Hello Nature readers,
Today we learn that a gene that causes obesity also shields against heart disease. Plus, we hear that grant success is getting tougher in Europe and discover what happened when two cryptography fans found the solution to an iconic puzzle in plain view.

Obesity gene shields against heart disease

People with obesity due to relatively rare forms of a gene called MC4R have lower levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol and reduced rates of heart disease than do people with a similar body-mass index. The study emerged from an effort to understand the fundamental mechanisms that regulate body weight and why some people with obesity maintain good heart health. The results could point the way to better ways of staving off cardiovascular disease, suggest researchers.

Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Nature Medicine paper

Grant battle is getting tougher in Europe

Success rates for Europe’s leading research grants are declining — some to single percentage points — as a surge in applications far outweighs the funds available. Data gathered by Nature show that researchers, especially those at the start of their academic journeys, are facing increasingly fierce competition to pursue research careers. “We’re extremely pleased that there is such a high demand for ERC grants. It shows that people have ideas for fundamental science, for frontier science, that there’s a need for it, there’s a desire for it,” says Maria Leptin, president of the ERC. “The flip side is we don’t have more money.”

Nature | 6 min read

Shining the light inside cells

Fluorescent dyes can help researchers to visualize the structure of a cell — but it can be difficult to use more than a handful because their colours only vary by so much. Now researchers have designed more than two dozen fluorescent proteins that differ not only by colour, but also in how much time they spend in their excited state — a property called the fluorescence lifetime. The researchers call these molecules time-resolved fluorescent proteins, or tr-FPs.

Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Cell paper

Solution to iconic CIA puzzle sets off chaos

One of the most compelling cryptographic puzzles in the world sits outside the headquarters of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Now two aficionados of Kryptos, a sculpture by Jim Sanborn, have cracked the code — not through mathematics but by using library science. They realized that the answer to the last remaining unsolved portion was hiding in plain sight in the Smithsonian’s archives. So far, they have kept the solution to themselves — but their discovery has kicked off a chain of events that encompasses the mercurial art market, the passionate cipher community, the sculptor’s own wishes and the question of what a ‘solution’ really means.

The New York Times | 8 min read

Futures: Warning signs

A pair of overconfident explorers are faced with a dire warning in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.

Nature | 6 min read

Podcast: one vaccine against many bird flus

The H5 subtype of influenza viruses — which includes the H5N1 bird flu virus that is infecting US dairy cows, and killing poultry, wild birds and mammals — could cause a pandemic if a variant evolves to spread between people. But, because there are multiple possible culprits, it has been hard to pre-prepare vaccines. Now, a team has used information on how H5 variants evolved to design a vaccine that, in animal studies, confers broad immunity.

Nature Podcast | 22 min listen
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