Osteoarthritis does not arise from wear and tear, that’s a persistent misconception. So what causes this condition, which affects 595 million people worldwide? Peter van der Kraan of Radboud university medical center searches for answers in evolution. He suspects that misbehaving cartilage cells, which are very useful early in life, turn against us later on.

A new study has identified for the first time signatures of sleep in the honey bee brain, showing remarkable parallels with sleep in humans and other vertebrates. It combined advanced optical brain imaging, machine learning analysis, and computational neural modelling to study how sleep affects their sensory brain networks, particularly the antennal lobes, the bees' primary olfactory centers. Sleep science has experienced strong growth as researchers worldwide attempt to unravel the evolutionary origins and cognitive functions of sleep. But until now, invertebrate sleep mechanisms at the neuronal level remained poorly understood. This study explores this new territory, offering the first network-level brain imaging during sleep in insects. Honey bees provide an opportunity to study sleep at single-neuron resolution, offering insights impossible to achieve in humans. The parallels identified between bee and human sleep may inspire future research on sleep function in bees, with potential applications in the study of memory consolidation and sleep disorders.

Researchers at UCL and the Francis Crick Institute have, for the first time, identified the origin of cardiac cells using 3D images of a heart forming in real-time, inside a living mouse embryo.

Large amounts of data (“big data”) offer enormous potential for improving the accuracy of genome-wide predictions in plant breeding. Encouraged by successful results with wheat hybrids, researchers at the IPK Leibniz Institute have now extended this approach to so-called inbred lines. For the first time, they combined phenotypic and genotypic data from four commercial wheat breeding programmes. The study results were published in the “Plant Biotechnology Journal”.