Scientists Uncover Key Protein in Cellular Fat Storage  [Sydney] – [29/08/2025] – UNSW research has shed light on how cells in the body manage and store fat, potentially offering new insights into health.   In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers identify a crucial protein, named CHP1, that acts as a central director in this process.  Fat, or lipids, are stored inside cells in small compartments called lipid droplets. These droplets are essential for energy storage and ...

Eight years ago, 87 obese adolescents took part in a groundbreaking study to see whether fecal transfer (taking ‘good’ gut bacteria from healthy donors and giving them in capsule form to people with a less healthy microbiome) would make a difference to their health and weight.   Four years later, a follow-up study, published this week in the world-leading scientific journal Nature Communications , suggests some significant health benefits from that single gut bugs transfer. In particular, the original overweight teens ...

A team of computer scientists at UC Riverside has developed a method to erase private and copyrighted data from artificial intelligence models—without needing access to the original training data. This advance, detailed in a paper presented in July at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Vancouver, Canada, addresses a rising global concern about personal and copyrighted materials remaining in AI models indefinitely—and thus accessible to model users—despite efforts by the original creators to delete or guard their information with paywalls ...

Using total-body PET imaging to get a better understanding of long COVID disease is the goal of a new project at the University of California, Davis, in collaboration with UC San Francisco. The project is funded by a grant of $3.2 million over four years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.  About 1 in 10 COVID-19 survivors develop a range of long COVID symptoms that can last from months to years. How and why these symptoms develop isn’t completely known, but they have been linked to activated immune T cells getting ...

Sinus surgery is more effective than antibiotics at treating chronic rhinosinusitis, according to a major clinical trial led by University College London (UCL) along with academics at the University of East Anglia and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS), or sinusitis, is a long-term condition affecting one in 10 UK adults. Symptoms include a blocked and runny nose, loss of smell, facial pain, tiredness and worsening of breathing problems, such as asthma. It’s often similar to the symptoms of a bad cold, but it can last for months or even years. The team carried out a randomised controlled patient trial comparing sinus surgery with long-term ...

A first-of-its-kind Blood Pressure Treatment Efficacy Calculator built on data from nearly 500 randomised clinical trials in over 100,000 people allows doctors to see by how much different medications are likely to lower blood pressure. The research, published today in The Lancet1, could transform how the condition is managed, allowing doctors to choose a treatment for each patient based on the degree to which they need to lower their blood pressure. “This is really important because every 1mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure lowers your risk of heart attack or stroke by two percent,” said Nelson Wang, cardiologist and Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global ...

89 to 97 per cent of autistic adults aged 40+ years are undiagnosed in the UK, according to the largest review of its kind which was conducted at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London. The review indicated that middle-aged and older autistic adults are facing higher rates of mental and physical health conditions than non-autistic adults of the same age, alongside challenges with employment, relationships and wellbeing. Although research on ageing in autistic populations has increased nearly ...

Imagine for a moment that you’re in an auto factory. A robot and a human are working next to each other on the production line. The robot is busy rapidly assembling car doors while the human runs quality control, inspecting the doors for damage and making sure they come together as they should. Robots and humans can make formidable teams in manufacturing, health care and numerous other industries. While the robot might be quicker and more effective at monotonous, repetitive tasks like assembling large auto parts, the person can excel at certain tasks that are more complex or ...

When injured, cells have well-regulated responses to promote healing. These include a long-studied self-destruction process that cleans up dead and damaged cells as well as a more recently identified phenomenon that helps older cells revert to what appears to be a younger state to help grow back healthy tissue. Now, a new study in mice led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Baylor College of Medicine reveals a previously unknown cellular purging process that may help injured cells revert to a stem cell-like state more rapidly. The investigators dubbed this newly discovered response cathartocytosis, taking from Greek root words that mean cellular ...

Since January’s wildfires flattened entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, displacing 12,900 households and causing an estimated $30 billion in losses, California’s many other fire-prone communities have been eager for solutions to better protect themselves. A new UC Berkeley-led study provides these communities and their lawmakers with actionable data on how wildfire mitigation strategies can reduce the destructiveness of wildfires by as much as 50%. One option to reduce wildfire damage is home hardening, which ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Cellular differentiation of stem cells into specialized cells requires many steps, including division, to create more cells; fate determination, which is a commitment to a specific lineage or developmental path; and migration, to integrate the cell into its final location. Previous in vitro work has shown that stem cells can spontaneously self-organize into groups of specialized cell types, yet little is known about how that happens in living animals — where densely populated microenvironments ...

A team of computer scientists led by the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a new artificial intelligence platform that automatically seeks out “questionable” scientific journals. The study, published Aug. 27 in the journal “Science Advances,” tackles an alarming trend in the world of research. Daniel Acuña, lead author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, gets a reminder of that several times a week in his email inbox: These spam messages come from ...

           In recent years, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine, has been a main contributor to the opioid crisis. One of the worst adverse effects of fentanyl abuse is opioid-induced cardiac arrest.  Although it is well known that opioid abuse can induce arrhythmias; the effects of fentanyl abuse on heart rhythms have not yet been thoroughly investigated.             In a recent study published in Circulation, first-author Gema Mondéjar-Parreño, PhD and senior author Joseph C. Wu, MD, ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., August 28, 2025 – Raina Biosciences Inc., (“Raina”), an mRNA technology and therapeutics company, today announced the publication of data from its generative AI platform in Science. The data supports Raina's pioneering approach to mRNA design using its GEMORNA platform to generate novel sequences with superior drug properties over existing mRNA discovery methods. Founded by a team with deep RNA therapeutics and AI expertise, the Company’s mission is to transform the mRNA-based therapeutics landscape by accelerating drug discovery timelines and opening new therapeutic areas for mRNA ...

