A Virginia Tech-led team of international scientists has solved one of the last major mysteries in millipede evolution, revealing new clues about a group of animals that helped pave the way for life on land. The findings, published in Current Biology, complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders. By combining genomic data from living species with morphological evidence from fossils, researchers traced the group's origins to nearly 460 million years ago — suggesting millipedes may have been present long before the oldest known millipede fossils.

Tumor cells coexist with diverse immune, stromal, and neural cells in a complex microenvironment. Recent single-cell and spatial transcriptomics have uncovered specialized cell subsets that drive cancer progression, immune evasion, and treatment response. A new review synthesizes these advances, introduces the “virtual tumor” concept for AI-driven ecosystem modeling, and outlines a roadmap from fundamental tumor microenvironment (TME) biology to next-generation precision immunotherapies targeting specific cell populations and their coordinated networks.

Small intestinal cancer is a rare and poorly understood disease, partly because the molecular drivers behind it have remained unclear. Now, researchers from Japan have identified mutations in COPA—a gene involved in cellular cargo transport with no prior link to cancer—as an alternative route to small intestine tumorigenesis. Their findings may help explain how these tumors develop and could inform and advance future diagnosis and treatment strategies.