A research group at Umeå University has developed new advanced light-controlled tools that enable precise control of proteins in real time in living cells. This groundbreaking research opens doors to new methods for studying complex processes in cells and could pave the way for significant advances in medicine and synthetic biology.

An international team of scientists has discovered the anti-icing secret of polar bear fur – something that allows one of the planet’s most iconic animals to survive and thrive in one of its most punishing climates. That secret? Greasy hair.

After some polar sleuthing, which involved scrutiny of hair collected from six polar bears in the wild, the scientists homed in on the hair “sebum” (or grease) as the all-important protectant. This sebum, which is made up of cholesterol, diacylglycerols, and fatty acids, makes it very hard for ice to attach to their fur. 

While this finding sheds fascinating new light on our understanding of polar bear – and even Inuit – ecology, it may also have a suite of unrelated applications, with a similar concoction of artificially made sebum promising to be useful as an anti-ice surface coating, or in next-gen ski skins used by skiers and snowboarders.

Researchers from Zhejiang University and HKUST (Guangzhou) have introduced ProtET, an innovative AI-powered multi-modal protein editing model published in Health Data Science. ProtET leverages advanced transformer-structured encoders and a hierarchical training paradigm to align protein sequences with natural language instructions, enabling precise and controllable protein editing.

The model was trained on over 67 million protein-biotext pairs from Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL databases and demonstrated significant improvements across key benchmarks, including 16.9% enhanced protein stability, optimized enzyme catalytic activity, and improved antibody-antigen binding affinity. ProtET’s zero-shot capabilities successfully designed SARS-CoV antibodies with stable 3D structures, highlighting its real-world biomedical applications.

This research represents a major advancement in AI-driven protein engineering, offering a scalable and interactive tool for scientific discovery, synthetic biology, and therapeutic development.

New research, led by the University of Plymouth and published in the journal Ocean and Coastal Management, highlights the benefits of combining existing long-term plankton monitoring programmes and emerging technologies in monitoring the health of our seas

A new analysis of samples from the asteroid Bennu, NASA’s first asteroid sample captured in space and delivered to Earth, reveals that evaporated water left a briny broth where salts and minerals allowed the elemental ingredients of life to intermingle and create more complex structures. The discovery suggests that extraterrestrial brines provided a crucial setting for the development of organic compounds.