Even after adopting cattle, early herders kept hunting and gathering - The University of British Columbia

In 1991, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stumbled into a fight with the American beef industry. A children’s alphabet book featuring the cartoon heroes warned about methane from cattle warming the planet and urged readers to eat less meat. The National Cattlemen’s Association made a big fuss out of it and Random House, the publisher of the book in question, agreed not to reprint it.

Oct 12, 2026By Farms.com Researchers discover cattle pregnancies can succeed without a protein long considered essential For many years, scientists believed that a protein known as interferon tau (IFNT) was essential for successful pregnancy in cattle. This protein is produced by the developing embryo and was thought to send a crucial signal to the mother, helping maintain the pregnancy. However, new research from Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich has challenged this long-standing scientific belief. The study, recently published in Nature Communications, found that cattle embryos can establish and maintain pregnancies even without producing interferon tau. The discovery could change how scientists understand reproduction in cattle and may lead to new strategies to improve fertility in livestock. The research team, led by Dr.

Aging is the price paid for the ability of experiencing existence, one might philosophize. Natural cellular aging begins with differentiation. Once a stem cell becomes a specific cell type, it's locked in forever: fat cells can never become muscle cells, no matter how hard one wishes, or pokes and prods at them in front of the mirror. Or so it goes in nature, but scientists can definitely transform cells, as if biologically compensating for all the failed alchemical attempts of the past. Now, scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older. The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell. Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type. The second method involves a "direct conversion," which skips the middle stage and directly transforms a cell into a different type.

Cells constantly recycle proteins and other cellular components. But how do they ensure that the right cargo ends up in the right recycling vesicle—one of the cell's transport carriers? A team at the University of Basel has identified a molecular switch that controls this process. The small protein ARF-1 ensures that recyclable cargo is efficiently loaded into transport vesicles and returned to the cell's surface.