The protein on human cells that tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) uses for infection has now been identified—a major step toward understanding how TBEV causes neurological disease and for developing antiviral drugs. The study, co-led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) published today in the journal Nature.

Barley is one of the world’s oldest cultivated plants, farmed for more than 10,000 years. Scientists have long believed it was domesticated in just one location. An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute has revealed that modern barley has a “mosaic origin”, meaning it stems from several wild populations across the Fertile Crescent. The findings were published today in the prestigious journal Nature.

Ko Mochizuki of the University of Tokyo has discovered that Vincetoxicum nakaianum, a dogbane species native to Japan described for the first time by Mochizuki and his collaborators only a year ago, mimics the smell of ants attacked by spiders to attract flies that feed on such attacked insects, and in the process pollinate the flowers. This is the first case of a plant mimicking the odor of ants, revealing that the scope of floral mimicry is more diverse than previously imagined. The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

An international team of researchers led by Dr Manel Esteller, head of the Cancer Epigenetics Group at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, has just published the most comprehensive analysis to date of the longest-lived person ever recorded, the Catalan woman Maria Branyas, who passed away at the end of 2024 at the age of 117. The peer-reviewed study, published in the prestigious international journal Cell Reports Medicine, concludes that the biology of supercentenarians is more complex than previously thought, and that the key may lie in a delicate balance between opposing forces.