Researchers developed MARVAL, an automated platform for measuring the shape of brain blood vessels from time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography. In more than 3,000 community participants and nearly 9,000 stroke patients with high-quality imaging, the team built an East Asian cerebrovascular template, charted age-related vascular changes, and found that small-vessel integrity and network complexity were strongly associated with disability, recurrence and mortality after ischemic stroke.

A new study led by XUE Chaoyou from the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with LOU Huiqiang at China Agricultural University and RAO Shuquan from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences has shown that RNA-guided IS110 transposons use two mechanistically distinct pathways to mobilize DNA.

Decomposers are crucial for keeping Earth habitable through nutrient recycling. Most decomposers survive through osmotrophy — a means of feeding by absorbing dissolved nutrients rather than engulfing prey. But how this method of feeding repeatedly arose across the eukaryotic tree of life remains unclear. Now, researchers have discovered that four groups of eukaryotes which have specialized in osmotrophy first arose between 720 million and 1 billion years ago and that they share a toolkit of genes involved in osmotrophic functions. Their results also indicate that horizontal gene transfer played an important role in the evolution of these functions.

New research from Canada's University of Victoria has found that some kelp forests around Vancouver Island were disappearing far earlier than previously thought.

Scientists finally found the predator that had been killing and eating ancient birds and regurgitating their broken bones as pellets 120 million years ago-- it's a new species of dinosaur, related to Velociraptor, that had wing-like structures on both its arms and its legs.

When we think of the immune system, most people imagine white blood cells putting up a fight against invading germs within our bloodstream. But now, in research publishing June 4^th in the Cell Press journal Molecular Cell, scientists detail a separate but equally important route by which our bodies fight infection—directly inside already infected cells. In the report, the authors define a previously undescribed method of germ resistance they coin “antibody-directed xenophagy” (ADX), where cells can digest bacteria and viruses that cross the cell membrane, including Salmonella and adenoviruses.