University of Cambridge media release   First ‘Bible map’ published 500 years ago still influences how we think about borders   UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 19:01 US ET ON FRIDAY 28TH NOVEMBER 2025 / 00:01 UK (GMT) ON SATURDAY 29TH NOVEMBER 2025   The first Bible to feature a map of the Holy Land was published 500 years ago in 1525. The map was initially printed the wrong way round – showing the Mediterranean to the East – but its inclusion set a precedent which continues to shape our understanding of ...

Experts at Cincinnati Children’s have uncovered striking metabolic differences in people with Fanconi anemia (FA), a rare genetic disorder that causes bone marrow failure and dramatically increases cancer risk. The findings, published Nov. 28, 2025, in Science Advances, could reshape how clinicians think about nutrition and potentially cancer prevention in this vulnerable population.  WHAT THE TEAM DISCOVERED  In collaboration with the Bone Marrow Transplantation Program and the Fanconi Anemia Comprehensive Care Center at Cincinnati Children’s, researchers used a cutting-edge technique ...

A new study published in Science Advances overturns a long-standing paradigm in climate science that stronger Northern Hemisphere summer insolation produces stronger tropical rainfall. Instead, a precisely dated 129,000-year rainfall reconstruction from a Cuban cave shows that the Caribbean often did the opposite, drying during intervals of intensified summer insolation. The research reveals a new unrecognized primary driver: The North Atlantic Subtropical High (NASH), a powerful and ever-present high-pressure system, that surprisingly has been the dominant force shaping the ...

A discovery from Australian researchers could lead to better treatment for children with neuroblastoma, a cancer that currently claims 9 out of 10 young patients who experience recurrence. The team at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, found a drug combination that can bypass the cellular defences these tumours develop that lead to relapse. In findings made in animal models and published today in Science Advances, Associate Professor David Croucher and his team have shown that a drug already approved for other cancers can trigger neuroblastoma cell death through alternative pathways when the usual routes become blocked. This ...

Belgian scientists from VIB and Ghent University (UGent), together with Danish collaborators, have uncovered compelling evidence that early-infancy infection with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) significantly increases the risk of developing childhood asthma—especially in children with a family history of allergy or asthma. Their study, published today in Science Immunology, suggests that protecting newborns against RSV could substantially reduce asthma cases later in life. Early triggers of asthma Across Europe, 5–15% of children live with asthma—a chronic condition that affects quality of life, can burden families ...

Osaka, Japan – Catalysts are vital substances that speed up many chemical reactions fundamental to modern life, including fertilizer, pharmaceutical, and energy production. However, many catalysts depend on expensive transition-metal elements, and their supply damages the environment and is vulnerable to geopolitical disruption. Recently, a team in Japan has developed a way to achieve a crucial type of chemical transformation without relying on transition-metal element resources. In an article due to be published in the Journal ...

Groundbreaking new research warns that Africa’s forests, once vital allies in the fight against climate change, have turned from a carbon sink into a carbon source. A new international study published in Scientific Reports and led by researchers at the National Centre for Earth Observation at the Universities of Leicester, Sheffield and Edinburgh reveals that Africa’s forests, which have long absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, are now releasing more carbon than they remove. This alarming shift, which happened after 2010, underscores the urgent need for stronger global action to protect forests, ...

Yuwei Gu was hiking through Bear Mountain State Park in New York when inspiration struck. Plastic bottles littered the trail and more floated on a nearby lake. The jarring sight in such a pristine environment made the Rutgers chemist stop in his tracks. Nature makes plenty of long-stranded molecules called polymers, including DNA and RNA, yet those natural polymers eventually break down. Synthetic polymers such as plastics don’t. Why? “Biology uses polymers everywhere, such as proteins, DNA, RNA and cellulose, ...

In humans, CBD is thought to have therapeutic effects for some conditions including chronic pain, nausea, or inflammation. Now, dogs may be reaping some of the benefits, too, according to a new study. Researchers in the US have used data from the Dog Aging Project to characterize demographics, health status, and behavior of dogs that used CBD or hemp supplements. They published their results in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. “Behaviorally, dogs given CBD products for multiple years are initially more aggressive compared to dogs not receiving those products, but their aggression becomes less intense over time,” said senior author ...

By Alistair Jones SMU Office of Research Governance & Administration – A dystopian future where advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems replace human decision-making has long been a trope of science fiction. The malevolent computer HAL, which takes control of the spaceship in Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a chilling example. But rather than being fearful of automation, a more useful response is to consider what types of repetitive human tasks could be safely offloaded to AI, particularly with the advances of large language ...

By Vince Chong SMU Office of Research Governance & Administration – It might not be ubiquitous just yet but embodied artificial intelligence is slowly but surely cementing its place in the world. Robotic systems equipped with sensors and cameras help with everything from factory assembly to surgery, while autonomous, self-driving cars and drones are science fiction no more. Despite these advances though, there is a limit to what embodied AI can do in unpredictable, everyday environments like homes or offices. Say, a robotic arm may be programmed ...

By Alistair Jones SMU Office of Research Governance & Administration – Beomgeun Cho, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Singapore Management University (SMU), is the inaugural recipient of the Kyujin Jung Memorial Research Award, presented at the 2025 American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) conference.  The award, which recognises a promising early-career scholar in the field of public administration, is based on an overall assessment of their academic trajectory and achievements, rather than a specific paper. "I am deeply honoured to be the ...

