A monkey with a distinctive mask-like face, found in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been declared a new species – only the fifth new species of monkey documented from Africa in the past 75 years.

The monkey is known as likweli to local people who hunt it for bushmeat, and it has been given the scientific name Colobus congoensis. It lives in one of the most inaccessible parts of Africa, without paved roads or infrastructure.

“A typical expedition involves multiple modes of transportation: a flight, followed by a motorcycle ride, two days of hiking on foot and finally travel by dugout canoe to reach the monkey’s range,” says at Florida Atlantic University.

One of the most intriguing features of likweli is its facial appearance, says Detwiler. The light-coloured skin around the mouth and beneath the nose is unlike that of any other African colobus species, but resembles the facial pattern seen in some Asian colobine monkeys.

Detwiler and her colleagues believe the species’ mask-like face may represent ancestral traits that were present before the African and Asian colobine lineages diverged over 8 million years ago. “If so, likweli may have retained characteristics that were subsequently modified or lost in the other African colobus species,” says Detwiler.

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Like other colobus monkeys, likweli also has a distinctive body odour that defies description, she says.

��è����Ƶs first became aware of the species in 2008 when a team surveying on the banks of the Lomami river, in what is now Lomami National Park, took a photo that showed only a part of a monkey that had not been seen before, high in the canopy.

Then, in November 2018, another group again spotted the monkey, which is about 1.3 metres long and weighs around 7 kilograms. Between 2018 and 2022, there were 114 recorded observations of the new species, 25 of which were from vocalisations.

In 2021, several monkeys that had been killed by hunters for bushmeat were confiscated and handed over to researchers. Detailed morphological and genetic analysis confirmed they were indeed a wholly separate species. Genetic tests and recordings of their vocalisations also added to the evidence of their uniqueness.

“The genetic analyses revealed that likweli is a deeply divergent lineage that split from its closest known relative, Colobus satanas, approximately 4 to 5 million years ago,” says Detwiler. “That was much older than we expected and provided strong evidence that likweli represents a distinct species.”

Likweli is isolated from C. satanas by more than 1200 kilometres and several major river barriers. Unlike most other members of the genus, which have habitats exceeding 60,000 square kilometres, likweli is only known to exist in 1700 square kilometres of rainforest.

“Hunting is one of the primary threats facing likweli, particularly because the species has such a small known range and appears to occur at low densities,” says Detwiler.

Because of the risk of poaching and the monkey’s small population and home range, the team is proposing that the species should be listed as endangered. “Now that likweli has been recognised as a distinct species, another important step would be to grant it protected status under national law,” says Detwiler. “This would make it illegal to hunt the species, including in the buffer zone surrounding the park.”

There’s one scent to rule them all – and we now know what it is. A series of experiments has shown that a single molecule released by the queen of naked mole rat colonies prevents all the other females in a colony from breeding.

“It’s a super-contraceptive, if you’re a mole rat,” says at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin.

Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) have a social structure like that of bees and ants, with colonies made up of soldiers and workers, and a single queen ruling each colony. Only the queen can breed, but how she maintains her long reign – Lewin’s team’s oldest queen is 39 – hasn’t been clear.

“The theory was that the queen is larger and more aggressive than the other animals, exerting her dominance through pushing and shoving,” says Lewin. “But we never found that very satisfying as an explanation.”

So team member , also at the Max Delbrück Center, proposed identifying the mole rat bouquet – the molecules in the air around them that create their scent. Comparing the scents of hundreds of animals revealed that only the queens produce a molecule called isopropyl myristate.

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“It’s made in the reproductive organs, basically the vagina of the reproductive female,” says Lewin.

When the team sprayed isopropyl myristate daily into cages containing male and female pairs, none of the females became pregnant. Without it, almost all the females became pregnant.

Next, the team removed a queen from a colony and applied isopropyl myristate daily. There were no fights for succession and no females started breeding during the three months this was done. “We produced peacefulness,” says Lewin. “That’s probably the most dramatic experiment.”

When the team stopped applying isopropyl myristate, the high-ranking females started fighting within a week. After around three weeks one became pregnant: the new queen.

The team also showed that exposure to isopropyl myristate changes the levels of the hormones progesterone and prolactin. But they haven’t found out exactly how the molecule is detected and leads to these changes – that’s the next project, says Lewin.

The evidence for isopropyl myristate influencing reproduction is compelling, says at Linnaeus University in Sweden. “I think it’s an impressive and important study. And convincing.”

at Queen Mary University of London is also convinced. “But the paper raises many questions, like any interesting research,” says Faulkes. These include how animals detect it, and how behavioural interactions and queen dominance interact with the scent, he says.

There is something special about isopropyl myristate, says Lewin. Isopropyl myristate is volatile, meaning it can evaporate into the air, but it’s not highly volatile, so any traces left by the queen take time to evaporate and the scent persists for at least a day.

It’s known that a queen will patrol every part of her colony, which in the wild might extend underground for 3 kilometres. “We think the reason she does that is to deposit this molecule around the colony,” says Lewin. “To make sure that every member of her colony is exposed to her scent.”

Other experiments by the team suggest the animals can consciously detect the smell. For instance, highly ranked females with a chance of becoming queen try to avoid places where isopropyl myristate is present, whereas lower-ranked animals aren’t bothered.

The team also tested a number of other species of mole rat. They didn’t find isopropyl myristate in any solitary species but they did find it in a few species whose social structure is more like that of naked mole rats. “But I would be cautious about assuming that the same pathway has a comparable function across social mole rats without direct experimental evidence,” says Zöttl.

Isopropyl myristate is also widely used in cosmetics. It is described as odourless but Lewin says some women at his lab thought they could smell something when exposed to it. A 2008 study also reported that during pregnancy and after childbirth.

The jaws of some sea worms are made of an exceptionally hard yet lightweight material dubbed a “bio-metal” that could have applications in engineering.

Perinereis cultrifera is a type of ragworm with a long body adorned with bristles. Members of the species also have strong jaws that enable them to crush hard prey such as small crustaceans or other worms. Remnants of their jaws have been found in the fossil record dating back to hundreds of millions of years ago.

at TU Wien in Austria and his colleagues have been studying this worm’s jaws for almost a decade, leading them to propose that they are made of a novel material. The molecular structure of each jaw combines proteins and ions of metals such as zinc, giving it characteristics in between those of softer biological materials and metals.

Most recently, the team performed more than 3300 experiments in which small indentations were made in different parts of the jaw. The way its hardness changed under this pressure followed a pattern typical of metals like copper and silver. But the jaw also exhibited a kind of elasticity that metals cannot have, says Hellmich.

Finally, the researchers developed a mathematical model of bio-metals, which shows how they might respond to strain in a unique way in which microscopic forces arise from the metal ions becoming arranged into lines similar to certain defects in crystals.

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The researchers were surprised to uncover so much novelty in the relatively simple animal. Performing mechanical tests on the millimetre-sized jaw was really challenging and required hundreds of hours of preparation and polishing, says Hellmich. “Basically, anything can go wrong,” he says.

“The jaws of bristle worms are incredibly hard yet very lightweight,” says at Kent State University in Ohio. “Many industries, from automobiles to aeronautics, are searching for new ways to develop hard and lightweight materials. The answers are provided in nature!”

“Somehow evolution figured out a way to coax a metal-like mechanical fingerprint out of protein-like ingredients, and studying the worm is how we ask what trick makes that possible,” says at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who didn’t work on the study. The long-term dream outcome of this research is to genetically program materials that would grow in biological systems, he says.

Hellmich and his colleagues are interested in pursuing this goal and their team already includes geneticists and biologists at the University of Vienna. “We are asking questions like, ‘If we knock out a few genes, then how will the jaws be different?’” he says.

A 555-million-year-old worm had a predilection for turning right, possibly indicating the oldest known example of handedness.

