Parental care appears to have evolved in ants by repurposing ancient neural circuits rather than inventing entirely new brain systems. Because the same family of neuropeptides regulates caregiving in ants and mammals, evolution may have relied on a common molecular blueprint for social behavior. The findings establish ants as a powerful new model for studying how parenting came to be. Moreover, because the researchers found that caregiving behaviors change over an ant’s lifetime, their findings also contribute insights into how healthy aging naturally reshapes the brain and behavior.

University of Utah bioengineer Russell Stewart as long studied caddisfly silk, which contain adhesives that work underwater , in search of a compound for use in the human body in medical applications. Now the genetics of caddisflies’ evolutionary superpower is coming into focus, providing science with new clues for developing bioadhesives.

If we want to dismiss something as irrelevant, we’d say that it’s “as boring as watching the grass grow.” And yet grasses—including corn, wheat and rice—make up the majority of the plant-based calories that humans eat, as well as the majority of calories fed to livestock. Perhaps we should have been paying attention to such an important plant, because we now know, thanks to new research led by biologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published in Current Biology, that grasses grow according to temperature—not light, like other plants.

A new species - and previously unknown genus - of soil bacterium was isolated from soil collected in the Kogelberg Nature Reserve, a biodiversity hot spot in the Cape Floristic Region. This is the first genus from the phylum Acidobacteriota to be described from Southern Africa. The finding represents a significant advance in our knowledge of rare species that contribute to nutrient cycles in soil.

Traumatic brain injury disrupts complex glial cell networks that influence inflammation, white matter repair, and long-term neurological recovery. A new review highlights how microglia, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes interact dynamically after injury and explains why future therapies may require carefully timed, multi-target strategies instead of single-drug approaches. The study also outlines emerging treatments that promote remyelination, reduce harmful inflammation, and support regenerative repair processes across different stages of traumatic brain injury progression.

RNA design is central to next-generation therapeutics, yet identifying sequences that reliably fold into desired structures remains a major computational challenge, often constrained by high cost and time. A new study from Keio University explores the use of factorization machine with quadratic-optimization annealing (FMQA) for RNA inverse folding, while also examining how different encoding strategies may influence artificial intelligence (AI)-driven design performance, revealing an underexplored dimension of biomolecular engineering.

Rosa Chiara Paolicelli’s team at the Department of Biomedical Sciences of Unil uncovered a new role for the TDP-43 protein in controlling the function of microglia, the immune cells of the brain. Their study shows how the loss of this protein in microglia may contribute to the development of neurological diseases. The findings have been published in Nature Neuroscience.