One in 10 cars sold in the UK in June were made in China, according to the latest industry figures.
New Chinese brands such as BYD, Jaecoo and Omoda are growing rapidly in the UK.
There has been a particular surge over the past few months, at a time when most other G7 countries have levied significant extra tariffs against their imports.
Around 18,944 cars made by Chinese-owned brands, including MG and Polestar, were sold in June, which is 10% of overall UK sales, according to the latest figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). That is up from 6% in the same month a year ago.
Across the first half of this year, more than 8% – or 1 in 12 – cars sold were Chinese, up from 5% in 2023 and 2024. This was mainly but not exclusively electric vehicles.
By comparison a study by Jato Analytics for the first five months of the year put Chinese brands at 4.3% of the market across the EU, and just 1.6% in Germany and 2.7% in France. Spain was higher though at 9.2%.
Its analyst Felipe Munoz said: “The fact that the UK has not imposed tariffs is a big opportunity for the Chinese, along with the popularity of electric cars.
“MG is also playing like a local brand, and unlike France and Germany, the UK doesn’t have a big local industry to protect.”
However, some industry grandees have warned that the UK industry will struggle to compete, and Britain might have to introduce quotas.
Chinese firms and their franchises have been buying up car showrooms.
“Chinese manufacturers are producing cars which are better, cheaper and more innovative in every sector of the market,” said John Neill, former SMMT President and ex-chief executive of Unipart.
“If they are going to sell here we are going to have to get the Chinese to manufacture here.”
The government has so far faced little pressure from existing suppliers on copying the tariffs imposed by the EU, US, and Canada on electric cars.
The majority of EU member states backed big taxes being imposed on imports of EVs from China, which can be as high as around 45%, and Canada announced its imposition of a 100% tax on Chinese made EVs.
The EU and China are in negotiations to replace the tariff with a minimum price system.
Some Chinese manufacturers are also in the process of opening factories in the EU which could export across Europe including the UK tariff-free.
The SMMT said that one in four buyers of new cars in the UK are now purchasing electric cars – although the transition to electric has been driven by “unsustainable” discounting by manufacturers, says Mike Hawes, the SMMT’s chief executive.
“As we have seen in other countries, government incentives can supercharge the market transition,” he said.
Share on PinterestAn experimental brain scan may be able to accurately predict a person’s risk of age-related disorders. Image credit: Rafe Swan/Getty Images.
People age at different rates, partly due to genetics but largely because of lifestyle.
A person’s rate of aging can indicate how likely they are to develop age-related disorders, such as dementia.
Now, researchers have developed a method based on a single brain scan in middle age that could predict how fast a person is likely to age.
They suggest that their method, which can predict the aging rate of both brain and body, may detect who should implement lifestyle changes to reduce their risk of age-related illness.
Some people appear to age more slowly than others. This is partly due to genetics, which studies suggest accounts for around 25% of the variation in longevity but is largely due to lifestyle and the environment.
Modifications in lifestyle, such as following a healthy diet, exercising regularly, getting adequate sleep, not smoking, and not drinking alcohol to excess, can help slow a person’s rate of aging and delay or prevent age-related disorders.
A person’s rate of aging is often referred to as their biological age — how old their cells are — which can vary greatly from their chronological age, or the number of years since their birth. Measuring this can be tricky.
Now, a group of researchers from Duke, Harvard, and the University of Otago, New Zealand, have developed a method of predicting how fast a person will age, based on a single brain scan performed around the age of 45.
In their study, which is published in Nature Aging, the researchers suggest that the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging (DunedinPACNI) could help researchers determine how aging affects health, and help them evaluate the effectiveness of anti-aging strategies.
“The study developed and validated a new MRI-based biomarker called DunedinPACNI which shows not only a score for brain age, i.e. how old the brain looks, but also shows connections to cognitive decline and other health measures, allowing to perhaps predict how quickly a person ages and how their health will evolve later in life,” Madalina Tivarus, PhD, associate professor of Imaging Sciences and Neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, not involved in the study, told Medical News Today.
