Researchers have created the most complete genetic profile of the brown rat to date, according to a UTHealth Houston-led team, paving the way for scientists to more accurately investigate genetic links to conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure and stroke.
The research, published in Cell Genomics, was led by corresponding author Peter Doris, Ph.D., director of the Center for Human Genetics at The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine within McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.
The assembly of the brown rat’s genome provides a complete genetic fingerprint and reveals that the brown rat’s DNA is more complex than scientists previously understood. In addition to uncovering more than 60 new genes, many of which were previously difficult to sequence and are thought to play a role in immunity and other biological processes, the team discovered that brown rat sex chromosomes differ significantly from those in humans.
Sealed honey from ancient Egyptian burial contexts is reported to remain edible after millennia — a claim whose specific instances are hard to source, but whose underlying chemistry, driven by low water content, acidic pH and bee-made hydrogen peroxide, is real and well-documented.
Two solar farms in Minnesota were built on retired agricultural land, and instead of the gravel or mown turf that usually goes under panels, the ground was seeded with native wildflowers and prairie grasses. Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory came back to the same test plots for five years and counted what flew and crawled past them.
For most of human history, scientists believed that once a cell became a skin cell, a neuron, or a heart cell, that identity was permanent. Then a group of researchers discovered something extraordinary: cells could be reset. My guest today was there when that discovery happened.
Dr. Koji Tanabe, Ph.D. is Founder and CEO of I Peace (https://ipeace.com/en/), one of the world’s leading companies advancing induced pluripotent stem cell — or iPSC — technology from the research laboratory into scalable clinical manufacturing.
Dr. Tanabe occupies a truly unique place in modern biomedical history. He earned his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University and was the second author on the landmark scientific paper that first demonstrated the successful creation of human induced pluripotent stem cells — a discovery that fundamentally changed regenerative medicine and ultimately earned Dr. Yamanaka the 2012 Nobel Prize.
After helping establish one of the most important technologies in modern biology, Dr. Tanabe continued his work at Stanford University in the laboratory of Dr. Marius Wernig, a pioneer of direct cellular reprogramming, where he investigated how mature blood cells can be directly converted into neurons and explored the molecular mechanisms that govern cellular identity.
In 2015, Dr. Tanabe founded I Peace with an ambitious vision: to make clinical-grade iPS cells accessible at industrial scale. Today, the company has developed automated GMP manufacturing platforms capable of producing personalized and clinical-grade iPS cells for researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and regenerative medicine programs around the world.
On the episode we’ll explore how far the field has come since those first groundbreaking experiments nearly two decades ago, where regenerative medicine stands today, the growing role of iPS cells in drug discovery and transplantation, the excitement surrounding in vivo reprogramming and partial cellular rejuvenation, and what may ultimately become possible when every individual has access to their own personalized stem cell bank.
Are some interventions designed to induce gratitude more effectively than others? In which countries and cultures do they work best to improve mood, strengthen bonds between people and promote social reciprocity? A study aimed at answering these questions—conducted in 34 countries with more than 10,000 participants—had its results published in PNAS. In Brazil, the project received the help of researchers and 598 volunteers who responded to intervention prompts via an online tool.
“One of our main overall findings is that all the proposed interventions worked,” says Paulo Sérgio Boggio, a psychologist, professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University and coordinator of the National Institute of Science and Technology in Social and Affective Neuroscience (INCT-Sani). Boggio and his former graduate student, Beatriz Bezerra de Souza, are the two Brazilian co-authors of the article.
Thirty-six researchers are listed as authors of the paper, including experimental psychologist Michael McCullough, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The study was coordinated by Nicholas Coles, a researcher at the University of Florida.
Despite no longer “thinking out loud” about who the user is, the underlying behavioral shifts remained just as strong. This means user-aware adaptations are becoming increasingly covert and difficult to detect simply by monitoring an AI’s internal reasoning logs.
Our results suggest that user awareness is a meaningful and understudied form of situational awareness in frontier language models. The effect is significant and robust, hard to detect, and can persist even without reasoning. To be clear, these effects say nothing about the individuals named: we find no evidence that any of them sought this differential treatment, and the behavior almost certainly emerged as an unintended artifact of training rather than by anyone’s design.
The most immediate implication of our findings is for alignment evaluations. Models can already recognize particular people and organizations and behave differently for them, so results built on synthetic names and companies may not transfer to deployments involving real, high-stakes identities. The behaviors we observe today are relatively benign, but they may be precursors of more concerning conditional behaviors.
An important limitation of this work is that we are mostly only measuring fixed-prompt propensities here rather than actual performance in critical tasks. We hope to broaden and automate the investigation to a larger degree with our ongoing efforts.
