In the distant depths of the Universe, two galaxies are locked in a thrilling war. Over and over, they charge towards each other at speeds of 500 km/s on a violent collision course, only to land a glancing blow before retreating and winding up for another round. “We hence call this system the ‘cosmic joust’,” says study co-lead Pasquier Noterdaeme, a researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France, and the French-Chilean Laboratory for Astronomy in Chile, drawing a comparison to the medieval sport. But these galactic knights aren’t exactly chivalrous, and one has a very unfair advantage: it uses a quasar to pierce its opponent with a spear of radiation.

Quasars are the bright cores of some distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes, releasing huge amounts of radiation. Both quasars and galaxy mergers used to be far more common, appearing more frequently in the Universe’s first few billion years, so to observe them astronomers peer into the distant past with powerful telescopes. The light from this ‘cosmic joust’ has taken over 11 billion years to reach us, so we see it as it was when the Universe was only 18% of its current age.

“Here we see for the first time the effect of a quasar’s radiation directly on the internal structure of the gas in an otherwise regular galaxy,” explains study co-lead Sergei Balashev, who is a researcher at the Ioffe Institute in St Petersburg, Russia. The new observations indicate that radiation released by the quasar disrupts the clouds of gas and dust in the regular galaxy, leaving only the smallest, densest regions behind. These regions are likely too small to be capable of star formation, leaving the wounded galaxy with fewer stellar nurseries in a dramatic transformation.

But this galactic victim isn’t all that is being transformed. Balashev explains: “These mergers are thought to bring huge amounts of gas to supermassive black holes residing in galaxy centres.” In the cosmic joust, new reserves of fuel are brought within reach of the black hole powering the quasar. As the black hole feeds, the quasar can continue its damaging attack.

This study was conducted using ALMA and the X-shooter instrument on ESO’s VLT, both located in Chile’s Atacama Desert. ALMA’s high resolution helped the astronomers clearly distinguish the two merging galaxies, which are so close together they looked like a single object in previous observations. With X-shooter, researchers analysed the quasar’s light as it passed through the regular galaxy. This allowed the team to study how this galaxy suffered from the quasar’s radiation in this cosmic fight.

Observations with larger, more powerful telescopes could reveal more about collisions like this. As Noterdaeme says, a telescope like ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope “will certainly allow us to push forward a deeper study of this, and other systems, to better understand the evolution of quasars and their effect on host and nearby galaxies.”

Charles Darwin once remarked, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Nature tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilization.” And yet, Kobe University botanist SUETSUGU Kenji knows of a few islands in Japan where orchids reproduce without ever opening their flowers. He says: “I’ve long been captivated by Darwin’s skepticism about plants that rely entirely on self-pollination. When I found those non-blooming orchids, I felt this was a perfect chance to directly revisit this issue. The apparent defiance of evolutionary common sense made me wonder what precise conditions — both environmental and genetic — would allow a purely self-pollinating lifestyle to emerge, let alone persist.”

On the Northern Ryukyu Islands of Kuroshima, Takeshima and Yakushima exist the only wild populations of plants known to reproduce solely by self-pollination. “Our group spent over ten years working with local plant enthusiasts, monitoring more than a hundred individual plants across several islands, so we can say with certainty that these orchids never open their flowers in their natural habitats,” explains Suetsugu. He and his team decided to subject these populations to genetic analysis that can detect minute differences even between closely related individuals, which allowed them to track gene flow and relatedness.

In the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Kobe University-led team now reports that the extreme genetic uniformity between the plants in each species proves that they are truly purely self-pollinating. In addition, they also found that the two species each arose from insect-pollinated species that already have a very low degree of genetic variation in this geographic region. The variation is so low, in fact, that even though pollen might get transported from one plant to the next, it’s nearly identical to self-pollination.

This is only made worse by another observation Suetsugu made: The cross-pollinating relatives on these islands rely on fruit flies with limited flight ability. The animals thus only pollinate, if they pollinate the plants at all, flowers of the same plant or of those that live very close by, even further reducing the benefit of insect pollination. Suetsugu explains: “Darwin’s statement was motivated by the idea that a purely self-pollinating lineage would accumulate harmful mutations and eventually face an evolutionary dead end. Yet our findings show that for the relative species with open flowers, the real genetic payoff for outcrossing might be marginal, giving the self-pollinating orchids, which are more successful at producing fruit, an evolutionary edge.”

