A kimchi-derived bacterium can bind to nanoplastics under gut-like conditions and may help carry them out of the body. In mice, the probiotic more than doubled the amount of nanoplastics detected in feces, pointing to a surprising potential use for microbes from fermented foods.

Scientists discovered a new frog species in the flooded forests of the western Amazon, distinguishing it from nearly identical relatives through DNA and its unique call. Adenomera varcena highlights how much Amazonian biodiversity remains hidden even as habitat loss and climate change threaten these poorly understood species.

A pocket-sized, roughly $100 detector can reveal the invisible stream of cosmic particles constantly passing through Earth and even through our bodies. What began as a student physics project is now being used in major experiments, balloon missions, and potentially future spacecraft.

Astronomers have confirmed a Jupiter-size planet less than a million years old, making Elias 2-24 b the youngest known planet and giving scientists a rare look at a world still being born. Its surprisingly rapid formation challenges leading theories about how giant planets come together, especially so far from their stars.

New supercomputer simulations suggest JWST’s puzzling Little Red Dots are rapidly growing black holes from the early Universe. Extreme radiation may have helped create unusually massive black hole seeds, while dense surrounding gas allowed them to grow dozens of times faster than black holes can today. The simulated objects closely resemble the Little Red Dots seen by Webb. If correct, they could solve the mystery of how enormous black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.

A natural compound produced by gut bacteria after digesting foods such as pomegranates, walnuts, and berries may help repair and protect the intestinal lining. The discovery reveals a surprising beneficial side of an inflammatory pathway and could inspire more targeted treatments for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Scientists discovered that brain-cell axons may not be smooth tubes as textbooks have shown for more than a century, but instead naturally resemble strings of tiny pearls. Those pearl-like structures can change with neural activity and may help control how quickly electrical signals travel through the brain.

Science, Ahead of Print.

Scientists are testing a counterintuitive way to fight mesothelioma, an aggressive asbestos-linked cancer with few effective treatments. A new experimental mesothelioma drug kills cancer cells by disabling PRX3, an antioxidant defense that tumors use to survive intense oxidative stress. In an early clinical trial, it controlled disease progression in 67% of patients and produced encouraging survival results, raising hopes that the strategy could eventually be used against other cancers.

Scientists have found the first evidence that liquid may have flowed across Pluto’s surface in the recent past. Dark features on the enormous Sputnik Planitia glacier appear consistent with liquid nitrogen rising through cracks from deep beneath the ice. Computer models show that nitrogen could melt at the glacier’s base and travel upward like fluid through small conduits. The finding reveals that Pluto may be much more geologically active than its frozen appearance suggests.

Scientists found that black and green Japanese rice contain unusual, potentially beneficial fats and may be digested more slowly than ordinary white rice. The combination could make these colorful varieties promising ingredients for foods designed to support blood sugar and metabolic health.

Scientists discovered a hidden “immune organ” inside the skull that acts as a rapid first responder against brain cancer in mice. Strengthening this local immune defense improved tumor rejection and survival, raising the possibility of new treatments that target the skull directly.

I know what you think about papers in Cell. They are long. Mechanistic. “Complete.” They report deep biological insights. I know this because I hear it a lot from researchers. There is truth to it. Cell has published thousands of papers that fit these descriptors, and we will continue to. They have incredible value. But we don’t publish papers in Cell because they are long and mechanistic. We publish them because they are exciting. Cool. Awe-inspiring. We publish them because we think they provide something that our readers will want to learn about and will benefit from.

The virtual cell is envisioned as a multi-modal, multi-scale, and stateful world model that can simulate, perturb, and ultimately program cellular systems. This perspective outlines how this paradigm could transform cell biology from experimental trial-and-error toward simulation-driven discovery, counterfactual exploration, and rational intervention design.

Biological processes continuously adapt in response to intervention. Unlike static predictive models, biomedical world models support action-conditioned simulations for counterfactual reasoning, intervention design, and sequential planning. This perspective defines the key properties of biomedical world models and discusses the data, modeling, and evaluation challenges required to build them across biological and clinical scales.

Salaudeen et al. review common reliability failures in predictive and generative AI for healthcare, including erroneous model outputs, clinically unjustified performance differences, and deployment-time degradation. They examine why existing technical solutions fall short and argue for lifecycle-aware evaluation, continuous monitoring, and institutional governance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way biomedical research is conducted by making it possible to integrate diverse types of biological data and tackle questions that were previously difficult to address. At the same time, its growing use also raises important questions about data quality, reliability, interpretability, and how computational predictions should be combined with biological knowledge and experimental validation. In this Voices piece, researchers from diverse disciplines share their perspectives on how AI is advancing their respective fields and highlight both the transformative opportunities and the key challenges that will shape the future of the life sciences.

scBaseCount is presently the largest public single-cell RNA-seq repository, containing over 502 million cells across 27 organisms and 75 tissues. An AI agent autonomously discovers, annotates, and uniformly reprocesses all 10× Genomics datasets in the SRA, creating a harmonized, continually updated resource for studying the diversity of cell biology and training AI models.

Tahoe-100M is an atlas of 100 million single-cell transcriptomes, capturing how 50 cancer cell lines respond to ∼1,100 drug-dose treatments. By pairing single-cell and molecular phenotypes at scale, the resource links drug mechanisms to cellular responses and provides an openly available substrate for training predictive models of cell behavior.

LongevityBench, Longevity-LLMs, and Longevity Claw evaluate the readiness of the state-of-the-art AI systems for spearheading aging research.