When cell division (mitosis) takes too long, it can be a sign that something is wrong with the cells, for example DNA damage or chromosomal instability. That’s why our cells come with an innate ability to tell the time, with a stress response known as the mitotic stopwatch pathway activating after prolonged mitosis. Now, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have found that certain cancers can ‘lose their sense of time’ to avoid cellular stress responses, revealing new insights that could shape future anti-cancer therapeutics.

Researchers have developed DrugtargetMR, a comprehensive computational tool designed to bridge the gap between genetic discoveries and clinical applications. By integrating multi-omics data with advanced statistical modeling in a unified R framework, the software simplifies the identification of causal genes and therapeutic targets for complex human traits, making sophisticated post-GWAS analysis accessible to the broader scientific community.

"We undertook this difficult study to understand fatigue," said senior author Daniel Forger, a University of Michigan professor of mathematics. "We're seeing profound changes in the brain over the course of the day as we stay awake and they seem to be corrected as we go to sleep."

The sense of smell is vital for animals, as it helps them find food, protect themselves from predators and interact socially. An international research team led by Dr Quentin Martinez and Dr Eli Amson from State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart has now discovered that certain areas of the brain skull allow conclusions to be drawn about the sense of smell in mammals. Particularly significant is the volume of the endocast of the olfactory bulb, a bony structure in the skull that is often well preserved even in very old fossils. This volume is closely related to the number of intact odour receptor genes – an important indicator of olfactory ability. This allows the sense of smell to be estimated even in extinct species such as early whales, sabre-toothed cats or the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine. The study, which provides a reliable method for reconstructing the sense of smell in extinct mammals, was published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS).