Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. “The fact that many populous and economically powerful countries are autocratizing is especially worrying. ...

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have uncovered how the bacteria that causes tuberculosis fuels itself during infection, providing new insights into one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.   The study, published in The EMBO Journal, provides the first detailed 3D structure of a protein called EtfD, which the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses to extract energy from lipids (fats), along with the first laboratory test capable of directly measuring its activity. Together, these advances are giving researchers tools to begin early-stage drug discovery ...

A new study reveals an unprecedented increase in wildfires in tropical peatlands during the 20th century.   Peatlands store vast quantities of carbon below the Earth’s surface – more than all the world’s forest biomass combined – but when they catch fire large amounts of the stored carbon is released into the atmosphere.   Wildfires in tropical regions have been on the rise in recent decades, but the history and characteristics of wildfires in tropical peatlands remain largely unknown.   Researchers therefore analysed charcoal ...

Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark. The result is the first particle discovery made using the upgraded LHCb detector, a major international project involving more than 1,000 scientists across 20 countries. The UK made the largest national contribution to the upgrade, with significant leadership ...

Leuven, 17 March, 2026 - Scientists from the VIB–KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology, in collaboration with the Francis Crick Institute, have discovered how cancer cells can exploit healthy lung cells to support metastatic tumor growth in the lungs. In two complementary studies published in Nature Cell Biology and Cancer Discovery, they show that tumors use lipids produced by lung cells as signals, and that decreasing the lipid production of ...

A new collaboration between EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, and Seoul National University has made millions of AI-predicted protein complex structures openly available through the AlphaFold Database. To maximise global health impact, the dataset prioritises proteins important for understanding human health and disease. This is the largest dataset of protein complex predictions currently available. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They interact to create protein complexes which fulfil biological ...

What do we really know about how oviraptors – bird-like but flightless dinosaurs – hatched their eggs? Did they use environmental heat, like crocodiles, or body heat from an adult, like birds? In a new Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution study, researchers in Taiwan examined the brooding behavior and hatching patterns of oviraptors. They also modelled heat transfer simulations of oviraptor clutches and compared hatching efficiency to modern birds. To do so, they experimented with a life-sized oviraptor incubator and eggs. “We show the difference ...

LA JOLLA, California, USA, 17 March 2026 — A first-generation college student who once needed research stipends to pay rent has spent the last decade building the infrastructure to ensure others do not face the same calculus. Dr. Christian Cazares, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, grew up in Calexico, California, a border town where more than eighty percent of his schoolmates qualified for the free lunch program. In a new interview published today in the Genomic Press journal Brain Medicine, Dr. ...

Among the primary concerns surrounding artificial intelligence is its tendency to yield erroneous information when summarizing long documents. These “hallucinations” are problematic not only because they convey falsehoods, but also because they reduce efficiency—sorting through content to search for mistakes of AI outputs is time-consuming. To help address this challenge, a team of computer scientists has created an algorithmic framework that draws from a natural phenomenon—bird flocking—by mimicking how birds efficiently self-organize. The framework serves as a preprocessing step for large language models ...

MONTREAL, Quebec, CANADA, 17 March 2026 – Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Therapeutics for Mental Health, Staff Psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC), and Senior Scientist, Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience Program at the Research Institute of the MUHC, and President-Elect of the Collegium Internationale of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP), has issued an unambiguous challenge to the global drug-development system, ...

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, USA, 17 March 2026 — The girl was maybe fourteen. In Nottingham, England, there was a state comprehensive school where egalitarianism was practiced the way religion is practiced in some households: fervently, and with suspicion toward anyone who broke ranks. In biology class, Mary Phillips stood up and said something that got her into trouble. She said the brain was superior to every other organ in the body. Her argument was precise: you could transplant a heart, a kidney, a liver. You could not transplant the brain. The teachers disapproved. Her classmates shifted ...

A research team led by Dr. Ji-Hyung Han from the Convergence Research Center of Sector Coupling & Integration at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (President Yi, Chang-Keun, hereinafter “KIER”) has developed a new seawater electrolysis system that overcomes the precipitate formation issue long blamed for performance degradation and process interruptions, while also presenting a new direction for further technology advancement. Water electrolysis is a technology that produces hydrogen, an eco-friendly energy source, by splitting water. Recently, amid the global freshwater shortage, seawater electrolysis using seawater has been gaining attention as a promising ...

Philadelphia, March 17, 2026 – Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that a new automated tobacco treatment system integrated into routine pediatric care helped drive a 3.9% absolute increase in smoking cessation among mothers – a population-level impact that could translate to tens of thousands of parents quitting each year and protect hundreds of thousands of children from harmful secondhand smoke exposure. The study, published today in Pediatrics, demonstrates how technology can scale ...

New research from the University of Waterloo shows that artificial intelligence (AI) still struggles with some basic software development tasks, raising questions about how reliably AI systems can assist developers.   As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly incorporated into software development, developers have struggled to ensure that AI-generated responses are accurate, consistent, and easy to integrate into larger development workflows.   Previously, LLMs ...

Niigata Japan - A Japanese registry has identified a blind spot in the routine care of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Serum bicarbonate levels are rarely measured, leaving metabolic acidosis largely undetected and hence, undertreated. Metabolic acidosis is a common complication of CKD and is associated with muscle loss, bone disease, insulin resistance, accelerated kidney decline, and increased mortality. Clinical guidelines recommend treatment when the serum bicarbonate level falls below 22 mEq/L. However, real-world data from Asia have been limited.   To address this, Mai Tanaka and colleagues extracted nationwide data ...

Australian media release (see below for North American media release) A landmark Lancet Psychiatry paper published today – the largest-ever review of the safety and efficacy of cannabinoids across a range of mental health conditions – found no evidence that medicinal cannabis is effective in treating anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  The study comes amid more than one million prescription approvals and a tripling of sales of cannabinoid medications (including ...

The Lancet Global Health: Modelling suggests climate change could drive millions globally into physical inactivity by 2050 and be linked to an estimated half a million premature deaths Rising temperatures due to climate change could drive millions more adults globally into physical inactivity by 2050, being linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and billions of dollars in lost productivity, suggests a modelling study published in The Lancet Global Health journal. Climate change is making the world hotter, and this growing heat is likely to affect how active people can be. Physical inactivity is already a major global health problem, ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 23:30 UK TIME ON MONDAY 16 MARCH 2026 Fathers’ health crucial to improving pregnancy and child outcomes Researchers say boys and men are an important but ‘persistently under-appreciated’ population for measures to improve the health of the next generation of children Improving health and well-being of future fathers critical to addressing intergenerational disparities and legacies of racism A focus on shared responsibility for pregnancy and parenthood ...

Under embargo to Monday 16 March 2026, 23:30 UK time Peer reviewed / Survey Major step towards a first global system to track health before pregnancy The key health and social indicators needed for a new global system to monitor people’s health before pregnancy have been identified for the first time by researchers at University College London and the University of Southampton. As more women are becoming pregnant with health conditions that can complicate pregnancy and childbirth, such as obesity, diabetes ...

A new study published in The Lancet Global Health reveals a previously underappreciated tension at the heart of international climate negotiations: policies designed to protect developing countries from bearing an unfair share of the cost of cutting carbon emissions could inadvertently deprive those same countries of millions of life-saving air quality improvements. The leaders of the study also identify a promising way to resolve this dilemma. The study, conducted by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, Princeton University, and collaborators across six countries, modeled ...

Bull sharks form social relationships with specific “friends”, new research reveals. Sharks are often viewed as solitary, but the study – carried out on the Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji – found that rather than mixing at random, sharks have “active social preferences” and choose their social partners. The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, University of Lancaster, Fiji Shark Lab, and Beqa Adventure Divers. “As humans we cultivate a range of social relationships – from casual acquaintances to our best friends, but we also actively avoid certain ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — People with Alzheimer’s disease often have other neurodegenerative conditions as well, including a less-understood disorder called frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). While a precise diagnosis of FTLD has only been possible during an autopsy, new research shows how clinicians may be able to diagnose people living with both Alzheimer’s and FTLD by evaluating neuropsychiatric symptoms. In a study published in Neurology, researchers found that compared to patients who have either of the two types of dementia alone, having both Alzheimer’s disease and FTLD is associated with greater likelihood of having known neuropsychiatric symptoms ...

Even 200 years after asteroid 16 Psyche was discovered, astronomers continue to puzzle over its formation. Psyche is the 10th-most massive asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the largest known metallic asteroid, at 140 miles in diameter. NASA's Psyche mission will arrive in 2029 to determine its origin. Psyche may be a leftover building block of an early planet, shredded by violent collisions, or a planetary fragment that once separated into layers before losing its rocky outer mantle. Other hypotheses suggest Psyche is an ancient remnant that either started metal-rich ...

A new study reports that a biochar-enhanced photocatalyst can efficiently degrade antibiotic contaminants in water, offering a promising strategy for addressing one of the growing threats to global water quality. The research, published in the journal Biochar, describes the development of a ternary composite material composed of biochar, titanium dioxide, and graphitic carbon nitride. The material demonstrated remarkable ability to break down sulfadiazine, a widely used sulfonamide antibiotic that is frequently detected in aquatic environments. Antibiotic pollution has become ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 16 March 2026    Follow @Annalsofim on X, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn              Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own ...