Researchers in the lab of Mary Gehring at Whitehead Institute, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) affiliate, have developed a gene expression “map” of seed development in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Their findings reveal in which tissues and cell types genes that determine agriculturally significant traits, such as seed size and nutritional composition, are expressed. The work could guide future efforts to improve crop yield, nutrition, and resilience.

IBD, which comprises the inflammatory conditions Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects about 1.6 million Americans, many of whom cannot be effectively treated. This mostly is due to a lack in understanding of what exactly causes the increased inflammation, fibrosis, and compromised intestinal barrier that underlie this disease and its manifold symptoms. 

 

A new study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering and led by Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, developed donor-specific microfluidic Organ Chip models of colon that replicate major hallmarks of IBD in vitroin an unprecedented way. Their approach pinpointed new drivers of IBD progression and, for the first time, demonstrated a direct impact of pregnancy hormones on IBD severity in female IBD patient chips and recapitulated the enhanced initiation of cancer formation in IBD tissues.

A study led by researchers from the Department of Microbiology at the University of Malaga has revealed how organic farming –the one that uses natural substances and processes, avoiding the use of synthetic chemicals– can, in the long term, help crops become more resistant to drought in a natural way.

The advancement of electronic skins toward commercialization calls for cost-effective and robust flexible conductors, among which metal films are attractive candidates but suffer from poor stretchability. Conventionally, cracks formed in strained metal films are universally considered detrimental and sought to be suppressed. Herein, we demonstrate that cracking is not a drawback, but rather an effective design parameter for on-demand tailoring of film properties. By exploiting the size effect in crack engineering, we propose a bioinspired, dual-scale architecture that endows metal film conductors with up to 325% stretchability. We show that through the synergy of nanoscale pore implantation and microscale substrate roughening, progressively evolved crack patterns can be programmed within metal films by modulating structural parameters. This tunable film cracking behavior yields a nearly 25-fold regulation of stretchability, representing a remarkably wide tunable range among previously deposited metal counterparts. Leveraging these advances, a stretchable metal film-based, AI-empowered electronic skin is constructed, demonstrating excellent practicality across diverse flexible sensing scenarios. Our strategy highlights the pivotal role of the size effect in precise crack manipulation, and the multi-scale regulation paradigm establishes a fresh route to performance improvement of flexible conductors.

Technology that converts carbon dioxide (CO₂) into fuels and plastic feedstocks using electricity is gaining attention as a core technology in the era of carbon neutrality. In particular, ethylene and ethanol are high-value materials widely used in the production of plastics, fuels, and chemical products, but until now, the only metal that has effectively produced them has essentially been copper (Cu). Through this study, Korean researchers have revealed the limitations of existing catalyst theories that have explained this principle.