Leveraging AI capabilities combined with genetic data led St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital investigators to predict new cancer drug targets that carry a limited risk of side effects.

Healthy brain cells rely on tightly regulated RNA processing and turnover to maintain normal function. With aging, these processes become less efficient. This leads to the accumulation of aberrant RNA species—which researchers refer to as “RNA pollution.”

Generative AI tools are rapidly transforming how software is built—and raising new risks in the process, according to a new TechBrief from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Technology Policy Council (TPC) on the rise of “vibe coding.”

A research team has developed a camera-only visual odometry (VO) system that uses prebuilt colored point cloud maps to deliver more accurate and robust localization with reduced drift in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-challenged environments. 

As the global pollution crisis caused by manufacturing and disposing of single-use plastics continues to grow, researchers have developed a non-toxic plastic alternative derived from the hemp plant—a non-psychoactive type of cannabis. 

In a study publishing April 30 in the Cell Press journal Chem Circularity, a team of scientists and engineers demonstrates a stretchy, hemp-derived thermoplastic that can extend up to 1,600% of its size. The material has a high “glass transition temperature,” a quality that allows plastics to stay dry and durable when they come into contact with boiling hot water. 

Years before he conducted the research that would earn him a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, was a postdoctoral scientist at Gladstone Institutes, studying genes. There, he helped discover a gene (now called eIF4G2) that’s essential for early embryonic development. Then, the story pauses. Without the technology needed to develop an animal model to further investigate the gene, Yamanaka moved on to develop induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells—adult cells that have been reprogrammed into an embryonic state. That work earned him the Nobel Prize, but he never forgot his first gene. Now, 30 years since his postdoc, Yamanaka has circled back to eIF4G2. In a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, he and his colleagues finally created a sophisticated animal model to study the gene. With that tool, they’ve now shown that eIF4G2 is indispensable for adult intestinal health.