Australian shark experts have tested four bite-resistant materials to assess their ability to reduce injuries and blood loss. 

While internal and crushing injuries may still occur, bite-resistant wetsuits can now be added to the ‘toolkit’ of measures available to reduce shark-bite risk and resulting injuries, say researchers from Flinders University’s Southern Shark Ecology Group.

UC San Diego and colleagues across the nation have announced the first data release from the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, offering a detailed look at early human brain development.

Microscopy is a vital tool for exploring the mysteries of life, enabling scientists to observe the dynamic changes of cells and organelles across spatial and temporal scales. However, because cells are primarily composed of water and exhibit low refractive-index contrast, it remains challenging to clearly visualize their internal structures. In recent years, Intensity Diffraction Tomography (IDT), an emerging label-free 3D imaging technique, has attracted increasing attention. Instead of relying on fluorescent dyes, IDT directly exploits the intrinsic refractive-index distribution of cells for imaging, thereby avoiding phototoxicity and photobleaching and making it particularly suitable for long-term live-cell observation. When combined with 3D fluorescence microscopy, this dual-modal approach can simultaneously provide molecular specificity and global structural information, offering a powerful tool for deciphering cellular components and their interactions. Nevertheless, long-term imaging (from several hours to days) is often hindered by the optical complexity of cells, environmental thermal drift, and mechanical instabilities of the microscope, which lead to time-varying aberrations and focal drift. Achieving stable, high-quality tracking of subcellular structures over extended periods therefore remains a key challenge.

Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease that affects millions and lacks effective treatments due to safety concerns, cost, and growing drug resistance. In a recent study, researchers from Japan discovered that onnamides, compounds isolated from marine sponges in Okinawa, exhibit potent anti-leishmanial properties. These molecules showed high efficacy and low toxicity in laboratory tests, offering a promising foundation for new therapies targeting leishmaniasis and other protozoa-derived infections.

A team from the University of Liège has developed novel equations to estimate the size of large marine reptiles from the dinosaur Era known from incomplete skeletons. This work, published in Biology Letters, paves the way for a better understanding of the evolution and ecology of these marine predators.

Many applications—from drug discovery and diagnostics to cell engineering and gene modulation—require delivering biomolecules into large numbers of cells and rapidly evaluating the outcomes. The challenge is twofold: achieve intracellular delivery at scale across diverse cells and cargos, and obtain quantitative results fast enough to keep pace with that delivery.