“The idea of using a routine MRI brain scan to do a ‘aging check-up’ is very interesting and exciting,” Tivarus told us.
This study builds on the Dunedin Study, previous research conducted in the same cohort of participants. This study, which followed a group of 1,037 people born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1972–’73, looked at age-related changes in gene methylation to create an epigenetic clock.
In the Dunedin Study, researchers regularly tested participants’ blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), glucose (blood sugar) and cholesterol levels, lung and kidney function, and even gum recession and tooth decay.
Over almost 20 years, they used the overall pattern of change across these health markers to generate a score for how fast each person was aging.
In the latest study, researchers used a single MRI scan of the brain performed when participants were aged 45, which they correlated with the Dunedin Study aging data. They then developed their DunedinPACNI to estimate rate of aging using only information from the MRI scan.
They found that their prediction accuracy was in line with more established epigenetic methods.
People with faster DunedinPACNI scores had several indicators of more rapid aging, including:
worse balance, slower gait, weaker lower and upper body strength, and poorer coordination
self-reported worse health and more physical limitations
poorer performance on cognitive function tests
greater childhood-to-adulthood cognitive decline
older physical appearance.
Emer MacSweeney, MD, CEO and consultant Neuroradiologist at Re:Cognition Health, who was not involved in this research, highlighted how important brain imaging could be, telling MNT that:
“The researchers observed that individuals with higher DunedinPACNI scores, indicating faster brain aging, were also more likely to experience health deterioration in other organ systems, such as cardiovascular and respiratory health. The fact that brain imaging can reflect systemic aging suggests the brain may serve as a biomarker for overall biological age, offering a non-invasive, accessible measure of aging processes throughout the body.”
“This study is exciting because it shows that MRI scans might be used not just to detect disease, but also to track how the brain is aging long before problems begin. However, it’s still early days. While promising, DunedinPACNI still needs to be tested more widely in larger and more diverse populations across different ages, ethnicities, and health backgrounds. It did perform well across multiple large datasets, but more global validation is needed.”
The researchers compared the DunedinPACNI with measures of hippocampal and ventricular volume, which are commonly used MRI-based measures of brain aging, using UK Biobank and ADNI participants.
They found that faster DunedinPACNI was more consistently and strongly associated with poor cognition, poor health, frailty, and risk of dementia, disease and mortality than either of these measures.
Tivarus was impressed by the study structure.
“The study methodology has some important strengths such as it is using a robust, decades-long longitudinal dataset, uses sound statistical methods, and has been validated extensively using imaging data from other large studies,” she explained.
However, she also pointed out that there were “some limitations, such as the specific population data used to train the model (mostly European ancestry, from a specific geographical location), its performance in younger or pediatric populations is untested, [and] it infers dynamic processes from one static image (one MRI snapshot).”
“While I don’t think it is ready for clinical use, DunedinPACNI appears to be a promising imaging biomarker of biological aging,” Tivarus told us.
Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn shared platforms when they were both Labour MPs
High profile left winger Zarah Sultana has quit Labour and vowed to launch a new political party with Jeremy Corbyn.
That, however, seems to have come as news to him.
In a social media post, the former Labour leader congratulated Sultana on her “principled decision” to leave and said he was “delighted that she will help us build a real alternative”.
But he said “the democratic foundations of a new kind of political party” were still taking shape and discussions were “ongoing”.
Sultana appears to have jumped the gun, taking not just Corbyn but others involved in the project by surprise.
But that does not mean it is not happening.
There is no name yet – Arise and The Collective have been bandied about. Corbyn is thought to like the phrase “Real Change”, but not necessarily as a party name.
No timetable for a launch has been agreed, although there has been talk of fielding candidates at next May’s local elections.
But all of those involved in the project believe there is a huge gap in the market to the left of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, with millions of potential votes up for grabs.
Are they right?
And what would the arrival of a new socialist party mean for the Greens who have scooped up many left-wing voters in recent times – not to mention the Labour Party itself?
