One reason why our livers excel at clearing waste from our blood system is that the organ functions according to three key “zones” that perform specific major tasks. So, if scientists hope to create self-growing patches of liver organoid tissue that could help repair damaged organs, it’s important that the lab-grown tissue faithfully reproduce such zones. In a groundbreaking paper published April 16, 2025, in the prestigious journal Nature, a team of organoid medicine experts at Cincinnati Children’s reports achieving just such a milestone – made from human stem cells. When these humanized organoids were transplanted into rodents whose own liver-bile duct system ...

Replicating the liver’s complexity While organoids aim to mimic human organs, the liver’s repertoire of complex functions – and thus the energy it needs to operate – have made it challenging for researchers to grow organoids that proliferate and fully function, says Sato. When prioritizing growth and survival in laboratory settings, hepatocytes, the liver’s main cells, eventually transformed into cells resembling cholangiocytes, which line the bile duct. Hepatocyte functions only lasted 1-2 weeks at most.  The study team, led by Ryo Igarashi and Mayumi Oda at the Keio University School of Medicine, ...

A team of Lehigh University researchers has successfully predicted abnormal grain growth in simulated polycrystalline materials for the first time—a development that could lead to the creation of stronger, more reliable materials for high-stress environments, such as combustion engines. A paper describing their novel machine learning method was recently published in Nature Computational Materials.  “Using simulations, we were not only able to predict abnormal grain growth, but we were able to predict it far in advance of ...

Individuals with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease show altered blood levels indicating damaged neuronal contacts as early as 11 years before the expected onset of dementia symptoms. This is evident in the levels of the protein “beta-synuclein”. An international team, including researchers from DZNE, Ulm University Hospital and University Medicine Halle report these findings in the journal “Alzheimer’s & Dementia”. The biomarker studied here could potentially help to detect neurodegeneration at an early stage and thus ...

Researchers evaluating a nature-based programme of activities for patients with mild to moderate mental health conditions have shown that improvements in mood and anxiety levels can be seen in as little as 12 weeks.  As part of the UK government’s commitment to transform mental health services, seven ‘test and learn’ green social prescribing sites were identified across England, which included a programme in Humber and North Yorkshire - the first of the seven sites to publish results from the national programme.  Green social prescribing is a practice whereby a healthcare professional refers a patient to community-based nature activities ...

A University of Virginia School of Medicine scientist and collaborators have developed a much-needed new tool to increase the efficiency of genomic research and accelerate the development of new ways to improve human health. UVA researcher Nathan Sheffield, PhD, has spent four years developing a new data standard to ensure that scientists are comparing apples to apples when doing genomic analysis. This type of analysis helps researchers understand the operating instructions for our cells and see how those instructions are carried out. The resulting insights help us understand the workings of both healthy cells and unhealthy ones, pointing us to new ways to treat and prevent disease. Genomics ...

“We find that epigenetic clocks based on the entropy of methylation states predict chronological age with similar accuracy as common approaches that are based on methylation levels of individual cytosines.” BUFFALO, NY — April 16, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Aging (Aging-US) Volume 17, Issue 3, on March 12, 2025, titled “DNA methylation entropy is a biomarker for aging.” Researchers Jonathan Chan, Liudmilla Rubbi, and Matteo Pellegrini from the University of California, Los Angeles, led a study that discovered a new way to measure changes in DNA that can help predict a person’s ...

The Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital’s cardiology faculty practice has received the 2024 Human Experience Pinnacle of Excellence Award® from Press Ganey, one of the nation’s leading patient experience organizations.   The faculty practice is located at The Mount Sinai Hospital and has several physicians with top expertise in cardiovascular care. It is one of 10 heart centers across the country, and the only one in New York, to receive this prestigious award placing it on the leading ...

Affectionate mothering in childhood may have a lasting impact on important personality traits, potentially influencing life outcomes such as educational achievement, economic success, and health and well-being, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. The findings suggest that positive maternal parenting could foster important traits such as openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. “Personality traits are strong predictors of important life outcomes, from academic and career success to health and well-being,” ...

When two materials come into contact, charged entities on their surfaces get a little nudge. This is how rubbing a balloon on the skin creates static electricity. Likewise, water flowing over some surfaces can gain or lose charge. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have harnessed the phenomenon to generate electricity from rain-like droplets moving through a tube. They demonstrate a new kind of flow that makes enough power to light 12 LEDs. “Water that falls through a vertical tube generates a substantial amount of electricity by using a specific pattern of water flow: plug flow,” says Siowling Soh, the study’s corresponding ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study offers clarity on one of the most common questions asked of financial professionals: Is term or permanent life insurance right for me?   Researchers at The Ohio State University conducted a study of how different life insurance product types were related to whether households had adequate financial resources if an income earner died.   They didn’t compare permanent and term life insurance directly, but they calculated how likely households with different life ...

Opaque materials can transmit light when excited by a high-intensity laser beam. This process, known as optical bleaching, induces a nonlinear effect that temporarily alters the properties of a material. Remarkably, when the laser is switched on and off at ultrahigh speeds, the effect can be dynamically controlled, opening new possibilities for advanced optical technologies. Multicolored optical switching is an important phenomenon with potential applications in fields such as telecommunications and optical computing. However, most materials typically exhibit single-color optical nonlinearity under intense laser illumination, ...

