Bathing can change the primates' parasites and gut microbes. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When the temperatures plunge and snow falls, it's understandable to envy a snow monkey soaking in a steaming hot spring. Officially called Japanese macaques (), the primates are well known for taking advantage of the warm waters during snowy winters. While the hot water helps keep their bodies toasty in parts of Japan that can be covered with feet of snow for months at a time, there may be more to this unique behavior than meets the eye.

Super tough microbialites are some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Among the tricky carnivorous plants, great white shark-killing orca whales, and other remarkable flora and fauna that call South Africa home is a remarkable group of "living rocks." Called microbialites, these communities are similar to coral reefs and are built up by microbes. These tiny living organisms absorb and release dissolved minerals into more solid rock-like forms.

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

Mars may have a network of liquid water flowing through the frozen ground. All buried permafrost, on Earth and beyond, is expected to host narrow veins of liquid, and new calculations show on Mars, they could be big enough to support living organisms. "For Mars we always live on the edge of maybe habitable, maybe not, so I set out to do this research thinking maybe I can close this loop and say that it's very unlikely to have enough water and have it be arranged so that it's habitable for microbes," says Hanna Sizemore at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. She and her colleagues used measurements of the soil composition on Mars to calculate how much of the icy soil could actually be liquid water and the size of the channels that water would run through. It is tricky to keep water liquid on Mars, because temperatures can get as low as -150 C (-240 F) on the planet.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. At the US Army Corps of Engineers' research facility in central Alaska, a unique tunnel descends underground. They were hunting for something much smaller--and smellier. "The first thing you notice when you walk in there is that it smells really bad. It smells like a musty basement that's been left to sit for way too long," geological scientist Tristan Caro recounted in a statement .

Infectious diseases continue to pose a serious threat to public health, underscoring the urgent need for effective computational approaches to screen novel anti-infective agents. Oligopeptides have emerged as promising candidates in antimicrobial research due to their structural simplicity, high bioavailability, and low susceptibility to resistance. Despite their potential, computational models specifically designed to predict associations between oligopeptides and infectious diseases remain scarce. This study introduces a prompt-guided graph-based contrastive learning framework (PGCLODA) to uncover potential associations. A tripartite graph is constructed with oligopeptides, microbes, and diseases as nodes, incorporating both structural and semantic information. To preserve critical regions during contrastive learning, a prompt-guided graph augmentation strategy is employed to generate meaningful paired views. A dual encoder architecture, integrating Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Transformer, is used to jointly capture local and global features. The fused embeddings are subsequently input into a multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier for final prediction. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset indicate that PGCLODA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models in AUROC, AUPRC, and accuracy. Ablation and hyperparameter studies confirm the contribution of each module. Case studies further validate the generalization ability of PGCLODA and its potential to uncover novel, biologically relevant associations. These findings offer valuable insights for mechanism-driven discovery and oligopeptide-based drug development. The source code of PGCLODA is available online at https://github.com/jjnlcode/PGCLODA.

Charlie Kirk dead at 31: What we know so far about MAGA star's death at Utah campus that sent shockwaves around the world as FBI botches arrest and Trump promises ultimate punishment MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd fired over'disgusting' on-air comments about Charlie Kirk shortly after conservative star was assassinated Elite sniper breaks down Charlie Kirk assassin's sick plot... and reveals tiny detail everyone's missed: The gun. MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Charlie Kirk's body wasn't even cold... before the fighting started again. Do these ghouls not see where this is headed? Charlie Kirk's powerful tribute to murdered Ukrainian refugee hours before his own assassination: 'America will never be the same' Musk dethroned as richest person by forgotten Wall Street darling's founder as stock soars 42% Trump issues Oval Office address over Charlie Kirk's assassination: 'This is a dark moment for America' TMZ forced to apologize after staff heard erupting in laughter as Charlie Kirk's death was announced Sweater weather starts here - the cozy, chic pieces from Soft Surroundings you'll actually wear all season America's top banker Jamie Dimon makes chilling warning that economy is struggling Fierce debate erupts over'non-human' technology in space after video captures UFO surviving Hellfire strike Is this Charlie Kirk's killer? This Oscar-nominated actress, 68, will soon reunite with her ex in Spain for their daughter's wedding, can you guess who?

--Microbiome data analysis is essential for understanding host health and disease, yet its inherent sparsity and noise pose major challenges for accurate imputation, hindering downstream tasks such as biomarker discovery. Existing imputation methods, including recent diffusion-based models, often fail to capture the complex interdependencies between microbial taxa and overlook contextual metadata that can inform imputation. We introduce DepMicroDiff, a novel framework that combines diffusion-based generative modeling with a Dependency-A ware Transformer (DA T) to explicitly capture both mutual pairwise dependencies and autoregressive relationships. DepMicroDiff is further enhanced by V AE-based pretraining across diverse cancer datasets and conditioning on patient metadata encoded via a large language model (LLM). Experiments on TCGA microbiome datasets show that DepMicroDiff substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher Pearson correlation (up to 0.712), cosine similarity (up to 0.812), and lower RMSE and MAE across multiple cancer types, demonstrating its robustness and generalizability for microbiome imputation. Microbiome data analysis plays a critical role in understanding host health, disease progression, and therapeutic response, particularly in contexts such as cancer progression, gut-brain interactions, and immunotherapy [1]. However, mi-crobiome datasets, derived from 16S rRNA or metagenomic sequencing, are notoriously sparse and noisy due to limitations in sequencing technologies, biological variability, and compositional constraints.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Mosquito bites are much more than just a red and itchy summertime nuisance. The diseases that they carry are notoriously difficult to control and kill over 700,000 people worldwide every year. What's more, many mosquitoes have developed resistance to the synthetic insecticides–the same substances that can also pose environmental and health risks. As a solution, microbiologists are looking into biopesticides derived from living organisms.

You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your parents listen in on your tiny heartbeat, track your gestation on an app, and post your sonogram on social media. Well before you were born, you were known to the algorithm. Your arrival coincided with the 125th anniversary of this magazine.