An investigational drug called davunetide, sprayed into the nose, reaches the brain in different amounts depending on biological sex and, in females, on the phase of the reproductive cycle. Working in mice and then in a small group of healthy adults, researchers at Tel Aviv University found that female mice took up more drug into the head region when estrogen was highest, during proestrus and estrus. In people, women trended toward higher peak plasma concentrations while men held the drug longer. The authors argue that averaging across sexes can hide a real drug effect, and that timing and hormones belong at the center of how brain therapies are designed and dosed.

A newly established alliance, comprising leading researchers and conservation experts, has mobilised to safeguard the Atlantic Ocean's leatherback turtle populations.

Can a snake in Thailand influence the evolution of a snake in the Philippines even if the two species never cross paths? According to a new study, the answer may be yes. The research suggests that migratory predators can act as evolutionary “messengers”, carrying their avoidance behavior across continents and linking the fates of species separated by thousands of kilometers. The findings challenge a longstanding assumption in mimicry theory and open the door to a hidden world of long-distance evolutionary relationships connecting distant ecosystems through migration.

A new single-protein analysis technique gives researchers an unprecedented ability to study proteins called scramblases, which have critical roles in biology. The development of the new technique, in a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, expands the toolkit available to cell biologists and biophysicists and could someday be useful in devising new strategies against multiple diseases.

A local research study led by scientists from the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore (A*STAR GIS) has uncovered how the gut microbiome can influence gene activity in the liver by acting on short stretches of regulatory DNA that function like molecular “switches”. By testing the activity of more than 100,000 human DNA switches linked to liver biology and comparing results from both in vitro and in vivo approaches, the team identified which switches operate under real physiological conditions and how microbial signals can modify their activity. This provides a clearer biological basis for how gut microbes shape liver function, offering new avenues for precision diagnostics and targeted therapies for liver disease. The findings were published in Molecular Cell.