Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have successfully traced the mechanism behind how an industrially important “superbase” catalyst is synthesized in a faster, microwave-assisted reaction. They took measurements using X-rays while the reaction occurred, uncovering how small precursor molecules were formed first before they clustered to create the final product. Their insights promise finer control over a promising technology for speeding up chemical synthesis in industry.   Polyoxometalates are industrially ...

University of Navarra (Spain) researchers have developed RNACOREX, a new open-source software capable of identifying gene regulation networks with applications in cancer survival analysis. The tool, created by scientists at the Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DATAI), members of the Cancer Center Clínica Universidad de Navarra, has been validated with data from thirteen tumor types from the international consortium The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Published in PLOS Computational ...

SAN ANTONIO, Dec. 19, 2025 – UT Health San Antonio, the academic health center of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UT San Antonio), received nearly $3 million in new academic and prevention awards as part of the latest funding round announced by the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). The state agency, which focuses on funding evidence-based cancer research and prevention efforts, has now awarded UT Health San Antonio almost $170 million since 2010. Expanding access to preventive salpingectomy in South Texas Kate Lawrenson, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Joe R. and Teresa ...

The Third Symposium on New Contaminant Control held in Shanghai on September 13–14 2025 highlighted how newly recognized pollutants are reshaping China’s environmental agenda. These substances including persistent organic pollutants endocrine disruptors antibiotics and microplastics are often invisible yet can linger in the environment accumulate in living organisms and pose long term risks to ecosystems and human health. Quote and key message “New contaminants do not always make headlines ...

What if the secret to climate-friendly farming wasn’t in futuristic tech—but in how we manage what’s already on the field? Imagine turning leftover maize stalks not into smoke from open burning, but into a powerful soil ally—especially when paired with its charred cousin, biochar. That’s exactly what a new international study has uncovered: a simple yet transformative strategy that cuts carbon emissions, boosts soil health, and even encourages microbes to work together like never before. Published on October 27, 2025, in the open-access journal Carbon Research (Volume 4, Article 68), this collaborative research bridges Moscow and Guangzhou to deliver one of the ...

MIAMI, FLORIDA (Dec 19, 2025) – C. Ola Landgren, M.D., Ph.D., received HealthTree Foundation’s prestigious 2025 Innovation Award for his work in developing CORAL, a new research tool that leverages AI to predict individual outcomes and guide treatment decisions in patients with multiple myeloma. Using deep learning to read standard bone marrow biopsy slides like pages in a book, CORAL spots patterns in a patient’s cancer to accurately predict genetic subtypes and patient outcomes, bypassing the traditional need for expensive, time-consuming genomic tests. Landgren, director of the Sylvester Myeloma Institute at Sylvester Comprehensive ...

Baltimore, MD — The University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) proudly announces the investiture of Manhattan E. Charurat, PhD, MHS as the Homer and Martha Gudelsky Distinguished Professor in Medicine, one of the institution’s most prestigious academic honors.  The ceremony opened with warm welcomes delivered by Heather Culp, JD, Senior Vice President and Chief Philanthropy Officer, Senior Associate Dean at University of Maryland Medicine, and Shyam Kottilil, MD, PhD, Interim Director of the Institute of Human Virology (IHV). Mark T. Gladwin, MD, Dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, offered ...

On December 10, Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biotechnology company, hosted the fourth edition of its Pharma.AI Quarterly Launch webinar, titled “Epic Year-End Recap & Q4 Winter Updates”. The event drew more than 300 registrants from universities, healthcare institutions, global pharmaceutical companies, and innovative biotech firms worldwide. Insilico's software team showcased the recap of Pharm.AI in 2025,and the latest capabilities through live demos and real‑world case studies.   Key highlights are summarized below: Generative Biologics What improved in  2025: Peptide workflows: template-based ...

Plastics are not inert: they gradually break into fragments over time, forming micro- and then nanoplastics (i.e., particles <1 μm in size). Nanoplastics are found in drinking water and foods packaged in plastic. This reality suggests that humans may be ingesting appreciable quantities of nanoplastics to which the gut is highly exposed. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how nanoplastics affect digestive system health. Additionally, to date, studies on this topic have employed commercial particles, which often contain additives. In the study published in Environmental Science: Nano, the research team specifically ...

AURORA, Colo. (Dec. 19, 2025) – Scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz have discovered that while brain neuron changes, including cell loss, may begin in early life, a drug long-approved for other conditions might be repurposed to slow this damage, offering new hope for those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other cognition issues. The study was published today in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. “This drug improved one measure of cognition and reduced a blood measure of neuron death in people with AD in a relatively short period of time in its first clinical trial,” said the study’s senior author Professor Huntington Potter, ...

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA — SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and Chinese Laser Press (CLP) have announced the recipients of this year’s Advanced Photonics Young Innovator Award. The award honors emerging researchers by recognizing outstanding papers published in the SPIE-CLP journal Advanced Photonics over the past five years. The seven recipients represent a diverse range of groundbreaking research that is shaping the future of optics and photonics: Peng Chen, Nanjing University, for "Liquid crystal integrated metalens with tunable chromatic ...

In what came to be called the “Christmas Valley miracle,” the Lake Tahoe Basin communities of Christmas Valley and Meyers were spared in late August 2021 when the massive Caldor Fire entered the basin, burning more than 222,000 acres and forcing roughly 30,000 people to evacuate during one of the hottest, driest summers on record. Outside of the Lake Tahoe Basin, the fire destroyed over 1,000 structures, many of them homes. Decades of fuel-reduction treatments conducted by federal, state and local land managers to protect people’s communities well before the fire are widely credited for ...

Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?  The famous question, though implausible, reflects a ubiquitous tradeoff between quantity and quality. Now, a new study shows that this dilemma operates in biology at the evolutionary scale.  Research published on December 19, 2025, in the journal Science Advances found that certain ant species structure their colonies by favoring quantity over quality. These species invest less into each individual’s cuticle—the protective layer of the exoskeleton—which liberates nutritional resources ...

Transposable elements are stretches of DNA that can move around the genome. Many of these DNA sequences originate from long ago, when viruses inserted their genetic material into our ancestors’ genomes during infection. Today, these viral transposable elements make up around 8-10% of the mammalian genome.   Once disregarded as “junk” DNA, we now know that many transposable elements play an important role in influencing how genes are turned on ...

The protein factories in our cells – so-called ribosomes – have a central task: during a process known as translation, amino acids are linked together according to messenger RNA, forming a growing peptide chain that later folds into a functional protein.  However, before a newly emerging protein can even begin to fold, it must be processed and transported to the correct location within the cell. As soon as it emerges from the ribosome, enzymes can remove its initial amino acid, attach small chemical groups, or determine to which cellular compartments the ...

University of Leicester engineers have unveiled a concept for a device designed to magnetically ‘cloak’ sensitive components, making them invisible to detection. A magnetic cloak is a device that hides or shields an object from external magnetic fields by manipulating how these flow around an object so that they behave as if the object isn’t there. In a new study for Science Advances, a team of engineers at the University of Leicester have demonstrated for the first time that practical cloaks can be engineered using superconductors and soft ferromagnets in forms that can be manufactured. Using computational and theoretical techniques ...

In a study published in Science Advances on December 19, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from international institutions, explored the impact of mountain building and climate cooling over 30 million years across five major mountain systems in the Northern Hemisphere and revealed that these processes are key drivers of the rich plant diversity found in the Earth's alpine biome. Mountain regions harbor a disproportional share of the world's plant species, but the processes responsible for assembling this diversity over deep time have remained unclear. ...

Using a specially developed simulation model, researchers at the University of Cologne have traced and analysed the dynamics of possible encounters between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans on the Iberian Peninsula during the Palaeolithic period for the first time. Between approximately 50,000 and 38,000 years ago, the first anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe, where they encountered Neanderthal populations. The team analysed the respective settlement areas and the movement patterns of both groups. Were there any interactions between the groups, and did they mix? And how were population dynamics influenced by climatic events? The ...

University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies announced the publication of “Burnout and Autonomy in the Modern Workforce: The Role of AI-Driven Skilling in Equity and Resilience,” a new white paper by Rheanna Reed, D.M., which draws on five years of University of Phoenix Career Optimism Index® data, to examine how burnout, autonomy, equity and artificial intelligence (AI) intersect in the U.S. workforce and outlines strategies employers can use to build a more resilient, future-ready workforce. Reed integrates these findings with peer-reviewed scholarship on burnout, self-determination, the Job Demands-Resources model, and equity in access to opportunity to argue that ...

Generative AIs may not be as creative as we assume. Publishing December 19 in the Cell Press journal Patterns, researchers show that when image-generating and image-describing AIs pass the same descriptive scene back and forth, they quickly veer off topic. From 100 diverse prompts, the AI pairs consistently settled on 12 themes, including gothic cathedrals, natural landscapes, sports imagery, and stormy lighthouses. These recurrent themes likely reflect biases in the ...

A large-scale model study now shows how the global food system can contribute to the fight against global heating. It identifies 23 levers, calculates their effectiveness and concludes: a decisive transformation of this sector alone, without the indispensable energy transition, can limit the global temperature increase to 1.85°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. In addition, food will become healthier and cheaper, and agriculture will be more compatible with biodiversity conservation. The study was led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in Nature Food. The study ...

About The Study: In July 2025, an Executive Order was issued that ended support for Housing First and sought to eliminate discretionary federal spending on such programs. Though not all housing offered on a Housing First basis would end if federal funding for these programs ceased, there will nevertheless be harmful consequences. This study projects that the number of people experiencing homelessness will increase by 5% within a year in addition to the already increasing trend. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Joshua A. Barocas, MD, email joshua.barocas@cuanschutz.edu. To ...

About The Study: In this quality improvement study using a controlled simulation, commercial large language models (LLM’s) demonstrated substantial vulnerability to prompt-injection attacks (i.e., maliciously crafted inputs that manipulate an LLM’s behavior) that could generate clinically dangerous recommendations; even flagship models with advanced safety mechanisms showed high susceptibility. These findings underscore the need for adversarial robustness testing, system-level safeguards, and regulatory oversight before clinical deployment. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding ...

Bromine-based flow batteries operate through the redox reaction between bromide ions and elemental bromine, offering advantages such as abundant resources, high redox potential, and good solubility. However, the substantial bromine generated during the charging process can corrode battery components, shorten cycle life, and increase system costs. Although traditional bromine complexing agents can alleviate corrosion to some extent, they often induce phase separation, compromising electrolyte homogeneity and adding complexity to the system. In ...

AURORA, Colo. (Dec. 18, 2025) – Eliminating federal funding for Housing First programs, initiatives that provide people experiencing homelessness (PEH) with stable housing without requiring sobriety or treatment, could lead to a sharp rise in homelessness nationwide, according to a new study published today in JAMA Health Forum. Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz estimate that ending support for federally funded permanent supportive housing (PSH) and rapid rehousing (RRH) programs would result in 44,590 additional ...