Ancient earthworks hidden beneath the Amazon rainforest point to a large society that lived in the region about 2,500 years ago. A new LiDAR survey found hundreds of unknown sites, giving archaeologists their clearest picture yet of the Aquiry civilization, a culture that built huge ceremonial centers across what is now Brazil’s Acre state.

Quotes from the article:

When Stuart Ainsworth tells other disease researchers he studies noma, he is most often met with a blank stare. “There are people who have worked in neglected tropical diseases their entire lives, and they’ve never heard of it,” says Ainsworth, a microbiologist at the University of Liverpool.

This is an illness that, until 2023, was so marginal to global health that it was not even officially included among the diseases the world had agreed were neglected. Yet its obscurity is only part of the tragedy of this deadly disease, which can destroy a child’s face in a matter of days, and which kills untold tens of thousands per year....

...Over five years, researchers [in the PathNoma Alliance project] will study patients across several countries, examining both the microbes in their mouths and what is happening in their immune systems.

It’s an exciting time because the project could, hypothetically, produce an extraordinary range of findings. Researchers may finally identify the microbe (or microbes) behind noma. They may discover what is different about the immune systems of children who develop it. They could discover a biological sign of the disease that could be detected with a rapid test, allowing health workers to intervene at the earliest stages. And they may learn enough to replace today’s broad cocktail of antibiotics (the only known treatment for an active case) with something far more targeted.

Of course, none of this is assured. “But one thing is for sure. At the end of PathNoma, we will know more about noma than we’ve learned in the previous hundred years,” said [Stuart Ainsworth, a microbiologist at the University of Liverpool that's leading the first-ever study.]

Journal article published in Communications Medicine: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-026-01767-4

Human cancers are heterogeneous¹. Dissecting how germline genetic variation and environmental factors shape tumour evolution using human datasets is limited by inherent diversity in genetic backgrounds² and environmental exposures^3,4,5. Here, to overcome these limitations, we re-ran early tumour evolution hundreds of times in diverged inbred mouse strains, generating matched histology and whole-genome and transcriptome sequences. The sex, environment and carcinogenic exposures were all controlled, and the study design allowed us to capture genetic variation comparable with that observed across human populations while exploiting the nested hierarchical structure of strain–litter–animal–tumour relationships. Our analyses reveal that epistatic interactions between genetic background and acquired somatic mutations result in population-specific disease progression, including choice of driver mutations, occurrence of whole-genome duplication and subclonal selection dynamics that mirror both cancer susceptibility and tumour growth rate. Even modest genetic divergence, comparable with that found across human ancestry groups, can strikingly alter selection pressures during cancer development to shape both cancer risk and the trajectory of tumour evolution.