Nocturnal moths are severely affected by light pollution, most notoriously through fatal attraction to artificial lights, yet flight-to-light is not their only response. To investigate how artificial lights impact flight behaviour, we exposed over 1200 wild-caught moths of 62 species to LED lights with different characteristics, under varying background lighting conditions, and tracked over 500 […]

The protein composition of sperm and seminal fluid are key to male fitness. However, we currently lack an understanding of the factors that shape seminal proteome composition. The common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) mates by traumatic insemination, subjecting the ejaculate to a unique selective environment as sperm traverse the female genital and paragenital system. We provide […]

Liquid biopsy using ultra-low-pass whole-genome sequencing (ULP-WGS, ~0.25x coverage) is a promising tool to detect circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) for cancer management, and the use of the native Oxford Nanopore (ONT) sequencing platform adds DNA methylation to the set of detectable features. Here, we test the performance of methylation-based cell-type deconvolution in ULP-WGS samples from […]

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) quality assurance has traditionally relied on static, geometrically regular phantoms that cannot generate the dynamic signal changes fMRI analysis pipelines are designed to detect. Here we present the Signal Generating (SiGn) anthropomorphic brain phantom, a 3D-printed cortical model derived from an individual participant’s structural MRI, filled with tissue-mimicking agar gels […]

Background Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have improved outcomes across multiple cancer types, yet reliable predictors of survival remain limited. While genomic features such as tumor mutational burden (TMB) are widely used, their contribution to predictive modeling in heterogeneous real-world cohorts remains unclear. We evaluated the relative contributions of clinical and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) features in […]

Blocking transmission of Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), the causative agent of Lyme disease (LD), from reservoir hosts to humans via Ixodes scapularis ticks represents an alternative strategy to reduce LD incidence. Here, we evaluated Purified Borrelial Lipoproteins (PBL) with a combination of adjuvants, for their ability to limit Bb transmission using C3H/HeN mice and Peromyscus leucopus […]

During tactile interaction, skin deformation drives the widespread activation of tactile afferents distributed across the fingertip. Yet the full spatial extent and evolution of these deformations remain largely unquantified. Using high-resolution 3D imaging, we reconstructed the complete volar surface of the fingertip under progressive tangential loadings typical of object manipulation. We show that much of […]

Extremely low-frequency pulsed electromagnetic fields (ELF PEMFs) have been proposed to modulate intracellular signaling in cancer cells, however, the primary mediators and their temporal sequence remain incompletely understood. In this study, U87 glioblastoma cells were exposed to ELF PEMF at varying frequencies and amplitudes, and intracellular calcium (Ca2+) dynamics, reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, and […]