A chemistry paper in Science came out yesterday where materials scientists have studied the hardness of rhenium diboride. It is SUPER hard and ULTRA incompressible (my addition of capitals for extra emphasis – I like saying things like ULTRA in a booming voice).

Here’s a news piece I wrote for news@nature. While I was digging around, a number of researchers pointed out that this isn’t a new material. So why do Science want to publish this? It seems that no one had really taken trouble to do detailed measurements on the material before. The researchers (including Sarah Tolbert and Richard Kaner) came at the problem of making a really hard material by working out how to pack enough covalent bonds into a metallic structure and lo and behold, rhenium diboride fitted nicely.

This week’s new papers

Here’s what we told the world’s journalists last week. You can use Google News to see what they made of our briefing.

Please cite Nature Genetics as the source of the following items. If publishing online, please carry a hyperlink to https://www.nature.com/naturegenetics.

Prostate cancer risk variants

DOI:10.1038/ng1999

DOI:10.1038/ng2015

DOI:10.1038/ng2022

Several newly identified genetic variants on chromosome 8 are associated with increased risk of developing prostate cancer, according to three studies to be published online this week in Nature Genetics.

Last year scientists in Iceland reported that a variant on chromosome 8 is associated with elevated risk of prostate cancer. Three groups have now revisited this region on chromosome 8, and have found additional variants that independently contribute to prostate cancer susceptibility. One group, led by Kari Stefansson, reports that a second variant is associated with the disease in several populations. This variant is relatively uncommon in individuals of European descent, but quite common in African Americans, suggesting that it accounts for some of the higher risk for prostate cancer observed in individuals of African descent.

The second group, led by David Reich, identified this same variant, as well as five previously undescribed risk variants in populations representing five different ethnic backgrounds. Finally, the third group, led by Stephen Chanock, found one of the variants reported by the Broad study to be associated with elevated risk in five different populations.

According to Reich and colleagues, combinations of these risk variants could account for up to two-thirds of prostate cancer cases in African Americans, and up to one-third of cases in European Americans. The variants do not map to a particular gene, but each group speculates that collectively they could promote amplification of this entire region of chromosome 8, an event that is commonly observed in prostate tumours.