A new study has found that biochar made from agricultural waste such as chestnut shells and vine prunings could help deliver beneficial compounds more effectively in animal feed, offering a promising alternative to antibiotics in livestock production. The research, published in Biochar, explores how biochar can act as a carrier for lysozyme, a natural antimicrobial enzyme commonly found in egg whites. Scientists developed a simple and environmentally friendly method to attach lysozyme onto biochar particles and tested how well the system works under conditions ...

Health promotion, education, and behavior assistant professor Leila Larson conducts her nutrition-focused maternal and child health research all over the world, and South Carolinians will soon benefit from her expertise. With funding from the USC Collaborative for Health Equity Research (CHEER), an equity-driven pilot project program recently established by the USC Office of the Provost, Larson has launched a new study focused on pica (i.e., the craving and consumption of non-food items, like ice, and sometimes earth, like clay or soil). “Pica impacts pregnant women across the globe, including ...

A two-drug combination frequently used in anti-aging research causes brain damage in mice, University of Connecticut researchers report in the March 16 issue of PNAS. The findings should make doctors cautious about prescribing the drug combo prophylactically, but also suggest new ways to understand multiple sclerosis. “When you administer this cocktail to an animal, young or old, the myelin is damaged, which makes it disappear. Even worse in the young animals” than in the aged ones, says UConn School of Medicine immunologist ...

Exercise science assistant professor Elizabeth Adams is using her expertise in healthy dietary patterns among children and families to lead a five-year study focused on improving nutrition through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). With support from a $3.2 million National Institutes of Health grant, Adams is working to increase SNAP recipients’ use of fruit and vegetable incentive programs to improve long-term wellness and reduce health care costs. Across the United States, more than 34 million individuals (nine million of them children) experience food insecurity, ...

First study linking fructose metabolism by brain immune cells to glioblastoma growth Blocking a key fructose transporter activated tumor-killing immune cells in mice Findings suggest a promising new drug target to improve brain cancer treatments CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered that specialized immune cells within the glioblastoma tumor metabolize fructose to suppress immune responses and promote tumor growth, reports a study published on March 17 in the Proceedings of the National ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Shoulder replacement is the third most common joint-replacement surgery in the U.S. and is likely to become more common as the population ages, according to Penn State researchers. Though most patients go home on the same day as their surgery, those with greater health risks or serious injuries are admitted to the hospital for shoulder replacement. Patients who experience complications like infection or sepsis sometimes need to be readmitted to the hospital for treatment at a later date.   In a study published in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery ...

Research Highlights: Excess fat stored around the waist (belly weight or visceral fat), indicated by measuring waist size, was more strongly associated with heart failure risk than body mass index (BMI). Systemic inflammation played a key role in the relationship between extra weight stored around the waist, or central obesity, and heart failure. About one-quarter to one-third of the link between abdominal fat and heart failure appeared to be explained by inflammation. The mediating role of inflammation in the association between central obesity and heart failure suggests that reducing inflammation ...

Research Highlights: Adults with prediabetes by their early 30s who had high fasting glucose levels, in addition to other risk factors such as obesity, high cholesterol or high blood pressure, had the highest risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Individuals who had high fasting glucose levels (100-125 mg/dL) and who met the criteria for treatment with a GLP-1RA medication were more likely to progress from prediabetes to Type 2 diabetes within five years. Using blood test results and risk factors to identify which young adults with prediabetes had the highest risk of progressing to Type 2 diabetes may help accelerate treatment ...

March 17, 2026-- Postpartum uninsurance declined among Black women in non-expansion states during the COVID-19 continuous Medicaid coverage policy, but racial gaps persisted, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The research is the first to explicitly examine how the policy affected racial equity in postpartum insurance coverage while also considering states’ Medicaid expansion status under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The study is published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Extending ...

Going to the grocery store these days can be a painful experience, with record-high price hikes biting into Canadian food budgets. However, as many societies around the world already know, a cheap, plentiful source of protein is literally at our feet: insects, especially crickets, grasshoppers, ants and beetles. While entomophagy — the eating of insects — has lagged in the U.S. and Canada, a new study by Concordia researchers found that there is some interest in the dietary practice, with some demographic groups showing more ...

DETROIT – A research team led by Wayne State University was awarded a $473,566, three-year grant from the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) for a major collaborative initiative focused on enhanced phosphorus removal at the nation’s largest single-site wastewater treatment facility. The GLWA Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF) serves 77 communities — including Detroit — and manages flows from a nearly 1,000‑square‑mile sewer shed. The project aims to protect the Rouge River and Lake Erie by improving phosphorus removal efficiency and ...

Every year, millions of people are diagnosed with cancer globally; however, current treatments are limited by disease complexity. A study published March 17th in the open-access journal in PLOS Biology by Tianyu Jiang at Shandong University, Qingdao, China and colleagues suggests that Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 (EcN) may be engineered with anticancer agents to treat cancerous tumors in mice. Bacteria inhabit and interact with the human body, playing a major role in both health and disease. However, the therapeutic efficacy of engineered bacteria-based cancer therapies has ...