As it turns out, Darwin’s skepticism might not have been unfounded. Another result of the Kobe University study is that even with conservative estimates, these self-pollinating species are at most 2,000 years old. Given that there are no other known examples of purely self-pollinating plants in the wild, such species might be ephemeral. “The fact that these orchids truly never outcross raises intriguing questions about their long-term viability, especially under pressures like habitat fragmentation and climate change,” says Suetsugu. He nevertheless is proud of his team’s findings, saying, “Each new data point, each newly described species, brings me closer to grasping the full spectrum of evolutionary possibilities.”

This research was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grants JP15K18470, JP17H05016 and JP18K06408), the Japan Science and Technology Agency (grant JPMJPR21D6), the Ministry of the Environment, Japan (grant 4-2001) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Tohoku University, Osaka Metropolitan University, Fukushima University, and the National Institute of Genetics.

The large-scale study analysed more than 1,000 stool samples from people with diarrhoeal illness to harness two cutting edge tools.

Diarrhoea, a common symptom of infectious intestinal disease, affects an estimated 18 million people each year in the UK. However, despite its prevalence, traditional lab tests often fail to recognise its cause, especially when infections are caused by unidentifiable or emerging pathogens. This newly published study used metagenomic (DNA-based) and metatranscriptomic (gene or RNA-based) sequencing. Unlike traditional methods, these techniques do not rely on growing organisms in a lab. Instead, they detect and analyse the genetic material directly from patient samples.

Co-lead author, Dr Edward Cunningham-Oakes, Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences, University of Liverpool said: “This is the UK’s largest study to compare traditional diagnostics with these next-generation tools. We not only found infections missed by standard tests, but we could see what the bugs were doing inside the gut — something standard diagnostics just can’t show.”

The work captures, for the first time, a comprehensive snapshot of the Salmonella gene expression directly from a human stool sample. The transcriptomic data provides new insights into how the bacteria survive and adapt after leaving the human gut. As Salmonella remains a priority diarrhoeal pathogen in the UK, the knowledge will be invaluable for helping scientists to target this dangerous pathogen.

The study’s key findings highlight the power of RNA tests in detecting hidden infections — including elusive parasites and RNA viruses — while also identifying which genes are active during infection. Remarkably, RNA remained stable in stool samples even without preservatives, suggesting it is more robust than previously thought. Notably, the ratio of RNA to DNA helped differentiate true infections from harmless gut microbes. By combining both DNA and RNA data, researchers gained the clearest and most accurate picture of the infection process.

Co-lead Professor Alistair Darby, Co-Director of the University’s Centre for Genomic Research said: “This study shows how genetic tools can revolutionise how we identify and understand intestinal infections. By understanding not just what’s there, but what it’s doing, we can improve public health responses, particularly around foodborne outbreaks.”

The findings could significantly impact how diarrhoeal diseases are diagnosed, managed, and studied in the UK and beyond — especially in light of the growing need for rapid, accurate diagnostics that don’t rely on outdated culturing methods.

The research also highlights the strategic role of Liverpool’s Centre for Genomic Research (CGR) and the new Microbiome and Infectious Disease (MaID) initiative, which is part of the Liverpool City Region’s Life Sciences Innovation Zone.

Professor Alistair Darby continued: “This is about more than diagnosing infections — it’s about building a platform for innovation in healthcare. Our previous work has shown that healthcare professionals are open to this. By making our data open-access, we hope to help other researchers, NHS labs, and public health agencies build on our work.”

Dr. Edward Cunningham-Oakes added: “Our results show that RNA, once thought too fragile to use in stool testing, can actually give us powerful insights into how infections work. That opens up new possibilities for diagnosing and treating these illnesses more effectively.”

