Eastern Africa’s Turkana Rift is both a hotbed for fossil discoveries of our earliest ancestors and a literal hotbed of volcanic activity caused by shifting tectonic plates. Now researchers have found that Earth’s underlying crust in the region has been significantly thinned, presaging Africa’s eventual breakup—and with that finding, the researchers offer a new perspective on how Turkana’s world-famous fossil record of human evolution came to be.

Community help is no longer just nice to have in the world of bat conservation, it is essential to large-scale bat monitoring and the protection of threatened and understudied species, according to new research.

Researchers at the International Laboratory of Microphysiological Systems of the HSE Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology investigated how different isoforms of the same microRNA influence gene function in prostate adenocarcinoma. The study found that in some cases, microRNAs can reinforce each other’s effects by targeting and suppressing the same genes. This finding offers a fresh perspective on the molecular mechanisms underlying tumour development and on the search for disease biomarkers. The results have been published in PeerJ.

How do cells know when to activate or slow down their activity? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) provides new insights by studying TORC2, an essential but still poorly understood protein complex. Using ultra-high-resolution imaging, scientists were able to observe its structure in detail for the first time. The team notably reveals the existence of a  molecular “cork” that controls its activation at the cell surface. Published in the journal Molecular Cell, these findings pave the way for new strategies to target this mechanism, which is involved in diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Human Frontier Science Program Foundation (HFSP) has awarded a highly competitive international research grant to Prof. Orna Amster-Choder of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in collaboration with Prof. Kerwyn Casey Huang of Stanford University and Prof. Sivaramesh Wigneshweraraj of Imperial College London.

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women worldwide. About 10% of breast cancers are hereditary, and approximately 60% of these cases carry BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations. Individuals harboring BRCA1 mutations exhibit a markedly increased risk of developing breast cancer. BRCA1 plays a critical role in maintaining genomic stability by repairing DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) through homologous recombination (HR).

Flinders University researchers have taken a revealing look inside the head of one of the first animals to crawl from the water to live on land more than 380 million years ago.  

Using high-tech neutron imaging, they scanned the skull and braincase of the only known specimen of Koharalepis jarviki, a large fossil fish found in freshwater rivers in the vast Lashly Mountains region of Antarctica which lived during the Devonian Period or 'Age of Fishes'.