WASHINGTON — For the first time, researchers have shown that terahertz imaging can be used to visualize internal details of the mouse cochlea with micron-level spatial resolution. The non-invasive method could open new possibilities for diagnosing hearing loss and other ear-related conditions. “Hearing relies on the cochlea, a spiral-shaped organ in the inner ear that converts sound waves into neural signals,” said research team leader Kazunori Serita from Waseda University in Japan. “Although conventional imaging methods often struggle to visualize this organ’s fine details, ...

(WASHINGTON—March 27, 2025) — A machine learning model generated by a team from the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) outperformed standard statistical models in identifying and stratifying transplant risk for patients with myelofibrosis, according to new research published today in Blood, the American Society of Hematology’s flagship journal. “Although there are many models available to identify patients with high-risk myelofibrosis, we are still lacking ...

 Accurate and robust 3D imaging of specular, or mirror-like, surfaces is crucial in fields such as industrial inspection, medical imaging, virtual reality and cultural heritage preservation. Yet anyone who has visited a house of mirrors at an amusement park knows how difficult it is to judge the shape and distance of reflective objects. This challenge also persists in science and engineering, where the accurate 3D imaging of specular surfaces has long been a focus in both optical metrology and computer vision research. While specialized techniques ...

Noted Maya archaeologist Julie Hoggarth, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at Baylor University, has been elected to the rank of AAAS Fellow, a lifetime honor announced today by the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. Hoggarth is among the 471 scientists, engineers and innovators who have been elected 2024 Fellows for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements throughout their careers. The new Fellow class hails from academic institutions, ...

DALLAS, March 27, 2025 — Recent analysis by the National Health Institute indicates that telehealth now accounts for 23% of all health care encounters nationwide, with some clinical specialties reporting virtual visit rates now exceeding 50%.[1] To help ensure quality care in this rapidly expanding field, the American Heart Association Center for Telehealth and the National Institutes of Health-funded University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Center for Virtual Care Value and Excellence (UNC-Chapel Hill ViVE), are building ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Raluca Cadar The Protein Society Phone: (844) 377-6834 E-mail: rcadar@proteinsociety.org LOS ANGELES, CA – The Protein Society, the premier international society dedicated to supporting protein research, announces the winners of the 2025 Protein Society Awards, which will be recognized  at the 39th Annual Symposium, June 26 – 29, 2025, in San Francisco, USA. Plenary talks from award recipients will take place throughout the 3.5-day event. The winners’ scientific accomplishments, described by their nominators below, demonstrate their profound impact on protein science. The Christian B. Anfinsen ...

A machine learning algorithm developed by Cambridge scientists was able to correctly identify in 97 cases out of 100 whether or not an individual had coeliac disease based on their biopsy, new research has shown. The AI tool, which has been trained on almost 3,400 scanned biopsies from four NHS hospitals, could speed up diagnosis of the condition and take pressure off stretched healthcare resources, as well as improving diagnosis in developing nations, where shortages of pathologists are severe. Digital ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) could help sonographers identify any abnormalities at the 20-week pregnancy screening scan almost twice as quickly, without reducing the accuracy or reliability of diagnoses, a new study has shown. This will help improve patient care by allowing sonographers to focus on other aspects of the scan, such as communicating with parents or spending more time looking at any areas of concern. The trial is the first of its kind to use AI for the 20-week pregnancy scan on real patients, and is ...

Dartmouth researchers conducted the first clinical trial of a therapy chatbot powered by generative AI and found that the software resulted in significant improvements in participants' symptoms, according to results published March 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine AI. People in the study also reported they could trust and communicate with the system, known as Therabot, to a degree that is comparable to working with a mental-health professional. The trial consisted of 106 people from across the United States diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or an eating disorder. ...

It’s been five years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. As SARS-CoV-2 shifts to endemic status, questions about its future evolution remain. New variants of the virus will likely emerge, driven by positive selection for traits such as increased transmissibility, longer infection duration and the ability to evade immune defenses. These changes could allow the virus to spread among previously immunized populations, potentially triggering new waves of infection. Predicting new mutations in viruses is crucial for advancing life science research, particularly when trying to understand how viruses evolve, ...

New York, N.Y., and Princeton, N.J. (March 27, 2025)—With a mission to understand how nutrition and metabolism impact the body’s ability to control cancer, four leading research institutions have united under the Weill Cancer Hub East, an innovative, collaborative partnership that aims to transform cancer treatment. The initiative connects world-class experts from Princeton University, The Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research to enhance a ...

Tokyo, Japan – One of the simplest and most beautiful naturally occurring patterns can be observed when light is shined through a pair of slightly misaligned periodic structures. This phenomenon, known as the moiré effect, is not only pretty to look at, but also has important consequences for the properties of materials. In an article published in ACS Nano, a team led by researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, announced the discovery of a previously unseen moiré pattern: a series of periodic one-dimensional bands in tungsten ditelluride bilayers. In nanomaterials, moiré patterns ...

DALLAS, March 27, 2025 — More than 56 million people globally live with heart failure (HF), which prevents the body from getting enough of the oxygen-rich blood it needs to work properly.[1] While there is no cure for HF, many people with this condition can live full, enjoyable lives and disease progression can be slowed with the right treatment. Research shows that outcomes for patients with HF improve when health care professionals and hospitals provide guideline-directed medical therapies. A new Heart Failure Center ...

