In vertebrate retinas, specialized photoreceptors responsible for color vision (cone cells) arrange themselves in patterns known as the “cone mosaic”. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have discovered that a protein called Dscamb acts as a "self-avoidance enforcer" for color-detecting cells in the retinas of zebrafish, ensuring they maintain perfect spacing for optimal vision. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications. 

Genetic engineering in non-human primates has long been limited by the need for virus-based gene delivery methods. Recently, researchers in Japan successfully used a nonviral system to introduce a transgene—that is, a gene that has been artificially inserted into an organism—into cynomolgus monkeys, which is a species of primate closely related to humans.

Imagine the world’s oceans with their beautiful blue color. Now, imagine that the same oceans were green. This is the intriguing possibility suggested by new research from Nagoya University in Japan. A research group has found evidence that cyanobacteria, important bacteria in the evolutionary process, flourished in green seas. Their findings not only tell us about the history of our planet but also suggest a new way to look for alien life on other planets.

Researchers investigated different compositions of tin sulfides to find the ideal material for devices that harness solar energy.

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has revealed, through fMRI-based brain activity analysis, that multiple regions in the human cerebral cortex flexibly represent numerical quantity. This finding comes from research by HAYASHI Masamichi (Researcher (Tenure-Track)) at Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), part of NICT’s Advanced ICT Research Institute, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo’s graduate student KIDO Teruaki (NICT cooperative visiting researcher), and Prof. YOTSUMOTO Yuko.

Although certain brain areas are known to respond to numerical quantity, this study expands that understanding by showing that some regions respond to relative quantity (e.g., “extra-small,” “small,” “large,” and “extra-large”) rather than absolute quantity (i.e., specific quantity). Moreover, these context-dependent, relative representations become more pronounced along the pathway from the parietal to the frontal lobe.

These results highlight the flexible nature of numerical quantity processing in the brain, and they are expected to advance our understanding of how the brain handles other types of “magnitude” concepts, including time and size.

This work was published in the journal “Nature Communications” on January 6, 2025.

The Super-Kamiokande and Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) Collaborations have produced a first joint analysis of their data.

Humans and other primates learn cause-and-effect relationships in their environments by predicting the likelihood of an event, such as a reward, through direct and/or indirect experience. Recently, researchers studied the activity of neurons in the dorsal part of the medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) of macaques to determine which neurons are responsible for encoding “self” reward prediction error (S-RPE) and “other” reward prediction error (O-RPE). The neurons encoding S-RPE and O-RPE are independent and work simultaneously, which may allow macaques and other primates to learn stimulus-outcome relationships more efficiently.

Researchers at University of Tsukuba have developed a vector that integrates the Cre enzyme gene with the specific DNA sequence loxP, which is its target. This vector allows to create Cre-loxP organisms, which are widely used in the functional analysis of specific genes, in a single step and thus to significantly reduce the time and cost of production.