Although these worms lacked limbs and so couldn’t be considered left- or right-handed in the way that we understand, the development of a tendency to favour one side over another is evidence of an advanced nervous system.

It remains a feature of free-living mobile life today, but until this discovery, it wasn’t thought to have emerged until the Cambrian Period, which began around 541 million years ago.

at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and his colleagues analysed 100 fossil specimens of a small flatworm-like creature, Spriggina floundersi, collected in South Australia over recent decades.

These animals lived during the Ediacaran Period, when multicellular life first became widespread. It preceded the Cambrian explosion, when animal life diversified dramatically and many groups of animals first appeared.

Spriggina lived in what was, half a billion years ago, a shallow ocean and is thought to have foraged on or close to the seafloor, moving by wriggling to the left or right.

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“We have around 50 specimens of Spriggina that are clearly bent,” says Evans. Twice as many of the fossilised worms are bent to the left than to the right, he says. This means the creature itself bent to the right, as the specimens are mirror-image impressions of the animals, made when storms buried them in sand.

“This appears to be statistically significant and matches what biologists find when they study handedness in different animals today,” says Evans. “Some specimens have multiple bends to both the right and left, suggesting that they all could bend both ways, which makes sense if you don’t want to be stuck moving in a circle.”

While the majority seem to demonstrate right-handedness, it is hard to tell if any were left-handed, he says. “I imagine it’s like taking a picture of 100 people waving with one hand today. You would likely be able to count that more people are waving with their right hand, but you wouldn’t be able to tell who is right- or left-handed.”

Discoveries like this demonstrate that many foundational characteristics that are common to a variety of animals today, such as the ability to move around, bilateral symmetry and handedness, evolved in the Ediacaran, says Evans.

In the Cambrian, organisms built on that foundation to become more complex, for example adding legs to move more efficiently, becoming “less alien and more like the major groups of animals we know today”, says Evans. “This is cool because it suggests that, while the Cambrian was an amazing time in animal evolution, those organisms didn’t just come out of nowhere: they built on the foundations established in the Ediacaran.”

“The presence of handedness in any kind of functional asymmetry, really deep into the fossil record, gives us important and interesting information about how these behaviours have evolved and how deeply in time they emerged,” says at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

A living organism is made from components that aren’t themselves living. This simple statement has profound implications. For one, it means that there is no mystical force that animates us and other life forms. For another, it means that it should be possible to build a life form from scratch – and we are now a step closer to doing so.

Artificial life has been the guiding light of synthetic biology for some time. In 2010, biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in California synthesised the stripped-down genome of a bacterium and inserted it into the chassis of another cell, emptied of its own DNA. The resulting organism, with a record-low number of genes (473) was able to grow and reproduce. But even then, scientists didn’t understand what a third of those genes were doing, or whether they were even needed. Instead of rebooting an existing cell with a synthetic genome, we need to build an organism from the ground up.

That is what scientists at the University of Missouri are now attempting. The SpudCell – named both to evoke Sputnik and the dawn of the space age, and for its resemblance to a potato – is an entity based on just 36 genes. It self-assembled when the genes were supplied with all the building blocks necessary for life, forming cell-like bubbles and making proteins.

SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life

But that’s it. The SpudCell can only make proteins because it is supplied with ribosomes, the crucial cell components that make proteins. It can’t metabolise food, supply itself with energy or reliably divide and reproduce. It isn’t alive, and it needs intensive care just to perform its basic functions. Nevertheless, the SpudCell represents a significant breakthrough in the creation of artificial life. If a modern living cell is a jet airliner, the SpudCell is the rickety wooden-and-cotton proto-airplane made by the Wright brothers.

Better versions will soon follow, with potentially transformative applications. The hope is that synthetic cells will one day be able to supply materials that are currently derived from fossil fuels, such as plastics, fuels and fertiliser. That is keenly needed. But the work in understanding how a living entity operates will shed light on what life needs, and how it emerges from dead materials. If we crack this ultimate mystery, synthetic biology will have really delivered.

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