Our brain’s remarkable ability to form and store memories has long fascinated scientists, yet most of the microscopic mechanisms behind memory and learning processes remain a mystery. Recent research points to the importance of biochemical reactions occurring at postsynaptic densities—specialized areas where neurons connect and communicate. These tiny junctions between brain cells are now thought to be crucial sites where proteins need to organize in specific ways to facilitate learning and memory formation. More specifically, a 2021 study revealed that memory-related proteins can bind together to form droplet-like structures ...

Plants store carbon in two primary forms: starch and triacylglycerols (TAGs). Starch is mainly stored in chloroplasts in leaves, where it serves as a readily available energy source, while TAGs are stored in seeds for long-term energy storage. Past studies have shown that a carbon trade-off exists between these two storage forms, implying that an increase in the levels of one form often reduces the levels of the other. Interestingly, attempts to increase TAG in leaves have led to a decrease in the levels of starch, suggesting ...

An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has discovered the most distant spiral galaxy candidate known to date. This ultra-massive system existed just one billion years after the Big Bang and already shows a remarkably mature structure, with a central old bulge, a large star-forming disk, and well-defined spiral arms. The discovery was made using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and offers important insights into how galaxies can form and evolve so rapidly in the early Universe. The ...

A multidisciplinary clinical team led by Professor Bernat Soria from the Institute of Bioengineering at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH, Spain) has developed a new method to deliver cell therapies in patients on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a life support system used in cases of severe lung failure. The advance has been published in Stem Cell Research & Therapy (Springer Nature Group). The team has opted not to patent the technique in order to encourage its use in public health systems ...

A new study from University of California San Diego suggests that climate trauma — such as experiencing a devastating wildfire — can have lasting effects on cognitive function. The research, which focused on survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, found that individuals directly exposed to the disaster had difficulty making decisions that prioritize long-term benefits. The findings were recently published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature portfolio of journals. “Our previous research has shown that survivors of California’s 2018 Camp Fire experience prolonged symptoms ...

Kyoto, Japan -- There's a sensation that you experience -- near a plane taking off or a speaker bank at a concert -- from a sound so total that you feel it in your very being. When this happens, not only do your brain and ears perceive it, but your cells may also. Technically speaking, sound is a simple phenomenon, consisting of compressional mechanical waves transmitted through substances, which exists universally in the non-equilibrated material world. Sound is also a vital source of environmental information for living beings, while its capacity to induce physiological responses at the cell ...

Strawberry fields forever will exist for the in-demand fruit, but the laborers who do the backbreaking work of harvesting them might continue to dwindle. While raised, high-bed cultivation somewhat eases the manual labor, the need for robots to help harvest strawberries, tomatoes, and other such produce is apparent. As a first step, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga has developed an algorithm for robots to autonomously drive in two modes: moving to a pre-designated destination and moving alongside ...

By Dr Kelly Dunning The Endangered Species Act (ESA), now 50 years old, was once a rare beacon of bipartisan unity, signed into law by President Richard Nixon with near-unanimous political support. Its purpose was clear: protect imperiled species and enable their recovery using the best available science to do so. Yet, as our case study on the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem reveals, wildlife management under the ESA has changed, becoming a political battleground where science is increasingly drowned out by partisan ideology, bureaucratic delays, power struggles, and competing political interests. ...

Citronellol, a rose-scented compound commonly found in cosmetics and household products, has long been considered safe. However, a Korean research team has, for the first time, identified its potential to cause neurotoxicity when excessively exposed. A collaborative research team led by Dr. Myung Ae Bae at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) and Professors Hae-Chul Park and Suhyun Kim at Korea University has discovered that high concentrations of citronellol can trigger neurological and behavioral toxicity. The study, published in the Journal ...

Most people think of crocodylians as living fossils— stubbornly unchanged, prehistoric relics that have ruled the world’s swampiest corners for millions of years. But their evolutionary history tells a different story, according to new research led by the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) and the University of Utah. Crocodylians are surviving members of a 230-million-year lineage called crocodylomorphs, a group that includes living crocodylians (i.e. crocodiles, alligators and gharials) and their many extinct ...

Images available via link in the notes section University of Oxford researchers have helped overturn the popular theory that water on Earth originated from asteroids bombarding its surface; Scientists have analysed a meteorite analogous to the early Earth to understand the origin of hydrogen on our planet. The research team demonstrated that the material which built our planet was far richer in hydrogen than previously thought. The findings, which support the theory that the formation of habitable conditions on Earth did not rely on asteroids ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A spat between birds at your backyard birdfeeder highlights the sometimes fierce competition for resources that animals face in the natural world, but some ecologically similar species appear to coexist peacefully. A classic study in songbirds by Robert MacArthur, one of the founders of modern ecology, suggested that similar wood warblers — insect-eating, colorful forest songbirds — can live in the same trees because they actually occupy slightly different locations in the tree and presumably eat different insects. Now, a new study is using modern techniques to revisit MacArthur’s ...

In birds, singing behaviours play a critical role in mating and territory defence. Although birdsong can signal individual quality and personality, very few studies have explored the relationship between individual personality and song complexity, and none has investigated this in females, say Flinders University animal behaviour experts. They have examined the relationships between song complexity and two personality traits (exploration and aggressiveness) in wild superb fairy-wrens (Malurus cyaneus) in Australia, a species in which both sexes learn to produce complex songs. “Regardless of their sex ...