Australian scientists have used high speed video to uncover the unique mechanism that allows a honey bee’s stinger to continue to pump venom into its target even after it has separated from the bee’s body.

A preclinical study from Duke University researchers suggests that the effectiveness of an experimental approach to limiting stroke-related brain injury may depend not only on the drug itself, but also on the brain’s collateral circulation: the network of small “backup” blood vessels that can help sustain tissue when a major artery is blocked.

ATP-induced cell death (AICD) is an operational conceptual framework describing the associations between pathological extracellular ATP accumulation, excessive purinergic stimulation, disrupted ATP homeostasis and diverse cell-death outcomes. This review summarizes recent evidence on the molecular mechanisms of AICD, including extracellular ATP–purinergic receptor signaling, ionic and membrane disturbances, inflammasome and caspase activation, mitochondrial dysfunction, redox imbalance, and the context-dependent convergence of these pathways on multiple forms of cell death. The directness and strength of gene-level evidence are also assessed using an ordinal evidence-grading framework that classifies the evidence for the 38 AICD-Core genes as direct experimental, indirect, context-dependent, mechanistically supportive, or currently insufficient. These mechanistic analyses, as well as gene-level analyses, are discussed in relation to the existing datasets in ATPexGen, which contains 38 AICD-Core and 216 AICD-Extended genes and provides a searchable and downloadable resource for the field of AICD research. The review also addresses gaps in current evidence, limitations of curation processes, and priorities for experimental validation and database development moving forward.