Japan's Okunoshima Island also known as "Rabbit Island," attracts thousands of visitors worldwide who come to interact with its free-roaming rabbits.  However, a recent study conducted at Fukushima University suggests that unregulated tourist feeding may be altering animal behavior and ecological relationships beyond the island's famous rabbits, influencing native wild boars and other wildlife. The findings highlight the need for better monitoring and management strategies that can balance wildlife tourism, animal welfare, and biodiversity.

Researchers at the University of Osaka have developed a method to build stable, tubular hydrogel structures at the arteriole scale. Using a technique called meniscus-guided interfacial ring-by-ring assembly, UV light is used to form ring-shaped structures at an oil–hydrogel interface, which combine to form hollow tubes. Different tubes could be created with good stability, controlled sizes, complex shapes, and multi-component structures. These structures could help to create vascular networks for artificial tissue models.

Understanding how prokaryotic genomes coordinate nucleotide composition and gene distribution is a central yet unresolved question in genome evolution. Across different genomes, GC-content, nucleotide asymmetries, and biased gene distribution between replication strands are tightly associated, but existing explanations typically address only individual components and lack a unified causal framework.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) and the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad, have developed and tested a new class of fluorescent probes that enable scientists to visualise xylem, the specialised tissue responsible for transporting water and minerals through plants. The work, published in Plant and Cell Physiology, introduces a faster, more specific and sensitive staining method than conventional dyes, creating avenues to strengthen research on plant development, vascular biology, and crop resilience.

The new Nature Immunology study shows that human lung tissue serves as a "reservoir" for a large number of tissue-resident memory T cells (T_RM cells). These cells stand ready to combat a surprising range of viruses, bacteria, and even deadly fungal pathogens.

New research led by UMC Utrecht shows that school closures during a pandemic outbreak are most effective when they are carefully targeted. The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates that the right strategy depends on which age groups are driving transmission at different stages of an outbreak. This study provides guidance for authorities, allowing them to make smart and informed decisions regarding school closures in case of a pandemic outbreak.

EMBL and collaborators developed ‘spatialproteomics’, an open-source software that helps researchers analyse complex tissue images and understand how cells are organised within tumours. The tool streamlines a workflow that was previously fragmented, taking users from raw microscopy images through cell segmentation, annotation, and spatial analysis, to biological insight in one unified framework. In studies of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the software revealed distinct spatial patterns in tumour and immune cells that helped distinguish between slow-growing and aggressive samples. Spatialproteomics could be useful in studies across many cancers, inflammatory diseases, and in tissues where spatial organisation matters.