It is very difficult to assess support for a party that does not yet exist, has no leader and no policies.
Pollsters More In Common recently tested the sort of support a party to the left of Labour would have – specifically one led by Jeremy Corbyn.
Their research suggested it could pick up 10% of the vote – reducing Labour’s standing by three points but far more dramatically eating in to support for the Greens, which would fall from 9% to 5% in the polls.
Notably, a Corbyn-led party could become the country’s most popular party among 18- to 24-year-olds with 32% of the vote.
Former Corbyn aide Andrew Murray said Sir Keir Starmer had “created the space” for a party to Labour’s left by ruthlessly expelling left wingers from the party and dropping his leadership campaign promises.
Speaking to GB News’s Choppers Podcast, Murray said Labour’s 2017 vote – 3.2 million more than Sir Keir’s in 2024 – showed the scale of potential support for a new left-wing party.
Thousands of votes had leaked away from the Tories to Reform UK at last year’s election, he added, and “there are similarly huge numbers of people who regard themselves as progressives and are looking for something different.”
A veteran left-wing organiser, who did not wish to be named, told the BBC even with a double digit share of the national vote it is “quite hard for new parties to become positive forces in the UK”.
“I think it could do quite a lot of damage to Labour and the Greens if it gets above a critical mass,” he said.
Senior Greens have told the BBC they are not worried about a new insurgent party.
Green leadership hopeful Zack Polanski said “anyone who wants to challenge Reform and this failing Labour government is a friend of mine”.
But he added: “In the past there’s been lots of left-wing parties, but only the Green Party has endured and had sustained growth.”
Polanski’s point was echoed by his leadership contest rival Adrian Ramsay, who currently co-leads the party, who said anyone looking for a “progressive alternative to Labour” should join the Greens.
Any damage to the Greens could be limited by a “non-aggression” pact with the new party, running candidates on a joint ticket, for example, or agreeing to stand aside in certain circumstances.
Jeremy Corbyn has been working for some time under the radar to turn the small group of independent MPs he co-ordinates into a full-blown political party which could stand candidates at the local elections next year.
Last year, the Islington North MP united with Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed – four independents that beat Labour candidates in the 2024 election with their pro-Palestinian stance in constituencies with large Muslim populations.
On Wednesday he hinted that a new party could be on the way, telling ITV’s Peston he and his fellow pro-Gaza independents would “come together” and “there will be an alternative”.
The MPs are united in their condemnation of Keir Starmer’s approach to the Gaza crisis, but we don’t know what their rest of their policy programme would be.
We do not even know for certain that Jeremy Corbyn would be their leader. He is thought to favour a democratic convention to decide on leadership but others in the project are impatient to get on with it.
Sultana is clearly keen to play a leading role, although her statement was carefully worded – she wants to co-lead the “founding” of a new party with Corbyn.
One thing is clear – any new party will not be a reincarnation of the previous Corbyn project, as key figures on Labour’s left show no sign of leaving.
Corbyn’s former shadow chancellor John McDonell said he was “dreadfully sorry to lose Zarah from the Labour Party” but is not expected to quit himself.
The chair of the Labour party under Corbyn – Ian Lavery – told the BBC he planned to stay in the party until he retired.
The Independent MPs were elected last year in areas where voters felt Labour wasn’t taking a strong enough line on Israel’s actions in Gaza.
We don’t know how resonant the issue will be at the next election, four years away.
But where Keir Starmer’s strategists might be concerned is that a new left-wing party might just reduce the Labour vote by enough in some seats to allow a second-placed Reform UK to sneak home.
And Labour may have to be more mindful that it can lose votes on the left and not just the right.
It was once seen as close to impossible to successfully launch a new political party in the UK, under Westminster’s first-past-the-post voting system.
But Reform UK, which has five MPs and is currently ahead in the polls, has shown how volatile politics now is and the extent to which traditional party loyalties no longer matter.
A well-known leader and some eye-catching policies could potentially redraw the map of mainstream politics.
Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton admits he “can dream of having a strong weekend” at the British Grand Prix after topping the first of Friday’s practice sessions.
The seven-time World Champion enjoyed arguably his strongest Friday since joining the Scuderia at the start of 2025, having topped Free Practice 1 and finishing P3 in the afternoon session.
Hamilton, a nine-time F1 winner at Silverstone, believes Ferrari’s pace was genuine and offers opportunities for Sunday’s race.
“It was a really good day,” he said. “Great to see the crowd. Amazing to be out on track in a Ferrari here at Silverstone.
“It’s pretty incredible and also with McLaren and Red Bull having upgrades, so for us to be in the mix still given they have had a step today, it’s really positive.
“I definitely feel like we can dream of having a strong weekend for sure. Executing and putting it all together and extracting it is another thing but I’ll prepare myself the best I can to make sure we get the best result.”
Hamilton secured his equal-best Grand Prix result for Ferrari last time out in Austria after finishing fourth and believes he is getting to grips with the SF-25 having been off the pace compared with team mate, Charles Leclerc.
“I’m progressing a lot now with the car and much more comfortable knowing where it needs to be,” he added.
“I think by FP2 we still weren’t where we needed to be, so definitely struggled a little bit more, but we know the changes that we need to make for the next session.”
Leclerc also enjoyed a strong showing on Friday, finishing fourth in the first session and P2 during Free Practice 2.
While missing some one-lap pace compared to pacesetter Lando Norris and McLaren, Leclerc believes Ferrari’s race pace will cause problems for the opposition on Sunday.
“The day was good,” he said. We’ve been pretty strong so far so it’s positive. I think we still need to find some pace in Qualifying.
“McLaren is once again probably the car to beat at the moment but in race pace I was happy. I’m finding my way, I’m changing quite a lot the car in weekends recently to try and find some pace in Qualifying.
“For now, I don’t think I find a way for that, but in the race I’m really happy with where we are. I think we are very strong in the race but we’ve got to do a step forward in Qualifying.”
Led by the European Research Council Synergy Grant project Into the Blue – i2B, the research team studied sediment cores collected from the seafloor of the central Nordic Seas and Yermak Plateau, north of Svalbard. These cores hold tiny chemical fingerprints from algae that lived in the ocean long ago. Some of these algae only grow in open water, while others thrive under seasonal sea ice that forms and melts each year.
“Our sediment cores show that marine life was active even during the coldest times,” said Jochen Knies , lead author of the study, based at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and co-lead of the Into The Blue – i2B project. “That tells us there must have been light and open water at the surface. You wouldn’t see that if the entire Arctic was locked under a kilometre-thick slab of ice.”
One of the key indicators the team looked for was a molecule called IP25, which is produced by algae that live in seasonal sea ice. Its regular appearance in the sediments shows that sea ice came and went with the seasons, rather than staying frozen solid all year round.
Simulating ancient Arctic climates
To test the findings based on the geological records, the research team used the AWI Earth System Model – a high-resolution computer model – to simulate Arctic conditions during two especially cold periods: the Last Glacial Maximum around 21,000 years ago, and a deeper freeze about 140,000 years ago when large ice sheets covered a lot of the Arctic.
“The models support what we found in the sediments,” said Knies. “Even during these extreme glaciations, warm Atlantic water still flowed into the Arctic gateway. This helped keep some parts of the ocean from freezing over completely.”
The models also showed that the ice wasn’t static. Instead, it shifted with the seasons, creating openings in the ice where light could reach the water—and where life could continue to thrive. This research not only reshapes our view of past Arctic climates but also has implications for future climate predictions. Understanding how sea ice and ocean circulation responded to past climate extremes can improve models that project future changes in a warming world.
“These reconstructions help us understand what’s possible—and what’s not—when it comes to ice cover and ocean dynamics,” said Gerrit Lohmann , co-author of this study, based at Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and co-lead of Into The Blue – i2B. “That matters when trying to anticipate how ice sheets and sea ice might behave in the future.”
Re-thinking the giant ice shelf theory
Some scientists have argued that features on the Arctic seafloor suggest that a huge, grounded ice shelf once covered the entire ocean. But this new study offers another explanation.
“There may have been short-lived ice shelves in some parts of the Arctic during especially severe cold phases,” said Knies. “But we don’t see any sign of a single, massive ice shelf that covered everything for thousands of years.”
One possible exception could have occurred about 650,000 years ago, when biological activity in the sediment record dropped sharply. But even then, the evidence points to a temporary event, not a long-lasting frozen lid over the Arctic.
Understanding the Arctic’s future
The study sheds new light on how the Arctic has behaved under extreme conditions in the past. This matters because the Arctic is changing rapidly today. Knowing how sea ice and ocean circulation responded to past climate shifts helps scientists understand what might lie ahead.
“These past patterns help us understand what’s possible in future scenarios,” said Knies. “We need to know how the Arctic behaves under stress—and what tipping points to watch for – as the Arctic responds to a warming world.”
The full paper, “Seasonal sea ice characterized the glacial Arctic–Atlantic gateway over the past 750,000 years”, is available in Science Advances.
This research is part of the European Research Council Synergy Grant project Into the Blue – i2B and the Research Council of Norway Centre of Excellence, iC3: Centre for ice, Cryosphere, Carbon, and Climate .
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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common, debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting about 10 percent of people over the age of 65 and one third of people aged 85 and above. Besides environmental factors, the genes have a strong influence on whether or not a person develops AD during their lifetime. Through genome sequencing of DNA from large groups of healthy people and people with AD, some naturally occurring small changes in the DNA, known as genetic variants, were found to be more frequent in AD patients than in healthy people. As more and more of these AD-associated genetic “risk” variants are discovered, it is now possible to calculate a person’s individual polygenic risk score (PRS), meaning the likelihood of the person to develop AD, with high accuracy. Despite this progress, it is still largely unknown how genetic risk variants, or combinations thereof, cause AD in individual patients and more specifically, how risk variants impact the health and function of brain cells.
To address this, researchers in the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University, UK, have now generated the first large-scale stem cell bank from over 100 individuals selected for extremes of AD PRS, which had previously been determined by genome sequencing. The results of the work are published today in Stem Cell Reports. About two thirds of the donors had been diagnosed with AD and had a relatively high PRS while one third were cognitively healthy, age-matched individuals with a low PRS. Blood cells from these individuals were genetically engineered to turn them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are immature cells capable of generating all cell types of the body. The new “iPSC Platform to Model Alzheimer’s disease Risk” (IPMAR) resource will be made available to researchers worldwide to facilitate studies on the impact of risk variants in iPSC-based cellular models of AD in the lab. Ultimately, the resource can be used to increase our understanding of genetic risk factors linked to AD, and may inform the design of new, individualized treatments or prevention strategies.
Source:
International Society for Stem Cell Research
Journal reference:
Maguire, E., et al. (2025). Modeling common Alzheimer’s disease with high and low polygenic risk in human iPSC: A large-scale research resource. Stem Cell Reports. doi.org/10.1016/j.stemcr.2025.102570.
If you’re like me, you depend on a lot of systems and services, even within your home LAN. Because I work from home, that’s amplified to the point where I need certain applications available to me that aren’t hosted by a third party, for flexibility, ease of use, reliability and security.
Thankfully, Docker is there to make deploying those apps and services considerably easier; otherwise, I’d wind up having to first deploy a collection of virtual machines (VMs), keep them running and worry about upgrading/managing them efficiently.
Yeah, Docker makes this entire process easier. Even better, I can spin up those apps and services in seconds, instead of having to go the traditional route, which can often take quite a bit longer to deploy.
But what are the apps and services that I depend on for my LAN to keep me productive? Surprise, surprise: I have a list, and here it is.
Nextcloud
Nextcloud has essentially become my Google services for my home LAN. I began using Nextcloud in earnest on my LAN when I started fearing that Google would use my documents within Drive to train its AI. After that thought danced across the synapses of my mind, I pulled those documents and moved them to a Nextcloud deployment on my home network. Problem solved.
But Nextcloud isn’t just a document server; it’s much more. Nextcloud is an entire suite of applications that can be used for just about every need you have for a home office. There’s audio/video chat, calendars, email, whiteboard, AI assistant and agentic AI, file sharing, collaboration, file access control, versioning, machine learning (ML), tons of integrations, monitoring/auditing and so much more.
There’s even an app store, where you can extend the feature set to meet your exact needs.
Nextcloud is free to use and can be deployed with Docker from Docker Hub as simply as:
Grocy
If you need to manage things in your home, Grocy is the way to go. As you might have suspected from the name, Grocy is all about groceries and meal planning. If you’re as busy as I am, planning meals isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but this handy Docker app makes it considerably easier. Not only can you keep track of the items you have in your kitchen or pantry, but you can also categorize them by location (e.g., fridge, freezer, pantry, garage, basement, etc.) and even keep track of recipes. On top of all this, Grocy even lets you keep track of chores you need to take care of around the house. You can even keep track of batteries, charging cycles and warranties so you can take the guesswork out of when you replaced those batteries in your smoke detectors.
Grocy can be deployed with a docker-compose and a Dockerfile that looks like this:
Tududi
If you want a task manager that can be accessed from any machine on your network, consider Tududi. Tududi can help manage those tasks and even projects with a well-designed, user-friendly UI. The Tududi feature list includes comments, due dates, project names, status, priorities, hierarchical structure for tasks and projects, smart recurring tasks, areas, notes, tags and Telegram integration.
With the Telegram integration, you get the ability to create tasks directly through Telegram messages, receive daily digests of your tasks and quickly capture ideas and to-dos on the go. You also get smart parent-child relationships such that when a recurring task generates a new instance, each generated task maintains a link to the parent, those tasks are displayed as a Recurring Task Instance (with inherited settings), users can edit the parent recurrence pattern from the child task and changes to the parent settings affect all future instances within a series.
Tududi can be installed from Docker Hub with the command:
Bitwarden
Bitwarden is one of the finest password managers on the market. The app/service enjoys one of the best feature lists of all password managers and uses industry-standard encryption. Even so, there are certain highly sensitive bits of information that I would prefer to retain on my home LAN. For that, I make use of the Bitwarden server, which can be easily deployed via Docker. The Bitwarden server acts almost identically to the standard service, only it’s housed privately, so it doesn’t have to be available beyond your LAN. With that in mind, you could house highly sensitive information, and (as long as your network is secure), you shouldn’t have to worry about anyone stumbling upon your vault or the items contained within.
Bitwarden can be deployed with Docker with the command:
Portainer
If you want to manage all of your containers with the help of a powerful, web-based GUI tool, Portainer is hard to beat. Portainer allows you to see all running containers, view all container logs, get quick console access to containers, deploy code into containers using a simple form and turn your YAML into custom templates for easy reuse. Oh, and you can deploy, stop, run and remove containers. In fact, there’s very little you can’t do with Portainer.
Portainer is considered one of the most popular container management systems in the world and does require a bit of work to get up and running. You can check out the official Portainer documentation and get up to speed on the process.
Although this is a short list of containers I regularly use on my LAN, there’s always room for more. Make sure to check out Docker Hub to see if there’s another app/service you could benefit from.
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Jack Wallen is what happens when a Gen Xer mind-melds with present-day snark. Jack is a seeker of truth and a writer of words with a quantum mechanical pencil and a disjointed beat of sound and soul. Although he resides…
Poke around a British rockpool and you may spot a shell shuffling over the sand. Inside is a hermit crab – an animal that spends much of its life testing the outside world before deciding whether it is safe to venture forth.
New research from the University of Plymouth reveals that the speed of that decision, a trait biologists call boldness, hinges on a crab’s built-in sensory toolkit.
The study focuses on microscopic hair-like structures called sensilla that pepper the claws of Pagurus bernhardus, a common UK species.
By counting those hairs on dozens of individuals and matching the totals to behavior in the lab, the team discovered a clear pattern: more sensilla equals faster recovery from a startle response.
Hermit crabs so equipped are not only bolder, they are also more predictable – showing similar, rapid emergence times across repeated tests.
Measuring crab response times
The experiment began with a simple but telling ritual. Researchers placed each crab in a small tank and gently startled it with a puff of water or a light tap on the shell.
That cue mimics the sudden pressure wave generated by a predator or rolling wave, prompting the animal to yank its legs and antennae inside its borrowed shell. The team then timed how long it took for eye stalks and claws to reappear.
About a third of a second is considered lightning fast in hermit-crab terms; several minutes, positively timid. Over repeated trials, certain individuals consistently clocked shorter hideouts, indicating a stable personality trait rather than random chance.
“I was especially intrigued by how they used their claws and other sensory appendages, such as their antennae, in their explorations and when re-emerging from their shell,” said lead author Ari Drummond, a PhD student at the University of Plymouth.
That curiosity led to the hunch that claws might act as information-gathering probes, letting crabs “sniff” the water for chemical cues or feel subtle currents that betray lurking threats.
Claw molts reveal sensors
Linking behavior to anatomy required patience. Hermit crabs, like all crustaceans, periodically molt. During this process, they shed the outer exoskeleton, including the thin cuticle covering each sensillum.
Drummond and colleagues waited for each test subject to molt naturally, collected the discarded claw tissue, and examined it under a scanning electron microscope.
The high-resolution images looked like alien landscapes – ridged terrain studded with evenly spaced bristles. Each bristle is a sensillum, connected to nerve cells that detect touch, water movement, or dissolved chemicals.
By tracing and counting every sensillum in the images, the team created a detailed sensory map for each crab. This noninvasive method marked a major advance over earlier studies, which often required removing limbs.
Analysis revealed striking variation: some claws sported 50 percent more sensilla than others of similar size. When the researchers plotted those numbers against startle data, the trend became unmistakable. Bolder hermit crabs have more sensilla on the claw surface.
Bolder crabs have more hairs
Why would extra sensory hairs translate into courage? The authors propose that better input reduces uncertainty. With richer information about water chemistry or microcurrents, a crab can judge threats more accurately and resume foraging sooner.
That efficiency, in turn, may feed back into survival and reproductive success, favoring individuals who “invest” in sensory hardware.
They call the concept the “sensory investment syndrome.” It’s a hypothesis linking an animal’s personality – here, boldness – to the resources it allocates to senses. If confirmed across other species, it could reshape how biologists think about behavioral diversity in nature.
“We’ve known for a long time that individual animals of the same species can show consistent behavioral differences from one another,” said senior author Mark Briffa, a professor at Plymouth.
“Our new research suggests that in hermit crabs, some of this variation may be linked to how individuals sense the world around them.”
In his opinion, similar mechanisms might operate in insects, fish, or even mammals, where variation in eye size, whisker density, or olfactory receptors could underpin consistent behavioral tendencies.
Crab survival starts with sensing
Hermit crabs face mounting challenges: coastal pollution, rising temperatures, and habitat disturbance all alter the sensory landscape of rockpools. Understanding how these creatures sense and decide may reveal which populations are most at risk from environmental change.
“In a world where environments and species are increasingly at risk from human impacts, it is essential that we gain a better understanding of what information animals detect, how they use that information and then respond to stay alive,” Drummond said.
Future work will test what each sensillum detects and whether diet, growth, or shell choice affects hair abundance.
For now, the takeaway is clear: in the miniature dramas playing out between tide and shore, knowledge is power – delivered through a forest of microscopic hairs on a tiny claw.
The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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Researchers have discovered a class of light-sensitive proteins found exclusively in microbes adapted to cold environments, which they believe hold the potential to revolutionize cellular engineering.
The rare, obscure group of blue proteins known as cryorhodopsins was reportedly unlike anything researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) had seen before.
