One of my favourite summer pastimes is enjoying a cold beer in a bar with friends after work. But not just any beer ' it has to be a lager. And I am not alone. With its crisp and refreshing profile, lager accounts for more than 90% of the global beer market. However, all lager beers taste quite similar, and the diversity of flavours and aromas is limited. This is mainly due to the small numbers of commercial yeast available for production. But what if we could break free from these constraints and create completely new and exciting flavours' Yeast are unicellular fungi that ferment sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. For centuries, humans have used yeast, consciously or unconsciously, to produce fermented foods, such as wine, beer and bread. The traditional lager yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus, is a hybrid cross between two yeast species: S. cerevisiae (used for producing wine and ale beer) and S.eubayanus (a wild species found on trees). However, this long history of selective breeding, similar to what we see in our livestock, crops and pets has also narrowed the genetic diversity of lager yeast, resulting in a strongly limited range of available flavours and aromas ' leaving little room for innovation....

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing's Querida Anderson chats with Lawrence Ingrassia about his book A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery (Henry Holt and Co./Macmillan Publishers, May 2024). Ingrassia details his family's battle with numerous cancers, spotlights the pioneers who worked tirelessly to solve the puzzle of genetic mutations, and explores the ongoing advancement in cancer research and development. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can also watch the full video at the end of this page. A Fatal Inheritance is a memoir and medical detective story about my family and families like mine who question seemingly unrelated cancer diagnoses and about the doctors who solved the medical mystery behind those cancers. The writing process helped me expand my understanding of cancer and cancer treatment improvement. Initially, I didn't plan to write a book. I wanted to learn more about Li-Fraumeni syndrome, the cancer condition that robbed me of my family. My mother died of breast cancer at 42, and my youngest sister died of abdominal cancer at 24. Additionally, my other sister died of lung cancer at 32, my brother died of cancer at 69, and his son was diagnosed with his first cancer when he was only two years old....

For years, scientists ' and the public ' in China have been fascinated by Qizai, the only brown-and-white panda in captivity. Found abandoned in the wild, he lives at Louguantai Wild Animal Breeding and Protection Center in Xi'An. Only seven brown-and-white pandas have ever been documented ' all from Qinling, a mountain range in the Chinese province of Shaanxi. 'Previous studies2 suggested that Qinling pandas may have been separated from Sichuan pandas around 300,000 years ago,' says Hu, a conservation geneticist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. Hu and his colleagues studied the genomic information of three 'family trios' ' a pair of panda parents and their cub ' associated with two brown pandas, along with the genomes of 29 other black-and-white pandas. The trios were Qizai and his parents; Qizai, his mate and their cub; and Dandan ' the first brown panda to be documented in China, nearly four decades ago ' her mate and their cub. Among them, only Qizai and the now-deceased Dandan are brown and white....

Some geneticists have expressed their unease about a figure in a high-profile Nature paper that was published earlier this week1, noting that it could be misinterpreted as reinforcing racist beliefs. The figure has reignited a long-standing debate among geneticists about how best to discuss and depict race, ethnicity and genomic ancestry, given how these terms can be misinterpreted and weaponized by extremists. 'The problem is, a lot of people will see figures like this as supporting a viewpoint' that race and ethnicity are closely aligned with genetics, says Ewan Birney, deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridgeshire, UK. 'And then they build castles in the air from all this.' Alexander Bick, a physician and geneticist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, who co-authored the paper in which the figure appears, acknowledged in an e-mail to Nature's news team that 'it's clear that the figure fell short of our intended goal for this paper'. (Nature's news team is editorially independent of its journal team.) But Bick defended the analysis, noting that it is a 'faithful representation of the patterns that exist in the data that is consistent with representations in other similar studies' and that he is not planning to submit a correction to remove the plot....