SMU Office of Research Governance & Administration – Associate Professor Yasmin Ortiga chats with Filipino nurses for a living. The sociologist at Singapore Management University (SMU) tends to ask them about their hopes and dreams, why they uprooted themselves to go work in a hospital miles away from their home in the Philippines, often leaving young children behind. Every conversation builds up her research on international migration.  Of late, the chats have thrown up cases of these migrant nurses choosing to bypass Singapore, which relies on Filipinos for over half of its foreign registered nurses. A blip or a notable shift ...

By Vince Chong SMU Office of Research Governance & Administration - Increasing tax competition, cryptocurrency taxation, environmental taxation, and myriad global tax reforms. These are among the many concerns facing the international tax system right now, as regulatory environments diverge and grow ever more complex. Tackling the challenges head on is SMU Assistant Professor Vincent Ooi, who leads a prestigious new initiative launched in partnership with the Tax Academy of Singapore: ...

SMU Office of Research Governance & Administration – In a coup for Singapore Management University (SMU), a team led by Associate Professor of Computer Science He Shengfeng has edged out competing research institutions to clinch a grant for developing a groundbreaking deepfake detection system. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) project, when completed in an estimated three years’ time, promises to have widespread commercial applications. It would also be the first multilingual deepfake data set that includes dialectal variants such as Singlish and Korean dialects. “Many existing tools don’t perform well on Asian languages, accents, or content,” ...

Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility, will today welcome delegates from SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) as well as representatives from the UK government, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and UKRI (UK Research and Innovation). The event is aimed at deepening an existing collaboration between the two facilities.   SESAME, located in Allan, Jordan, is an intergovernmental synchrotron radiation facility established under the auspices of UNESCO and modelled on CERN. It is a unique scientific ...

Long-term exposure to toxic air can substantially weaken the health benefits of regular exercise, suggests a new study by an international team including UCL (University College London) researchers. The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, analysed data from more than 1.5 million adults tracked for more than a decade in countries including the UK, Taiwan, China, Denmark and the United States. The team found that the protective effect of regular exercise on people’s risk of dying over a specific period – from any cause and from cancer and heart disease specifically – appeared to be reduced, but not eliminated, for those who ...

The domestic cat may be a far more recent arrival to Europe than previously thought, arriving roughly 2000 years ago and not because of the Paleolithic expansion of Near East farmers. The findings offer new insight into one of humanity’s most enigmatic animal companions and identify North Africa as the cradle of the modern housecat. The domestic cat has a long and complex, albeit uncertain, history. Genetic studies show that all modern cats descended from the African wildcat, which is found today in North Africa and the Near East. However, sparse archaeological remains and the difficulty of distinguishing domestic from wild ...

An injection that blocks the activity of a protein involved in aging reverses naturally occurring cartilage loss in the knee joints of old mice, a Stanford Medicine-led study has found. The treatment also prevented the development of arthritis after knee injuries mirroring the ACL tears often experienced by athletes or recreational exercisers. An oral version of the treatment is already in clinical trials with the goal of treating age-related muscle weakness. Samples of human tissue from knee replacement surgeries — which include both the extracellular scaffolding, or matrix, in the joint as well as cartilage-generating ...

Macaques can tap along to a musical beat, according to a new study – findings that upend the assumption that only animals with vocal-learning abilities can find and move to a groove. According to the authors, the discovery offers fresh insights that suggest the roots of rhythm may run far deeper in our evolutionary past than previously believed. Humans have a unique ability to perceive and move in time to a steady musical beat. It is a skill that develops early in life and requires complex pattern recognition, prediction, and motor coordination. Outside of humans, the ability to synchronize ...

A new experiment using an AI-powered browser extension to reorder feeds on X (formerly Twitter), and conducted independently of the X platform’s algorithm, shows that even small changes in exposure to hostile political content can measurably influence feelings toward opposing political parties – within days of X exposure. The findings provide direct causal evidence of the impact of algorithmically controlled post ranking on a user’s social media feed. Social media has become an important source of political information for many people worldwide. However, the platform’s algorithms exert a powerful influence on what ...

Using nearly a decade of satellite data, researchers show how glaciers worldwide speed up and slow down with the changing of the seasons – annual rhythms that reveal how Earth’s ice may respond to long-term climate warming. The findings show that glaciers in regions that reach above-freezing temperatures experience the largest seasonal swings in ice flow, and rising temperatures may amplify these movements and shift their timing worldwide. Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets have been rapidly ...

A new tool shows it is possible to turn down the partisan rancor in an X feed – without removing political posts and without the direct cooperation of the platform.  The Stanford-led research, published in Science, also indicates that it may one day be possible to let users take control of their own social media algorithms. A multidisciplinary team created a seamless, web-based tool that reorders content to move posts lower in a user’s feed when they contain antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity, such as advocating for violence or jailing supporters of the opposing party. In an experiment using ...

Bird flu viruses are a particular threat to humans because they can replicate at temperatures higher than a typical fever, one of the body’s ways of stopping viruses in their tracks, according to new research led by the universities of Cambridge and Glasgow. In a study published today in Science, the team identified a gene that plays an important role in setting the temperature sensitivity of a virus. In the deadly pandemics of 1957 and 1968, this gene transferred into human flu viruses, and the resulting virus thrived. Human ...

MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL THURSDAY, NOV. 27, 2025) – In preclinical studies, researchers found that priming the immune system with a Treg-expanding therapy before stem cell transplant boosted survival, protected vital organs, and promoted a balanced gut microbiome—offering hope for safer, more effective treatment of blood cancers. The study, led by researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and collaborating organizations, is highlighted on the cover of the Nov. 27, 2025, issue of the journal, Blood. The new protocol focuses on improving outcomes for patients who undergo allogeneic ...