There was a total of 65 unprovoked shark bites worldwide in 2025, slightly less than the most recent 10-year average of 72. Nine of last year’s bites resulted in fatalities, compared to the ten-year average of six.

A novel method to manipulate the inner structure of cells connects several scientific fields and could represent a significant step in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

A new study from the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry, and Biophysics reveals a surprising insight into the operation of the ancestral brain: the visual cortex of turtles is capable of detecting unexpected visual stimuli in a way that is independent of their position on the retina, a property that, until now, was thought to exist only in the highly developed cortices of mammals, including humans. In light of these findings, the research team assesses that advanced brain mechanisms previously thought to be unique to mammals were already present hundreds of millions of years ago.

Understanding how microscopic interactions between proteins in cells produce large-scale organization and asymmetry is a fundamental question in cell biology. In a recent study, researchers from Japan investigated how actin and myosin create cell-scale structures using experimental setup. They found that Chara corallina myosin XI—a fast motor protein—drives actin filaments into large unidirectionally rotating rings. Their findings reveal physical principles of self-organization, inspiring new ways to design self-organizing biomimetic materials for biotechnological applications.

Postpartum breast cancer is diagnosed five to ten years after giving birth. It is associated with a higher risk of metastasis and a lower survival rate compared with women who have not been pregnant or those diagnosed during pregnancy. A team from the Institut Pasteur set out to understand the mammary gland mechanisms involved in tumor formation during involution, a major tissue remodeling process that occurs after pregnancy. In a preclinical study the scientists reveal how senescence, a cellular response inducing stable cell cycle arrest, plays an ambivalent role during mammary gland involution. While it is crucial for the normal tissue remodeling process in the mammary gland, senescence can also be hijacked by tumor cells to help them spread. This discovery, published in Nature Aging on February 18, 2026, suggests that targeting senescent cells during mammary gland involution could reduce the risk of postpartum breast cancer.  

Less than 2% of the human genome encodes proteins. The remaining DNA was once dismissed as “junk DNA,” but is now known to contain thousands of regulatory sequences called cis-regulatory elements (CREs). These elements act as gene “switches” and “dials,” controlling when, where, and how strongly genes are expressed. While gene sequences are largely similar between individuals, CREs vary much more extensively, and these differences are thought to be a major source of variation in physical traits and disease risk.

A research team led by Zicong Zhang and Associate Professor Fumitaka Inoue at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi), Kyoto University, has developed a new method for studying CREs at scale. The method makes it possible to examine, within the same sample, what a CRE does and how it does it. Using this method, the researchers examined approximately 10,000 CREs and their variants by simultaneously measuring transcriptional activity, chromatin accessibility, and the active histone modification H3K27ac. This allowed them to pinpoint which DNA changes matter and to gain insight into how transcription factors coordinate gene regulation.

This This work was published in Nature Communications, with the Accelerated Article Preview released on January 14, 2026 (GMT), and the final version published on February 17, 2026 (February 18 JST).

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) in Japan have developed a score that predicts the risk of liver cancer. The study establishes that the protein MYCN drives liver tumorigenesis, specifically of the type of tumors found in the deadliest subtype of liver cancer. The study characterizes the microenvironment of genes that permit overexpression of MYCN, and describes a machine-learning algorithm that uses this data to predict how likely a tumor-free liver is to develop tumors.