Vaping is largely believed to be a safer alternative to cigarettes, but new research shows that vaping devices can deliver toxic metals directly into lung tissue.

The Biophysics Collaborative Access Team (BioCAT)—led by Illinois Institute of Technology faculty Thomas Irving, Professor of Biology; Weikang Ma, Professor of Biology; and Jesse Hopkins, Professor of Physics—has received the first installment of $2.6 million of a renewal award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health to continue operating the BioCAT beamline at Sector 18-ID at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory for the next five years. 

A new study reveals that some of the ocean’s most powerful predators are running hotter, and that they are likely paying an increasingly steep price for it. The significance of this headline finding is the “double jeopardy” in which it places these iconic animals, which have high fuel demands due to their lifestyle and physiology, as they now face a future of warming oceans and declining food resources.

The research, led by scientists at Trinity College Dublin in collaboration with the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Faculty of Veterinary Science, shows that warm-bodied fish such as tunas and some sharks, including the legendary Great White and Ireland’s iconic basking shark, burn nearly four times more energy than their cold-blooded counterparts. This means they are likely to face an increasing risk of overheating as oceans warm, which may result in a reduction of suitable habitat and an enforced relocation towards the poles.

Photosynthetic bacteria helped shape Planet Earth. Among them are cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen in our atmosphere and made complex life possible, captivating scientists for decades. Now, researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) report a surprising new discovery—a system thought to separate DNA has developed to sculpt the shape of the cell in cyanobacteria instead. The results, published in Science, shed light on how protein systems evolve and how multicellularity emerged in this type of ecologically essential bacteria.

Investigating a common gene in three very different species – axolotls, mice and zebrafish – scientists have discovered the potential for a novel gene therapy aimed at eventually regrowing limbs in humans, according to new research published this week.

The research team led by Liying Qu and Weisong Zhao from Harbin Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Peking University, has developed Adaptive-SN2N, an innovative self-supervised learning framework. By introducing a risk-aware adaptive normalization strategy, this method successfully eliminates background artifacts commonly induced by deep learning, preserving high biological fidelity and enabling highly accurate live-cell quantitative analysis.

Event cameras have mostly been used to track motion, where large brightness changes at moving edges generate dense event streams. In a new PhotoniX study, researchers in South Korea instead apply these sensors to functional brain imaging, a harder regime where activity-related brightness changes are noticeably smaller. By characterizing the camera for this regime and using it to record cortical vascular dynamics at kilohertz frame rates, they show that event-based acquisition can faithfully capture fast blood-flow signals in vivo. For the imaging of calcium activity in cultured neurons and the rodent brain, an unsupervised reconstruction method converts the sparse event streams to continuous ΔF/F₀ activity signals. The framework opens new possibilities for high-resolution, data-efficient functional imaging in biology.