Francesca Cesari
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Francesca Cesari
@francesari.bsky.social
2.6K followers 56 following 75 posts
Chief Biological, Clinical and Social Sciences Editor of Nature

Any views expressed here are my own
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francesari.bsky.social
Snake bites kill/debilitate 1000s of people annually in Sub-Saharan African. A new nanobody cocktail is shown to be highly effective against 17 of the most dangerous African snake species. Unlike other anti-venoms it also protects against venom-induced dermal necrosis🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Nanobody-based recombinant antivenom for cobra, mamba and rinkhals bites - Nature
A recombinant antivenom composed of eight nanobodies provides broad protection against venom-induced lethality and dermonecrosis in mice challenged with venoms from cobras, mambas and rinkha...
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October 30, 2025 at 7:26 AM
francesari.bsky.social
A new study in published in Nature presents a comprehensive resource of immunological changes occurring during normal aging 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Multi-omic profiling reveals age-related immune dynamics in healthy adults - Nature
This multi-omic longitudinal analysis of the healthy human peripheral immune system constructs the Human Immune Health Atlas and assembles data on immune cell composition and state changes w...
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October 30, 2025 at 7:20 AM
francesari.bsky.social
Where do invertebrates without calcium-rich bones or shells store their calcium? In the fruit-fly, at least, it’s the malpighian tubules, where calcium is mobilised by a neuropeptide hormone called Capability. 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Neuroendocrine control of calcium mobilization in the fruit fly - Nature
The peptide hormone Capa is responsible for regulating extracellular fluid Ca2+ levels in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
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October 30, 2025 at 7:19 AM
francesari.bsky.social
An article in Nature reports that ecosystem energy flow, through food consumption by wild birds and mammals, has decreased by over one third in sub-Saharan Africa since around 1700 🧪
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Energy flows reveal declining ecosystem functions by animals across Africa - Nature
An ecosystem energetics approach, quantifying trophic energy flows across species, offers a unified framework for linking animal biodiversity loss to changes in ecosystem function and Earth system pro...
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October 30, 2025 at 7:17 AM
francesari.bsky.social
A short-necked sauropodomorph from a new Triassic locality in Argentina shows sign of the neck extension that characterised its larger, later cousins.🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A long-necked early dinosaur from a newly discovered Upper Triassic basin in the Andes - Nature
Discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of Huayracursor jaguensis, a Carnian dinosaur from the Northern Precordillera Basin in northwestern Argentina provides evidence of increased body size and early...
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October 23, 2025 at 1:18 PM
francesari.bsky.social
A vaccine central in A(H5) influenza virus antigenic space confers subtype-wide immunity 🧪👇
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A vaccine central in A(H5) influenza antigenic space confers broad immunity - Nature
A high-resolution antigenic map of influenza A(H5) haemagglutinin (HA) enables the design of immunogenic and antigenically central vaccine HA antigens that elicit antibody responses broadly covering t...
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October 23, 2025 at 1:16 PM
francesari.bsky.social
A paper in Nature presents MetaGraph, which indexes petabase-scale biological sequences for accurate and efficient searches across vast sequence space 🧪👇
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Efficient and accurate search in petabase-scale sequence repositories - Nature
MetaGraph enables scalable indexing of large sets of DNA, RNA or protein sequences using annotated de Bruijn graphs.
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October 8, 2025 at 4:54 PM
francesari.bsky.social
🧪 Women are represented as younger than men across occupations/social roles in data from Google,Wikipedia,IMDB, Flickr,YouTube and LLMs.The bias is strongest for occupations with high status/earnings.ChatGPT perpetuates this bias when generating and evaluating resumes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models - Nature
Stereotypes of age-related gender bias are socially distorted, as evidenced by the age gap in the representations of women and men across various media and algorithms, despite no systematic age differences in the workforce.
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October 8, 2025 at 4:53 PM
francesari.bsky.social
An article in Nature tracks trends in freshwater fish biodiversity in streams and rivers across the US over the last three decades and finds that fish biodiversity diverged across cold and warm streams, with a disproportionately large impact on cold streams.🧪
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Diverging fish biodiversity trends in cold and warm rivers and streams - Nature
In the past three decades, fish abundance, richness and uniqueness have diverged across cold and warm streams, and the effects on native fish communities of stream warming and increases in introduced fishes have magnified each other.
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September 25, 2025 at 5:22 PM
francesari.bsky.social
A study in Nature uncovers the mechanism behind a new metabolic class of drug for treatment of neuroblastoma 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reprogramming neuroblastoma by diet-enhanced polyamine depletion - Nature
Enhanced polyamine depletion in neuroblastoma models decreases translation of mRNA codons with adenosine in the third position, reprogramming the tumour proteome away from cell cycle progression and towards differentiation.
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September 25, 2025 at 5:20 PM
francesari.bsky.social
In a Perspective article in Nature the Biodiversity Cell Atlas describes its plans and goals for mapping the tree of life with single-cell genomics technologies🧪👇
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The Biodiversity Cell Atlas: mapping the tree of life at cellular resolution - Nature
The Biodiversity Cell Atlas aims to create comprehensive single-cell molecular atlases across the eukaryotic tree of life, which will be phylogenetically informed, rely on high-quality genomes and use shared standards to facilitate comparisons across species.
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September 25, 2025 at 5:14 PM
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A new study projects global burned areas and wildfire emissions using a machine learning–based approach, and estimates their impact on related mortality 🧪👇
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Global warming amplifies wildfire health burden and reshapes inequality - Nature
Nature - Global warming amplifies wildfire health burden and reshapes inequality
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September 19, 2025 at 11:10 AM
francesari.bsky.social
Repeated head trauma causes neuron loss and inflammation in young athletes 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
and the paper 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Years of hits to the head prime the brain for decline
Repetitive head impacts trigger neuronal loss and disrupt blood vessels and immune cells long before the accumulation of neurotoxic tau protein.
