In the study of why and how animals look the way they do, color is king—at least, the range of color humans can see.

A multidisciplinary research team at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University has developed a new coating technology that holds promise to substantially increase the lifespan of implanted and wearable biosensors while retaining their electrical signaling activities, enabling continuous measurements of analytes in different biofluids inside our bodies potentially for many weeks.

A research team, including Professor Naoto Tomioka of Okayama University of Science, has uncovered new genetic evidence challenging the long-standing "dual-structure model" of Japanese ancestry. By analyzing ancient genomes from individuals spanning the Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun periods (9000 B.P. to 1300 B.P.), the study identified three distinct genomic groups contributing to the ancestry of modern Japanese people. Their findings, published in Science Advances, suggest two waves of migration from Northeast and East Asia during the Yayoi and Kofun periods, integrating with the indigenous Jomon population. This research introduces a "triple-structure model" of Japanese ancestry and aligns with modern genomic studies. However, further analysis is needed to reinforce these conclusions.

Chemists at Emory University invented a reaction to streamline the total synthesis of a compound, phaeocaulisin A, extracted from a plant used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine. In laboratory dish experiments conducted with biologists at Winship Cancer Institute  of Emory University, the researchers showed the compound’s efficacy against HER2-positive breast cancer cells and triple-negative breast cancer cells. An analogue of the compound the chemists constructed boosted this efficacy.