In a mouse model of liver transplantation, researchers have identified proteins that act as “protective switches” guarding the liver against damage occurring when blood supply is restored during transplantation, a process known as ischemia-reperfusion injury. But they also found the same protective relationship in discarded human livers that we deemed unsuitable for transplantation.

How we focus our attention before we even see an object matters. For example, when we look for something moving in the sky, our expectation would be very different if the object is a bird flying past or a baseball coming straight at us. But it’s unclear whether our brain’s attention focuses first on a broad characteristic of the anticipated object, such as movement, or a specific feature — such as the direction of movement up or down. Researchers from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, addressed this by analyzing electrical brain activity with machine-learning methods.