Luan et al. establish the first mouse model that develops spontaneous, fully penetrant, and rapid-onset glomerulonephritis, demonstrating that dominant expression of an activating IgG subclass is sufficient to drive lethal lupus-like nephritis.
Category: futurism
Distinct kinematics and micromorphology for symmetrical rowing and sliding on water in ripple bugs and water striders
Bang, S.Y., Kim, W., Lee, J. et al. Sci Rep 15, 44,777 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-28453-0
Fossil may solve mystery of what one of the weirdest-ever animals ate
One of the weirdest animals that ever lived may have been a scavenger. A re-examination of fossils first described in the 1970s seems to show a swarm of Hallucigenia feeding on the corpse of a comb jelly.
Hallucigenia was a small animal, up to 5 centimetres long. It had a worm-like body with multiple legs, as well as long, sharp spines on its back. Because of its peculiar appearance, palaeontologists at first reconstructed the animal upside-down, supposing the spines to be legs.
It lived in the deep seas during the Cambrian period (about 539 million to 487 million years ago), when many major animal groups emerged. Hallucigenia was first identified in rocks from the Burgess Shale deposits in British Columbia, Canada. It is related to velvet worms, tardigrades and arthropods (the group that includes insects and spiders).
Image: Alamy
Hallucigenia was such an odd animal that palaeontologists reconstructed it upside-down when they first analysed its fossils — and now we may know what it ate.
An IL-12 partial agonist sustains intratumoral lymphocyte activation and detoxifies systemic IL-12 therapy
IL-12 is a promising tumor immunotherapy, but its therapeutic use is limited by acute NK cell-associated toxicity. Koliesnik et al. report the discovery of STK-026, an IL-12-Fc partial agonist that preferentially drives effector function in T cells, which express high levels of IL-12 receptors, and avoids NK cell-associated toxicity.
Self-Assembling Wires
An exploration of a fascinating self-organizing system. Created by the Stanford Complexity Group