Nature Podcast15 Jan 2025

AI-designed antivenoms could help treat lethal snakebites

00:46 Designing new antivenoms to treat snakebites

Researchers have shown that machine learning can quickly design antivenoms that are effective against lethal snake-toxins, which they hope will help tackle a serious public health issue. Thousands of people die as a result of snakebites each year, but treatment options are limited, expensive and often difficult to access in the resource-poor settings where most bites occur. The computer-aided approach allowed researchers to design two proteins that provided near total protection against individual snake toxins in mouse experiments. While limited in scope, the team behind the work believe these results demonstrate the promise of the approach in designing effective and cheaper treatments for use in humans.

Research Article: Vázquez Torres et al.

11:28 Research Highlights

How male wasp spiders use hairs on their legs to sniff out mates, and how noradrenaline drives waves of cleansing fluid through the brain.

Research Highlight: Male spiders smell with their legs

Research Highlight: How the brain cleans itself during deep sleep

13:53 Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time

News broke last week that in 2024, Earth’s average temperature climbed to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Although this is only a single year so far, we discuss what breaking this significant threshold means for the 2015 Paris climate agreement and what climate scientists understand about the speed that Earth is heating up.

Nature: Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?

23:39 Briefing Chat

NASA delays deciding its strategy for collecting and returning Mars rocks to Earth, and why papers on a handful of bacterial species dominate the scientific literature.

Nature: NASA still has no plan for how to bring precious Mars rocks to Earth

Nature: These are the 20 most-studied bacteria — the majority have been ignored

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