No Bells Week - Flora Graham, Senior Editor of the Nature Briefing

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It's No Bells Week this week, so as is tradition here on the Nature Podcast, Flora Graham joins me to discuss this year's winners. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine went to Spontae Parbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. This really centers on his pioneering studies of human evolution and developing methods to sequence and analyze DNA from ancient hominin fossils.

In this episode:

00:46 A virtual chemical library uncovers potential antidepressants

Certain psychedelic drugs are of interest to researchers due to their promising antidepressant effects. To help speed up the discovery of molecules with useful properties, researchers have built a virtual library of 75 million compounds related to these drugs. This approach yielded two molecules that showed antidepressant properties in mice, but without the hallucinogenic activity of psychedelic drugs.

Research article: Kaplan et al.

Research Briefing: Bespoke library docking for 5-HT2A receptor agonists with antidepressant activity

08:25 Research Highlights

Research suggests that ancient artificial island settlements were hubs of activity for society’s elite, and astronomers spot possibly the most luminous star ever observed.

Research Highlight: Ancient DNA suggests that artificial islands were party spots for the elite

Research Highlight: Scientists face down ‘Godzilla’, the most luminous star known

10:42 Nobel News

Flora Graham from the Nature Briefing joins us to talk about the winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes.

Nature News: Geneticist who unmasked lives of ancient humans wins medicine Nobel

Nature News: ‘Spooky’ quantum-entanglement experiments win physics Nobel

Nature News: Chemists who invented revolutionary 'click' reactions win Nobel

Enter Nature’s ‘Scientist at Work’ photo competition, full details here

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