Myths about how the Black Death travelled quickly across Asia, ravaging Silk Route communities, date back to a single fourteenth-century source, experts have found.

Zoos and private collections teach, inspire, and connect people to animals they may never encounter in the wild. And, in some cases, those animals represent valuable ‘assurance populations’ — essentially, backups that could be used to revive critically endangered populations in their native ranges. But new research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Morfeld Research & Conservation shows American giraffe collections have been hybridized across species, sharply reducing their conservation value.

When a heart attack strikes, the body’s attempt to heal leaves behind scar tissue that weakens the heart’s pumping power. Now, scientists from Würzburg and Freiburg have mapped the heart at unprecedented molecular detail, showing how immune and connective tissue cells orchestrate this scarring process. Their findings could lay the foundation for therapies that support heart repair and improve recovery after a heart attack.

BUFFALO, NY — November 3, 2025 — A new research paper featured on the cover of Volume 17, Issue 10 of Aging-US was published on October 20, 2025, titled “Brain region-specific and systemic transcriptomic alterations in a human alpha-synuclein overexpressing rat model.”

Researchers at Helmholtz Munich and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed Nicheformer, the first large-scale foundation model that integrates single-cell analysis with spatial transcriptomics. Trained on more than 110 million cells, it offers a new way to study how cells are organized and interact in tissues – knowledge that is crucial for understanding health and disease.