In a study involving data from thousands of people, the risk of a new coronary heart disease diagnosis was statistically associated with bloodstream levels of nine specific molecules that are produced by gut microbes. Danxia Yu of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, U.S., and colleagues present these findings on March 17th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine. The human digestive tract naturally contains a large population of microbes. Different people have different proportions of different species of gut microbes, which produce different molecules during their normal, metabolic ...

WASHINGTON — Scientists at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered a new dual function for a well-known cancer-related protein called ezrin. This finding could potentially open the door to new treatments for osteosarcoma, the most common bone cancer in children and young adults, as well as other cancers that are ezrin-dependent. The finding appeared March 17, 2026, in the journal Science Signaling. For decades researchers believed that ezrin was only active in its open form at the cell membrane. ...

A robot that can locate lost items on command – this is the latest development at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). It combines knowledge from the internet with a spatial map of its surroundings to efficiently find the objects being sought. The new robot from Prof. Angela Schoellig’s TUM Learning Systems and Robotics Lab looks like a broomstick on wheels with a camera mounted at the top. It is one of the first robots that not only integrates image understanding but also applies it to a clearly defined task. To find a pair of glasses misplaced in the kitchen, for example, the robot has to look around and ...

An international team of researchers, including physicists from HSE MIEM, has demonstrated that nonmagnetic impurities can help more accurately reveal Majorana zero modes—quantum states considered promising building blocks for quantum computing. The researchers found that these impurities shift the energy levels that typically obscure the Majorana signal, while leaving the mode itself largely unaffected, thereby making its spectral peak more distinct. The study has been published in Research. Majorana ...

Scientists at HSE University have identified a molecular mechanism underlying aggressive breast cancer. They found that the signals supporting tumour growth originate not from the tumour itself but from its microenvironment. The researchers also demonstrated that reduced levels of the IGFBP6 protein in the tumour microenvironment lead to the accumulation of macrophages—immune cells associated with a higher risk of cancer recurrence. These findings already make it possible to assess patient risk more accurately and may, in the future, enable the development of drugs that target cells of the ...

Heart disease is the leading cause of adult death worldwide, making cardiovascular disease diagnosis and management a global health priority. An echocardiogram, or cardiac ultrasound, is one of the most commonly used imaging tools employed by physicians to diagnose a variety of heart diseases and conditions.   Most standard echocardiograms provide two-dimensional visual images (2D) of the three-dimensional (3D) cardiac anatomy. These echocardiograms often capture hundreds of 2D slices or views of a beating heart that can enable physicians to make clinical assessments ...

Traumatic muscle injury can be associated with volumetric muscle loss (VML), often leading to permanent functional loss. Until recently, experimental therapies to support muscle regeneration have faced several key limitations, including the challenge of delivering sufficient healing cells to the traumatized area and the inability of conventional tissue transplants to conform to the specific shape of a muscle defect. A recent study, led by senior author Ngan F. Huang, PhD, Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Research) in the Stanford Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, highlights a unique approach her research team has developed to address this problem and potentially ...

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the properties of the perovskite family of materials can be used to create so-called quantum bits. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, pave the way for more affordable materials in future quantum computers. According to the researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, behind the study, few within the field believed it would be possible. The reason is that the atoms in perovskite materials should, in theory, interact ...

Superconducting materials could play a crucial role in the energy-efficient applications of the future. However, several technical challenges still stand in the way of their practical use. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed a new material design that addresses a major obstacle in the field: enabling superconductivity to operate at higher temperatures while also withstanding strong magnetic fields. This breakthrough could pave the way for far more energy-efficient electronics and quantum technologies. Digital devices, ...

WASHINGTON, March 17, 2026 — Most people will close their eyes when trying to concentrate on a faint sound. Many of us have been told that keeping our eyes closed helps us hear better — that it frees up our brains’ processing abilities and increases our auditory sensitivity. However, that strategy may sometimes backfire, particularly in environments with a lot of loud background noise. In JASA, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University tested whether a person closing their eyes can really hear better in noisy environments. To test this, volunteers listened to a collection of sounds through ...

In a single experiment, scientists can decipher the entire genomes of many patient samples, animal models or cultured cells. To fully realize the potential to study biology at this unprecedented scale, researchers must be equipped to analyze the titanic troves of data generated by these new methods. Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and the University of California Los Angeles published findings March 17, 2026, in Cell Reports Methods discussing building and testing a new computational tool for tackling massive and complex sequencing datasets. The new resource, ...

Diseases historically absent from the United States have been showing up in Florida, Texas, California and other U.S. states in recent years. To understand why, look to Peru. That’s where researchers from Stanford and other institutions analyzed the connection between a cyclone and a massive outbreak of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that can cause fever, rash, and life-threatening symptoms like hemorrhage and shock. Their findings, published March 17 in One Earth, reveal that warmer, wetter weather linked to climate change is making disease epidemics more likely. "Health impacts of climate change aren't something we're waiting for,” ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the brain’s balance between stability and excitability, according to a new MIT study. This disruption causes neural activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness, the researchers found. The discovery of this common mechanism could make it easier to develop new technologies for monitoring patients while ...