Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 27-Jun-2026 10:15 ET (27-Jun-2026 14:15 GMT/UTC)
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.
They cross oceans, glide on monsoon winds, and can appear in new places after thousands of kilometres in the air. Now a new study from Lund University shows that dragonflies are among nature’s most extreme migrants - and that their journeys may help us understand climate change.
Rockefeller University Press (RUP) has partnered with Cashmere, a data infrastructure platform, to manage the integration of its scientific literature into AI-powered research applications. The collaboration establishes a secure and transparent framework for AI inference, which is the phase in which a trained AI model queries live data to answer user questions and generate real-time results. Through the partnership, RUP will make Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), Journal of General Physiology (JGP), and Journal of Human Immunity (JHI) available for AI inference use cases.
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.
Embryos with advanced maternal age (AMA) present a decline in early embryonic development, which remains unknown. This study identifies a previously unknown mechanism through which disruptions in the "autophagy-metabolism-epigenetic modification" network compromise the developmental potential of aged embryos. It also offers preliminary insights into potential clinical strategies for improving the quality of aged embryos.