The MIT Press is proud to release our 2025 Impact Report for Direct to Open (D2O), our sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model.   The continued growth in the reach of open access publishing couldn’t be more timely. In 2025, access to truth and facts are under attack, and democratizing access to trustworthy, peer-reviewed information has never been more important. In the face of so many forces working against the spread of knowledge, Direct to Open continues to be a critical tool. To date, ...

Congenital hearing loss refers to impaired auditory function that occurs due to genetic causes. GJB2 is the gene responsible for approximately half of all cases of hereditary hearing loss. Connexin 26 (CX26), which is encoded by GJB2, helps in the formation of intercellular gap junctions—channels that allow for the movement of ions and chemical messenger molecules between adjacent cells, where it regulates auditory function.   GJB2 mutations often lead to fragmentation of gap junctions and gap junction plaques (GJPs) which are composed ...

Molecular biologist Yali Dou, PhD, holder of the Marion and Harry Keiper Chair in Cancer Research and professor of medicine and cancer biology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is one of seven USC faculty members in the 2025 cohort of new fellows. The AAAS is the world’s oldest and largest general science organization and the publisher of Science, a top peer-reviewed academic journal. Election as a fellow is a lifetime honor — one of the AAAS’s ...

University of Leeds news  Embargoed until 10:00 GMT, 27 March  Damaging cluster of UK winter storms driven by swirling polar vortex miles above Earth  Powerful winter storms which led to deaths and power outages in the UK and Ireland were made more likely by an intense swirling vortex of winds miles above the Arctic, say scientists.  A team of researchers led by the University of Leeds has pinpointed a new reason for winter storm clusters such as the trio named Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, which hit the nation within the space of a week in February 2022.  The findings which are published today in the journal ...

In the past, intact forests absorbed 7.8 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually – about a fifth of all human emissions – but their carbon storage is increasingly at risk from climate change and human activities such as deforestation. A new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) shows that failing to account for the potentially decreasing ability of forests to absorb CO₂ could make reaching the Paris agreement targets significantly harder, if not impossible, and much more costly. “Delaying action leads to disproportionately higher costs,” explains Michael Windisch, ...

A new medical database automatically compiles the medical records of obese patients and those suffering from obesity-related diseases in a uniquely comprehensive and reliable manner. The initiative, led by Kobe University, offers valuable insights for health promotion and drug development. “Obesity is at the root of many diseases,” says OGAWA Wataru, an endocrinologist at Kobe University. Obesity has been linked to the development of diabetes, hypertension, gout, coronary heart disease, stroke and many other diseases. Monitoring, treating and preventing obesity and the diseases it can cause is therefore not only good for ...

The parasitic vine Cuscuta campestris grows by latching onto the stems and leaves of plants and inserting organs called haustorium into the host plant tissues to draw nutrients. The haustorium is formed when ion channels in the cell membrane are stimulated during coiling and induce a reaction within the cell. Further, Cuscuta campestris has many types of ion channels, but which ones were linked to the development of haustorium were previously unknown. “For the first time, the genes involved in sensing ...

A new study led by researchers at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo has uncovered a surprising role for calcium in shaping life’s earliest molecular structures. Their findings suggest that calcium ions can selectively influence how primitive polymers form, shedding light on a long-standing mystery: how life’s molecules came to prefer a single “handedness” (chirality). Like our left and right hands, many molecules exist in two mirror-image forms. Yet life on Earth has a striking preference: ...

People living with Long Covid often feel dismissed, disbelieved and unsupported by their healthcare providers, according to a new study from the University of Surrey.  The study, which was published in the Journal of Health Psychology, looked at how patients with Long Covid experience their illness. The study found that many patients feel they have to prove their illness is physical to be taken seriously and, as a result, often reject psychological support, fearing it implies their symptoms are "all in the mind".  Professor ...

Wearable mobile health technology could help people with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) to stick to exercise regimes that help them to keep the condition under control, a new study reveals.  Researchers studied the behaviour of recently-diagnosed T2D patients in Canada and the UK as they followed a home-based physical activity programme – some of whom wore a smartwatch paired with a health app on their smartphone.  They discovered that MOTIVATE-T2D participants were more likely to start and maintain purposeful exercise at if they had the support of wearable technology- the study successfully recruited 125 participants with an 82% ...

An extinct lineage of parasitic wasps dating from the mid-Cretaceous period and preserved in amber may have used their Venus flytrap-like abdomen to capture and immobilise their prey. Research, published in BMC Biology, finds that the specimens of Sirenobethylus charybdis — named for the sea monster in Greek mythology which swallowed and disgorged water three times a day — date from almost 99 million years ago and may represent a new family of insects. The morphology of S. charybdis indicates the wasps were ...

A new species of fossil from 444 million years ago that has perfectly preserved insides has been affectionately named ‘Sue’ after its discoverer’s mum. The result of 25 years of work by a University of Leicester palaeontologist and published in the journal Palaeontology, the study details a new species of multisegmented fossil and is now officially named as Keurbos susanae. Lead author Professor Sarah Gabbott from the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment said: “‘Sue’ is an inside-out, legless, headless wonder. Remarkably her insides are a mineralised ...