Hello Nature readers,
Today we explore a ‘minimalist’ approach to quantum computing, hear that a US man has received the world’s first bladder transplant and meet the dog who helps stop turtle poachers.

Quantum computing goes minimal

A single atom has performed the first full quantum simulations of how certain molecules react to light. Researchers simulated the behaviour of three different organic molecules when they are hit with an energetic particle called a photon. They encoded these different parameters into a single ytterbium ion trapped in a vacuum using pulsating electric fields. The minimalistic approach could dramatically speed the path towards a ‘quantum advantage’, says the team behind the feat. “It is incredibly hardware-efficient,” says experimental quantum physicist Ting Rei Tan.

World’s first bladder transplant

A 41-year-old man has become the first person to receive a bladder transplant. Surgeons in the United States transplanted the bladder, together with a kidney, earlier this month, in an operation that lasted eight hours. “It’s the first time he has been able to pee in seven years. For all of us, this is huge,” says Inderbir Gill, one of the surgeons who performed the surgery. The transplant was the first of five planned as part of an early-stage clinical trial.

New gene tool is CRISPR without the cuts

A new genome-editing tool promises to insert entire genes, precisely and efficiently, into human DNA. The method uses a bacterial enzyme complex called a CRISPR-associated transposase (CAST), which can introduce full-length genes at targeted sites in a single step, without creating double-stranded breaks in DNA. Researchers used directed evolution — a process that harnesses the power of Darwinian natural selection in the lab — to produce an optimized version of the enzyme complex, called evoCAST, that showed a more than 400-fold improvement in efficiency over the non-evolved original.

Can US health-disparity research survive?

Several researchers studying health inequities have had their grants from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) cancelled because it related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The terminations have raised concerns about the extent to which research on health disparities will get swept up in the mass cuts to scientific research by the administration of US President Donald Trump. “It begs the question, what does DEI mean to the issuers of this notice? Does it mean the term ‘structural racism’? Does it mean ‘Black Americans’? Does it mean that we can no longer do rigorous science to really understand why the devastating burden of health disparities exist in this country and around the globe?” asks one affected researcher, nephrologist Dinushika Mohottige.

How microbes could save the world

“Sapiocentrism” — the tendency to centre our world view around humans — could prevent us from grasping the importance of microorganisms to our planet’s future, argues science writer Peter Forbes in his book, Thinking Small and Large. Microbial technologies are key to restoring our planet and ensuring our survival in an era of ecological collapse, Forbes says, if we can overcome the political barriers to their use at scale. He “reminds readers that microbes weathered planetary upheavals long before humans arrived, and are likely to persist long after we are gone”, writes environmental scientist Raquel Peixoto in her review.

Where there was no lockdown

Five years on from the early COVID-19 pandemic, there is evidence that broad stay-at-home orders did protect public health — but that other measures can work just as well, if a country’s culture and resources make them possible to pull off. For example, by comparing Sweden (which did not enact strict lockdowns) with its neighbours Norway, Finland and Denmark (which did), researchers ultimately saw about the same level of excess deaths per capita, though spikes in death rates happened in different years. But there are no easy answers: ruthless contact tracing — which appears to have done the job, at least early on, in Taiwan — involved access to private data that many would find impractical and unethical. The real solution, say researchers, is to be better prepared so that pandemics don’t spiral out of control in the first place.