Scientists have engineered tobacco and lettuce plants that carry the gene for the protein myoglobin, a molecule abundant in animal muscle fibers, in the genome of their chloroplasts. This makes it possible to mass-produce myoglobin in crops to give a meaty flavor and color to meat alternatives. The expected yield at scale could rival those from livestock farming, while greatly reducing water use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Glioblastoma is difficult to treat because tumour cells infiltrate the surrounding brain tissue and the blood-brain barrier limits how well drugs and radiotherapy reach the brain. Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Harvard and Henan universities have discovered a ‘double-punch’ nanozyme platform designed to address both problems with a single tool of smart nanoparticles.

AI systems increasingly influence how people search for information, receive recommendations, learn, work, and create. But these systems are only as reliable as the quality of the data used to train them. Supported by an NSF CAREER grant, Jiaqi Ma hopes to develop tools to make data curation more principled and transparent and improve the performance, reliability, and safety of widely used technologies such as language models and recommendation systems.