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Biology

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 17-Jun-2026 23:16 ET (18-Jun-2026 03:16 GMT/UTC)

Engineered lipid nanoparticles reprogram immune metabolism for better mRNA vaccines

University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Penn Engineers have redesigned the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used to deliver mRNA vaccines, showing that subtle changes in lipid chemistry can influence immune cell metabolism and reduce inflammation. The findings suggest that lipid nanoparticles can actively shape how immune cells respond, opening new avenues for vaccines and immunotherapies.

Journal: Nature Materials
Funder: American Cancer Society, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania

Taking pressure off the lungs

Kyoto University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Kyoto, Japan -- Pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, is a rare and severe disease characterized by elevated blood pressure in the pulmonary arteries, which transport blood from the heart to the lungs. This can eventually lead to right heart failure, when the heart's right ventricle becomes too weak to pump sufficient blood through the lungs and to the rest of the body.

Current treatments for PAH have improved the outcome for patients, but the prognosis for this disease is still poor and some patients end up needing lung transplants. C-type natriuretic peptide, or CNP, is a hormone involved in the regulation of vascular function, and a team of researchers at Kyoto University and collaborating institutions wondered whether it might also have therapeutic potential in PAH.

"CNP has been studied mainly in cardiovascular biology, but we wondered whether it might also play an important protective role in pulmonary vascular disease," says first author Hiromu Yanagisawa. The role of this hormone and its receptor GC-B in the pulmonary vasculature and the development of PAH has remained unclear, so the team was motivated to investigate.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Researchers refine the clock of Earth’s early complex animal life

University of Lausanne
Peer-Reviewed Publication

How can we measure time more than 500 million years into the past? A study recently published in Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Lausanne presents a new geological “rock clock” that allows major climate events from the dawn of complex animal life to be dated with unprecedented precision.

Journal: Nature Communications

Mitochondria identified as key player in a rare disease causing microcephaly

Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona)
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers use the Drosophila fly as a model for Mosaic Variegated Aneuploidy (MVA) syndrome.

Errors in chromosome division impair the viability of neural stem cells.

Restoring mitochondrial function makes it possible to restore brain size.

The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Journal: Nature Communications

Blocking lipid production in healthy lung cells can reduce lung metastasis

Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists from the VIB–KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology, in collaboration with the Francis Crick Institute, have discovered how cancer cells can exploit healthy lung cells to support metastatic tumor growth in the lungs. In two complementary studies published in Nature Cell Biology and Cancer Discovery, they show that tumors use lipids produced by lung cells as signals, and that decreasing the lipid production of lung cells can decrease metastasis. The findings point to new therapeutic strategies that target lung cell lipid production, rather than cancer cells themselves, which may also help refine patient selection for ongoing clinical trials targeting this pathway.

Journal: Cancer Discovery
Funder: World Cancer Research Fund International, Stichting tegen Kanker, Cancer Research UK, FWO, German research Foundation, EMBO, Chinese Scholarship Council

When waste becomes fertilizer: Can sludge-derived liquids reshape aquatic life in farmlands?

Maximum Academic Press
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A research team reveals that although aquatic biofilms known as periphyton can partially remove nutrients from hydrothermal carbonization aqueous phase (HAP), high concentrations disrupt microbial community structure, weaken ecological interactions, and reduce overall ecosystem multifunctionality.

Researchers show dinos hatched eggs less efficiently than modern birds

Frontiers
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers reconstructed clutches of oviraptors, bird-like but flightless dinosaurs that lived between 70 and 66 million years ago, to simulate heat transfer and infer hatching patterns in their clutches. They found that these dinosaurs didn’t hatch their eggs in the same way modern birds do. In addition to sitting on them, they likely used the sun as a co-incubator. The team pointed out that this method – although less efficient than the brooding of modern birds – wasn’t necessarily better or worse, but may have been a unique adaptation to the environment these dinosaurs lived in and could represent a step between semi-buried and fully-exposed styles of incubation.

Journal: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Major step towards a first global system to track health before pregnancy

University of Southampton
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The key health and social indicators needed for a new global system to monitor people’s health before pregnancy have been identified for the first time by researchers at University College London and the University of Southampton.

Journal: The Lancet

Bull sharks have ‘friends’

University of Exeter
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Bull sharks form social relationships with specific “friends”, new research reveals.

Journal: Animal Behaviour
Funder: Fiji Shark Lab, Hai Stiftung Shark Foundation, Waitt Foundation