Yellowstone’s roaming bison herds enhance nutrient cycles and boost ecosystem health at landscape scales, according to a new study. The findings, which challenge conventional grazing wisdom, suggest that restoring large-scale migrations could unlock the species’ full ecological power. Historically, North America supported tens of millions of bison whose seasonal migrations transformed the continent’s vast grassland ecosystems. Today, these once massive herds of wild, free roaming bison are no more; only about 400,000 bison remain, and almost all exist in small managed herds on private land or within parks and reserves. ...

The Tijuana River’s polluted waters don’t just contaminate Southern California’s beaches – they also release toxic gases and aerosols that travel far beyond the riverbanks, threatening the health of nearby communities, according to a new study. The Tijuana River Valley, straddling the US-Mexico border, faces a severe and worsening pollution crisis as untreated sewage, industrial waste, and toxic runoff flow into the Pacific, causing prolonged beach closures and persistent environmental health risks. While most concern ...

A study of ancient horse genomes reveals the genetic changes that contributed to making the animals tame, strong, and rideable by humans thousands of years ago. The domestication of horses, which occurred at least 4,500 years ago, had a transformative effect on the evolution of human society, altering mobility, farming, and warfare. Across much of the world, horses served as a primary mode of human transportation until the rise of the combustion engine in the late 19th century. However, despite ...

Locked beneath a single-plate crust, Mars’ mantle holds a frozen record of the red planet’s primordial past, according to a new study of Martian seismic data collected by NASA’s InSight mission. The findings reveal a highly heterogenous and disordered mantle, born from ancient impacts and chaotic convection in the planet’s early history. “Whereas Earth’s early geological records remain elusive, the identification of preserved ancient mantle heterogeneity on Mars offers an unprecedented window into the geological history and ...

Osaka, Japan – All living beings, big or small, are formed through the hard work of many different cells. To keep the body ready for any challenge, cells need to be dynamic. Often, this means the same types of cell – for example, red blood cells – look and function differently to one another to work together en masse. While researchers know that these varied, or micro-heterogenous, cells exist in multiple bodily systems, the benefits of being heterogenous for how systems function are not yet known. However, in a study due to be published in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers from The University of Osaka, The University of ...

New York, NY [August 28, 2025]—When genetic testing reveals a rare DNA mutation, doctors and patients are frequently left in the dark about what it actually means. Now, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have developed a powerful new way to determine whether a patient with a mutation is likely to actually develop disease, a concept known in genetics as penetrance. The team set out to solve this problem using artificial intelligence (AI) and routine lab tests like cholesterol, blood counts, and kidney function. Details of the findings were reported ...

On Aug. 28, scientists from Washington and Lee University, the National Park Service and the University of Wyoming published research in Science magazine shedding new light on the value of bison recovery efforts in Yellowstone National Park. Bill Hamilton, John T. Perry Jr. Professor in Research Science at Washington and Lee University, and Chris Geremia, a researcher with the National Park Service at Yellowstone, served as co-first authors, with co-author Jerod Merkle, associate professor and Knobloch Professor in Migration Ecology and Conservation at the University of Wyoming. While momentum is building to restore bison ...

Mars’s interior more like Rocky Road than Millionaire’s Shortbread, scientists find New research published in the journal Science reveals the Red Planet’s mantle preserves a record of its violent beginnings. The inside of Mars isn’t smooth and uniform like familiar textbook illustrations. Instead, new research reveals it’s chunky - more like a Rocky Road brownie than a neat slice of Millionaire’s Shortbread. We often picture rocky planets like Earth and Mars as having smooth, layered interiors - with crust, mantle, and core stacked like the biscuit base, caramel middle, and chocolate topping of a millionaire’s shortbread. But the ...

For decades, the Tijuana River has carried millions of gallons of untreated sewage and industrial waste across the U.S.-Mexico border. The river passes through San Diego’s South Bay region before emptying into the ocean, recently leading to more than 1,300 consecutive days of beach closures and water quality concerns. Residents of South Bay communities have long voiced concerns about the foul smells emanating from the river, reporting health issues including eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory issues, fatigue ...

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania brought quantum networking out of the lab and onto commercial fiber-optic cables using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that powers today’s web. Reported in Science, the work shows that fragile quantum signals can run on the same infrastructure that carries everyday online traffic. The team tested their approach on Verizon’s campus fiber-optic network. The Penn team’s tiny “Q-chip” coordinates quantum and classical data ...

New research finds the human brain has a built-in pain map that activates in different areas when relieving face, arm or leg pain. But placebo pain relief only works where the brain expects it. Further research may help to unlock safer, targeted pain treatments.   Researchers from the University of Sydney have used placebo pain relief to uncover a map-like system in the brainstem that controls pain differently depending on where it’s felt in the body. The findings may pave the way for safer, more targeted treatments for chronic pain that don’t rely on opioids.    Like a highway, the brainstem connects the brain to the spinal cord and manages all signals ...