W. M. Keck Foundation Bridge Funding Initiative grants $600,000 to Salk scientist, graduate student pairings. The three teams will each tackle their own projects, spanning cancer, neuroscience, and genetics. The grants accelerate high-risk, high-reward science that otherwise would be difficult to pursue in today’s science funding landscape.

An artificial intelligence framework that suggests just one to three ingredient swaps can make meals meaningfully more nutritious and less expensive, according to a new study published in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health by Trevor Chan and Ilias Tagkopoulos of the University of California, Davis, USA.

Transposable elements (TEs), also called transposons, are DNA sequences capable of moving or replicating from one location to another within a genome. While TEs are the most significant fraction of the human genome (approximately 40-50%), only recently have scientists begun to appreciate their impact impact on human diseases from cancer to neurodegenerative disorders.

Usually, our cells keep TEs quiet when we are young, but in a new study from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, researchers have discovered that TEs are actively expressed in human brains as large RNAs that can then be processed into small RNAs (18-32 nucleotides long). This finding provides new molecular insights into how our brains age normally, as well as how neurodegenerative disorders can impact these normal patterns of transposon RNA expression.

Using catheters coated with specialized carbon nanotubes, MIT researchers developed a new way to monitor bladder cancer patients for tumor recurrence.