Scientists have uncovered how the toxic protein that drives Huntington’s disease spreads through the brain. The study shows that neurons pass the harmful huntingtin protein through tiny cellular tunnels called tunneling nanotubes. Researchers also discovered that a partnership between two proteins, Rhes and SLC4A7, helps build these tunnels. When this pathway was disrupted in cells and mice, the spread of the toxic protein dropped sharply – revealing a promising target for therapies designed to slow or stop the disease.

Cutting patterns into elastic materials allows you to unfold those materials into new shapes, and researchers have now demonstrated the ability to control the sequence in which that unfolding happens by magnetizing the materials. The work represents a fundamental advance in our understanding of metamaterial behavior and has also demonstrated its utility in applications focused on absorbing kinetic energy.

Researchers have developed a new kind of nanoelectronic device that could dramatically cut the energy consumed by artificial intelligence hardware by mimicking the human brain.

Variation in tissue mechanical properties play an important role in generating animal body shape diversity, as a new study from EMBL researchers and their collaborators has shown. Using a combination of theoretical modelling and experimental perturbations, the researchers showed how a combination of such properties results in a unique 'mechanotype’ for a species. Mechanotypes can help us predict body shape, and the scientists hypothesise that evolution might act on mechanotypes to give rise to the diversity of animal body shapes that we see around us today.