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Researchers led by Cluntun and colleagues, publishing in Nature, report evidence that lactate can be transported directly into heart mitochondria through a specific protein transporter, rather than only being converted to pyruvate beforehand as long assumed. The team's findings indicate this direct entry pathway is necessary for the heart to function properly under stress conditions.
Nature's daily briefing describes how hobbyist codebreakers are using AI tools, including OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, to solve historical encrypted messages, such as WWII-era German military ciphers. One user reportedly used the model to find a key to an unsolved 1809 cipher in about six hours. Cryptography experts say the surge of interest is welcome but has also led to a flood of requests to verify AI-generated solutions, some of which turn out to be wrong.
Researchers led by Vamsi Mootha at Howard Hughes Medical Institute profiled mitochondrial proteins in five single-celled parasites and one plant, publishing nine papers in Cell, Cell Press Blue, Molecular Cell and Current Biology on October 1. The catalogues identified dozens of proteins absent in humans but shared among disease-causing parasites, including those behind malaria, sleeping sickness and giardiasis.
After his daughter Lucy suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her blind, billionaire Bill Ackman used his connections to secure her advanced care at Mount Sinai and pursue an experimental treatment. In May, the FDA granted her medical team first-time emergency authorization to transplant mitochondria from her leg muscle into her eyes in an attempt to repair her optic nerves. Ackman has since pledged over $400 million to establish an institute focused on longevity and brain health research.
Researchers applied distributed acoustic sensing, which detects minute deformations in fibre-optic cables, to capture the acoustic waves generated by thunder and use them to probe subsurface structures such as sinkholes. Separately, scientists injected a patient's own mitochondria, extracted from leg muscle, into her eyes in an attempt to treat severe blindness; the procedure was safe but did not restore vision. Meanwhile, a science sleuth flagged more than 50 cell-ageing studies that appear to have used an incorrect antibody to identify a key protein.
Researchers extracted mitochondria from a blind woman's leg muscles and injected them into the vitreous fluid of both eyes, after a February brain bleed had damaged her optic nerve and retina and eliminated her pupils' response to light. The procedure, described in an unreviewed preprint posted August 10, caused no inflammation or adverse effects and briefly restored some pupillary light response, though the effect faded within about four weeks and vision was not recovered.