Kirill Kovalev, PhD, a structural biologist at EMBL Hamburg’s Schneider Group and EMBL-EBI’s Bateman Group, who had spent years studying rhodopsins – light-sensitive pigments that convert light into electrical signals – believes cryorhodopsins could serve as prototypes for molecular on-off switches in cells.
“In my work, I search for unusual rhodopsins and try to understand what they do, Kovalev said, adding that he thought he knew rhodopsins inside out before the discovery. “Such molecules could have undiscovered functions that we could benefit from.”
Completely out of the blue
Kovalev was discovered by chance while browsing online protein databases. He was stunned when he spotted an unusual feature shared by microbial rhodopsins found only in extremely cold environments, such as glaciers and high mountain regions.
Reflecting on the fact that rhodopsins are typically found in seas and lakes, he was struck by how these cold-climate variants were almost identical, despite having evolved thousands of miles apart. Considering how crucial they seemed to survive in the cold, he doubted it was a coincidence and named them ‘cryorhodopsins’.
The image shows the light-detecting protein rhodopsin in five different species, as well as an overlay to reveal how the protein structure has changed with evolution. Credit: Qian-Yuan Tang
Since color is a defining feature of rhodopsins, most of which are pink-orange and activated by green and blue light, Kovalev was eager to examine the newly discovered variants.
To his surprise, the cryorhodopsins revealed a striking range of colors, including the highly sought-after blue type, which is activated by red light that penetrates tissue more deeply and non-invasively.
By applying advanced structural biology techniques, Kovalev discovered that the secret to their blue color is the same rare structural feature he originally spotted in the protein databases. “Now that we understand what makes them blue, we can design synthetic blue rhodopsins tailored to different applications.”
Nature’s built-in UV shield
The team then tested cryorhodopsins in cultured brain cells and found that exposure to UV light induced electric currents within the cells. When they illuminated the cells with green light, their excitability increased. Meanwhile, exposure to UV or red light reduced their excitability.
“New optogenetic tools to efficiently switch the cell’s electric activity both ‘on’ and ‘off’ would be incredibly useful in research, biotechnology, and medicine,” Tobias Moser, PhD, a group leader at the University Medical Center Göttingen, said.
Despite their potential, Kovalev stated that cryorhodopsins aren’t ready to be used as tools. But he emphasized that they’re an excellent prototype. “They have all the key features that, based on our findings, could be engineered to become more effective for optogenetics,” he noted.
By using advanced spectroscopy, the team then discovered that cryorhodopsins not only detect UV light but also respond more slowly to light than any other known rhodopsins. This suggested they may help microbes sense and respond to harmful UV radiation, a rare trait among related proteins.
Kovalev also noticed that the cryorhodopsin gene consistently appears alongside a gene for a tiny, unknown protein, hinting at a possible functional link. Using the AI tool AlphaFold, the team predicted that five copies of a small protein form a ring and interact with cryorhodopsin inside the cell.
They believe that when cryorhodopsin senses UV light, the small protein detaches to relay the signal deeper into the cell. “It was fascinating to uncover a new mechanism via which the light-sensitive signal from cryorhodopsins could be passed on to other parts of the cell.”
Cracking the code
To study cryorhodopsins in such detail, the team used a 4D structural biology approach, combining X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, and light activation techniques. And since cryorhodopsins are extremely light-sensitive, the researchers had to adapt by handling the samples in near-total darkness to avoid triggering unwanted reactions.
“We suspect that cryorhodopsins evolved their unique features not because of the cold, but rather to let microbes sense UV light, which can be harmful to them,” Kovalev highlighted.
He explained that the small proteins consistently spotted near the cryorhodopsin gene are also found in organisms lacking cryorhodopsins, hinting they may have broader roles beyond UV sensing. However, their unique dual function and why they evolved only in cold environments remain a mystery.
“In cold environments, such as the top of a mountain, bacteria face intense UV radiation,” Kovalev concluded in a press release. He believes cryorhodopsins might help microbes detect UV radiation, allowing them to activate protective responses.
The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.
