Photosynthetic bacteria helped shape Planet Earth. Among them are cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen in our atmosphere and made complex life possible, captivating scientists for decades. Now, researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) report a surprising new discovery—a system thought to separate DNA has developed to sculpt the shape of the cell in cyanobacteria instead. The results, published in Science, shed light on how protein systems evolve and how multicellularity emerged in this type of ecologically essential bacteria.

Investigating a common gene in three very different species – axolotls, mice and zebrafish – scientists have discovered the potential for a novel gene therapy aimed at eventually regrowing limbs in humans, according to new research published this week.

The research team led by Liying Qu and Weisong Zhao from Harbin Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Peking University, has developed Adaptive-SN2N, an innovative self-supervised learning framework. By introducing a risk-aware adaptive normalization strategy, this method successfully eliminates background artifacts commonly induced by deep learning, preserving high biological fidelity and enabling highly accurate live-cell quantitative analysis.

Event cameras have mostly been used to track motion, where large brightness changes at moving edges generate dense event streams. In a new PhotoniX study, researchers in South Korea instead apply these sensors to functional brain imaging, a harder regime where activity-related brightness changes are noticeably smaller. By characterizing the camera for this regime and using it to record cortical vascular dynamics at kilohertz frame rates, they show that event-based acquisition can faithfully capture fast blood-flow signals in vivo. For the imaging of calcium activity in cultured neurons and the rodent brain, an unsupervised reconstruction method converts the sparse event streams to continuous ΔF/F₀ activity signals. The framework opens new possibilities for high-resolution, data-efficient functional imaging in biology.

Fish living downstream of wastewater treatment plants are accumulating antidepressants, opioids and other drugs of abuse in their bodies, according to a new study.

Using a new analytical method they developed, a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo discovered that several substances that affect the central nervous system, including fentanyl, methadone and venlafaxine, were detected in small fish living in rivers that receive urban wastewater.

We thought it was evolution, but an experiment with pencils shows that tips like teeth and thorns may owe their rounded shape to mechanical wear.

The New York Academy of Sciences and the Leon Levy Foundation have announced the 2026 cohort of Leon Levy Scholars in Neuroscience, building on a program that has nurtured more than 190 early-career neuroscience scholars since 2009. Supporting cutting-edge neuroscience across New York City’s research ecosystem, this distinguished scholarship recognizes up to ten postdoctoral scientists annually, chosen from a highly competitive, citywide applicant pool, to pursue bold ideas in neuroscience over three years as they move toward independent investigator roles.

Eccentric training is widely used to prevent hamstring injuries, but the mechanisms behind their effectiveness remain unclear. Researchers found that nine weeks of eccentric training allowed hamstring muscle fibers to operate at longer lengths during exercise without overstretching their microscopic contractile units. These adaptations likely occur through the addition of sarcomeres in series and may help explain why this training method reduces hamstring injury risk.