Early-career-researcher-led best practices for social science and behavioural genetics - Nature

)The immortal jellyfish is capable of winding back its lifecycle to become young again. Scientists are unlocking its cellular secrets for new strategies to treat diseases of old age. The tiny translucent jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii is surprisingly hard to kill. The marine biologist Maria Miglietta of Texas A&M University at Galveston has cut them, boiled them, starved them, overloaded their tanks with salt or plopped them in fresh water – but the nifty creatures seem to cheat death every time. Under duress, they stop in their tracks and fall to the bottom of their tank. Then something astonishing happens: the animals transform into balls of cells that bear no resemblance to the tentacled umbrella shape of adult jellyfish, known as the medusa. Within one to three days, a structure called a polyp – an early jellyfish life stage – buds off from this ball of cells and then grows into a colony, which will eventually sprout new medusae. "From one jellyfish that doesn't die, then you get this colony that can form hundreds more," Miglietta says.

Much like sushi or political humor, badly needed donor organs tend to have a pretty short shelf life. By current estimates, vital organs like a heart or a lung need to be transplanted into their waiting human recipient within six hours or less, while the most hardy of these organs, the kidney, can only remain viable for up to 36 hours before surgery. These unforgiving expirations dates have helped keep over 100,000 Americans (and counting) stuck on the waiting list for a new organ—but surgeons and medical researchers at the University of Minnesota have just reported a breakthrough that might finally get this line moving. A university team, co-led by transplant surgeon Erik Finger, says it has effectively kept pig kidneys in cold storage for months, and in one case over a year, managing to gently thaw, test, and successfully transplant these warmed-over organs into test pig recipients. The research, published as a pre-print with bioRxiv while it awaits peer review, confirmed that the once-frozen organs had both regained their color and helped the test pigs produce urine: critical signs that restored blood flow and organ function had been achieved.

In August 2025, researchers reported finding traces of a comet that may have exploded over Earth roughly 12,800 years ago, possibly triggering a prolonged cold spell known as the Younger Dryas. The discovery, made in sediments from Baffin Bay near Greenland, appeared to offer new support for one of archaeology and climate science’s most controversial theories. The journal PLOS One retracted the study, citing serious problems with the dating of sediments, the identification of supposed cosmic material, and the reliability of the research.

MELBOURNE, Oct. 19 (Xinhua) -- Researchers in Australia have developed a way to precisely target the "unique molecular fingerprint" created when two genes become abnormally fused together, potentially paving the way for more personalized cancer treatments. Researchers from Australia's Peter MacCallum Cancer Center and collaborating institutions described the method in Science Advances, aiming to develop programmable cancer medicines tailored to individual tumors' genetic abnormalities, according to a statement released recently by Peter Mac. The new strategy can precisely target and silence gene fusions, stopping their cancer-driving effects and potentially offering a new, highly personalized approach to treating a wide range of fusion-driven cancers, according to the study. ■