In Europe, Maedi-Visna disease has high prevalence rates at the individual and flock levels, respectively, and is regarded as one of the most significant infectious disease in sheep. The lack of treatment or a commercial vaccine underscores the need for accurate and reliable diagnostic tools to...

Newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants underscore the need for broad-spectrum antiviral solutions. This study shows a macrocyclic peptide inhibitor that locks the SARS-CoV-2 spike trimer into a “closed” conformation by engaging a conserved region, and demonstrates that intranasal administration of the...

Iron (Fe) is a vital micronutrient for plants, which is required for processes such as photosynthesis and enzyme activity. Plants must carefully manage iron levels to maintain health and productivity. They activate iron uptake genes when deficient and suppress them when iron is excessive to prevent toxicity. This careful balance is known as iron homeostasis.

MicroRNAs, whose discovery was recognized with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, are central regulators of gene expression, yet a fundamental question has remained unanswered: how cells choose between the two strands produced from each microRNA precursor.

Challenging long-held assumptions, Aarhus University researchers have demonstrated that the protein building blocks essential for life as we know it can form readily in space. This discovery, appearing in Nature Astronomy, significantly raises the statistical probability of finding extraterrestrial life.

Light is a universal stimulus that influences all living things. Cycles of light and dark help set the biological clocks for organisms ranging from single-celled bacteria to human beings. Some bacteria use photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy just like plants, but other bacteria sense light for less well-known functions.

In a study published in Telestes, Dr. Joshua Kumbani and Dr. Margarita Díaz-Andreu categorized the various dance scenes depicted in South African rock art, drawing on ethnographic sources, published studies, and the comprehensive SARADA database to identify dance scenes, thus capturing this invaluable archive for the understanding of the San's various cultural practices.

Conventional treatments of Alzheimer's disease, one of the most common forms of dementia, have been largely focused on targeting individual pathological features. However, Alzheimer's disease is a multifactorial disorder driven by multiple, tightly interconnected processes, rendering single-target therapeutic approaches inherently limited. Addressing this challenge, KAIST researchers propose a new strategy that enables the simultaneous regulation of multiple disease-inducing factors simply by rearranging the structural positions of drug candidate molecules without altering their chemical substituents.

A few thousand years ago, sugar was unknown in the western world. Sugarcane, a tall grass first domesticated in New Guinea around 6000BC, was initially chewed for its sweet juice rather than crystallized. By around 500BC, methods to boil sugarcane juice into crystals were first developed in India.

Through new experiments, researchers in Japan and Germany have recreated the chemical conditions found in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon, Enceladus. Published in Icarus, the results show that these conditions can readily produce many of the organic compounds observed by the Cassini mission, strengthening evidence that the distant world could harbor the molecular building blocks of life.

Bacteriophages have been used therapeutically to treat infectious bacterial diseases for over a century. As antibiotic-resistant infections increasingly threaten public health, interest in bacteriophages as therapeutics has seen a resurgence. However, the field remains largely limited to naturally occurring strains, as laborious strain engineering techniques have limited the pace of discovery and the creation of tailored therapeutic strains.

A recent study by geophysicists at Washington State University offers insight into how nutrients may reach the subsurface ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons and a leading candidate for extraterrestrial life in the solar system.

"A plague is upon us'' may have been a common phrase in ancient Jordan, where countless people perished from a mysterious malady that would shape both a society and an era of civilization.