns. Some species even have a ’wing heart’ that beats a few dozen times per minute to direct insect blood to an area that produces mate-attracting scent. Researchers have used detailed thermal imaging to reveal these living structures and the specialized temperature-regulating behaviours and wing scales that protect them. (Cosmos | 4 min read)

Reference: Nature Communications paper