The research, led by scientists at the University of Liverpool, including Salmonella experts Dr Blanca Perez-Sepulveda and Professor Jay Hinton, was funded by the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Gastrointestinal Infections (HPRU-GI), a collaboration between the University of Liverpool, UK Health Security Agency, and other partners.

“Until now, our understanding of fibroblast diversity has been based primarily on studies in animal models. This new review is the first to compare and integrate extensive human studies that have used modern single-cell technologies. This approach makes it possible to combine findings from different human studies, creating a comprehensive picture of the various origins and functions of human fibroblasts,” says Professor Sandra Franz, lead author of the study from the University of Leipzig Medical Center.

This deeper understanding of cellular heterogeneity opens up new avenues for the development of targeted therapies. In the future, it may be possible to specifically address certain fibroblast subtypes — for example, to promote tissue repair or to inhibit pathological processes such as tumour growth. This is particularly significant for regenerative medicine and the treatment of chronic diseases.

The authors of the study — Dr Marta Torregrossa, Professor Jan C. Simon, and Professor Sandra Franz (all from the University of Leipzig Medical Center), together with Dr Yuval Rinkevich (Helmholtz Munich) — are conducting joint research as part of the ZellTWund project. Their aim is to further characterise regeneration-promoting fibroblast subtypes and their roles in health and disease — thereby paving the way for new therapeutic approaches. Translating these findings into clinical applications remains a key challenge for the coming years, the Leipzig researchers conclude.

Researchers at Washington State University’s Mount Vernon Northwestern Washington Research & Extension Center demonstrated in a new paper that some strains of wild spinach are resistant to Fusarium wilt, a fungal disease that is a persistent problem for growers of commercial spinach seed, and they identified regions of the plants’ genome associated with that resistance.

The findings are important for seed growers in western Washington and Oregon, where a significant portion of the world’s spinach seed is grown and where the pathogen has long been a problem due to the acidic soils.

“We were very, very pleased we found some excellent resistance when we did the screening and then we followed up with the DNA sequencing and looking at where that resistance might be lying,” said Lindsey du Toit, a plant pathologist who has worked on fighting disease in seed crops for 25 years at WSU’s Mount Vernon NWREC.

Though the new paper, published this month in Scientific Reports, identified several varieties of wild spinach associated with resistance to Fusarium wilt, more study is needed to understand the genetic nature of the resistance. However, seed companies don’t have to wait to apply the findings — they can begin breeding hybrids with the wild spinach varieties that showed resistance.

“You don’t necessarily have to understand the mechanism of resistance in order to use it,” du Toit said. “This is a tool that’s available immediately to breeding programs.”

Spinach consumption has been growing dramatically around the world. In the U.S., the per-capita consumption of the vitamin-rich vegetable has more than doubled in the past 20 years, with a particularly strong market for baby leaf spinach.

Most of the domestic crop is grown in hot, dry regions such as California, Texas and Florida. But growing spinach seed requires a rare combination of seasonal conditions — long, dry summers that aren’t too hot. As a result, around a fifth of the world’s spinach seed is grown in the Pacific Northwest.

But those crops have little resistance to Fusarium wilt, which afflicts spinach by entering through the roots and blocking their ability to take up water. Seed growers have tried to manage this problem by rotating spinach crops on long timeline — a decade or more between plantings — and taking other measures to treat the soil with calcium carbonate to reduce the acidity.

Even so, the prospect of an expensive “wipeout” of an entire crop has remained a continual threat.

In the current study, du Toit and a former post-doctoral researcher in her lab, Sanjaya Gyawali, screened 68 varieties of wild spinach from the region where the plant originated — Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — and compared them to 16 cultivated varieties. Researchers from the University of Arkansas also participated in the study.

They found strong resistance to the pathogen in several wild varieties. They then identified the chromosomal locations associated with the most powerful resistance. Those locations — known as quantitative trait loci — can be used by breeders to introduce more resistance to Fusarium wilt into commercial lines using marker-assisted selection, a technique that uses DNA markers to select for desirable traits.

The work was funded in part by the Specialty Crop Research Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The project was also supported by WSU CAHNRS Hatch Projects, and the Alfred Christianson Endowment in Vegetable Seed Science.