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September 19, 2025 at 11:06 AM
francesari.bsky.social
A study in Nature presents Delphi-2M, a medical AI tool for predicting future health-related events using data from medical records. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Learning the natural history of human disease with generative transformers - Nature
Delphi-2M forecasts a person’s future health, covering more than 1,000 diseases, provides insights into co-morbidity dynamics and generates synthetic data for the training of AI models that have never...
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September 19, 2025 at 11:02 AM
francesari.bsky.social
Do people cheat more when they delegate tasks to AI? A Nature paper shows that they do, and that LLMs are far more likely than humans to carry out unethical instructions (though it was possible to minimize this by including task-specific prohibitive guardrails).🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Delegation to artificial intelligence can increase dishonest behaviour - Nature
People cheat more when they delegate tasks to artificial intelligence, and large language models are more likely than humans to comply with unethical instructions—a risk that can be minimized by ...
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September 19, 2025 at 11:00 AM
francesari.bsky.social
A new study in Nature reports the development of programmable antisense oligomers (ASOs) to silence genes of both DNA and RNA phages, and is applied to understand the functions and phenotypes associated with key genes in jumbo phage ΦKZ
🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Programmable antisense oligomers for phage functional genomics - Nature
Establishing antisense oligomers as versatile, non-genetic tools to silence phage mRNAs opens applications in basic research and biotechnology, as shown by identifying essential factors for propagatio...
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September 11, 2025 at 10:51 AM
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A study in Nature presents a new classification of human skeletal muscle subtypes in cancer cachexia, based on transcriptomics, including a comparison between human and rodent datasets. 🧪👇
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Molecular subtypes of human skeletal muscle in cancer cachexia - Nature
Unbiased clustering analysis of the skeletal muscle RNAome in patients with cancer identifies two molecular subtypes, one of which distinguishes individuals with cachexia and indicates ...
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September 11, 2025 at 10:49 AM
francesari.bsky.social
The ant Messor ibericus lays eggs that develop into males of two different species. Females of one of the species clone males of the other. This may be the first known case of a male-only clonal lineage that reproduces solely through other species’ ova.🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature
In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...
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September 3, 2025 at 3:29 PM
francesari.bsky.social
Using epidemiological methods, a new study finds that the spread of the Great Fear during the French Revolution was not a result of emotional distress but rather the apparition of multiple independent locations. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789 - Nature
Epidemiological methods are used to show that the Great Fear of 1789, a series of peasant insurrections in rural revolutionary France, was driven by deliberate political action rather than spontaneous...
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September 3, 2025 at 2:36 PM
francesari.bsky.social
A study in Nature provides new global maps of land surface phenology that document the diversity, convergence and asynchrony of ecosystem function 👇🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Global phenology maps reveal the drivers and effects of seasonal asynchrony - Nature
A global land surface phenology map predicts complex geographical discontinuities in flowering phenology, genetic divergence and harvest seasonality across a range of taxa.
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September 3, 2025 at 2:24 PM
francesari.bsky.social
A paper published in Nature presents genomic datasets for chaetognaths that illuminate the evolutionary history of these animals and their body plan. They also allow for their phylogenetic placement 👇🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The genomic origin of the unique chaetognath body plan - Nature
Genomic, single-cell transcriptomic and epigenetic analyses show that chaetognaths, following extensive gene loss in the gnathiferan lineage, relied on newly evolved genes and lineage-specific tandem ...
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August 27, 2025 at 12:37 PM
francesari.bsky.social
A new chemical signalling system in species belonging to the Bacteroidota phylum regulates a range of distinct biosynthetic gene clusters and operates in an analogous manner to the quorum sensing systems of the well-studied Proteobacteria. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Discovery of a widespread chemical signalling pathway in the Bacteroidota - Nature
The N-acyl-cyclolysine system regulates the expression of co-localized operons encoding diverse secreted molecules in Bacteroidota.
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August 27, 2025 at 12:32 PM
francesari.bsky.social
The >1000 lipid species found in eukaryotic cells have vital functions. Using a combination of microscopy, spectroscopy and modelling, scientists report the first quantitative map of retrograde flux of individual lipids in cells. 🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Quantitative imaging of lipid transport in mammalian cells - Nature
Directional, non-vesicular lipid transport is responsible for fast, species-selective lipid sorting into organelle membranes.
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August 22, 2025 at 5:38 AM
francesari.bsky.social
New discoveries of an Australopithecus and Homo from Ethiopia dated to around 2.5 million years ago showed that the two genera were more or less contemporaneous.🧪👇
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New discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia - Nature
Hominin fossils from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area, Ethiopia, suggest that early Homo and Australopithecus species co-existed in the region more than 2.5 million years ago.
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August 20, 2025 at 5:24 PM
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An unusual metabolite-based mechanism serves as protective layer against dysfunction of essential enzymes. A metabolite produced by the enzyme TGDS is crucial for rescuing the activity of UXS1 in low-NAD⁺ environments - its deficiency leads to Catel-Manzke syndrome.🧪👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A missing enzyme-rescue metabolite as cause of a rare skeletal dysplasia - Nature
In mammals, the enzyme TGDS produces UDP-4-keto-6-deoxyglucose, which binds to the catalytic pocket of UDP-xylose synthase, thereby regenerating the essential NAD+ cofactor of UDP-xylose synthase...
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August 20, 2025 at 5:22 PM