I sometimes make fun of microglia, because they were (unfairly) given a name that means “tiny glue.” They deserve better: these are immune cells that live in the brain and attend to numerous important matters (none of which involve glue). A new paper in Cell Reports shows that microglia in mice are strikingly different between males and females, and for me this adds to their mystique as quiet heroes of the brain and to the pathos of their silly name.…

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Polar bears are classic examples of “charismatic megafauna,” finishing a solid 8th in a 2018 survey of the most charismatic species on earth. (The Top 20 ranking includes zero birds, and 4 of the top 7 are murderous cats, which reveals more about humans than it does about other animals.) I certainly agree that they are charismatic, having watched them perform at a zoo many years ago, though I admit my fanhood was diminished by watching them hunt baby belugas…

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Is age really just a number? Hundreds of “aging clocks” developed over the last 10–15 years suggest that it is. These clocks aim to measure biological age rather than chronological age—initially using DNA methylation, more recent examples use, e.g., blood proteins. A recent preprint goes a step further by developing “tissue clocks” that predict the biological age of different human tissues from images or even blood samples. The authors reason that tissue structure, with its direct links to physiological fitness,…

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Consider whether you would read an article that reached a conclusion like this: “Our results thus reveal a range of strategies for investing resources in the most expensive machines at the heart of this process.” I probably wouldn’t, since words like “invest” and “expensive” are—shall we say—unattractive to me. But what if the sentence is actually this: “Our results thus reveal a range of strategies for investing resources in the molecular machines at the heart of cellular self-replication.” That’s a…

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Bats are wonders. These are mammals with powered flight, a group of species with a diverse array of senses (sonar!) and lifestyles, that dart around the Sonoran desert where I live, eating flying insects and pollinating native plants. Okay, so they’re also vast reservoirs of coronaviruses, but even that is wildly interesting. Consider a new paper in Nature that just added ten new bat genomes to the genomeosphere (it’s part of an effort called Bat1K; what a time to be…

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