Baltimore, MD — The University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) proudly announces the investiture of Manhattan E. Charurat, PhD, MHS as the Homer and Martha Gudelsky Distinguished Professor in Medicine, one of the institution’s most prestigious academic honors.  The ceremony opened with warm welcomes delivered by Heather Culp, JD, Senior Vice President and Chief Philanthropy Officer, Senior Associate Dean at University of Maryland Medicine, and Shyam Kottilil, MD, PhD, Interim Director of the Institute of Human Virology (IHV). Mark T. Gladwin, MD, Dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, offered ...

On December 10, Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biotechnology company, hosted the fourth edition of its Pharma.AI Quarterly Launch webinar, titled “Epic Year-End Recap & Q4 Winter Updates”. The event drew more than 300 registrants from universities, healthcare institutions, global pharmaceutical companies, and innovative biotech firms worldwide. Insilico's software team showcased the recap of Pharm.AI in 2025,and the latest capabilities through live demos and real‑world case studies.   Key highlights are summarized below: Generative Biologics What improved in  2025: Peptide workflows: template-based ...

Plastics are not inert: they gradually break into fragments over time, forming micro- and then nanoplastics (i.e., particles <1 μm in size). Nanoplastics are found in drinking water and foods packaged in plastic. This reality suggests that humans may be ingesting appreciable quantities of nanoplastics to which the gut is highly exposed. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how nanoplastics affect digestive system health. Additionally, to date, studies on this topic have employed commercial particles, which often contain additives. In the study published in Environmental Science: Nano, the research team specifically ...

AURORA, Colo. (Dec. 19, 2025) – Scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz have discovered that while brain neuron changes, including cell loss, may begin in early life, a drug long-approved for other conditions might be repurposed to slow this damage, offering new hope for those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other cognition issues. The study was published today in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. “This drug improved one measure of cognition and reduced a blood measure of neuron death in people with AD in a relatively short period of time in its first clinical trial,” said the study’s senior author Professor Huntington Potter, ...

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA — SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and Chinese Laser Press (CLP) have announced the recipients of this year’s Advanced Photonics Young Innovator Award. The award honors emerging researchers by recognizing outstanding papers published in the SPIE-CLP journal Advanced Photonics over the past five years. The seven recipients represent a diverse range of groundbreaking research that is shaping the future of optics and photonics: Peng Chen, Nanjing University, for "Liquid crystal integrated metalens with tunable chromatic ...

In what came to be called the “Christmas Valley miracle,” the Lake Tahoe Basin communities of Christmas Valley and Meyers were spared in late August 2021 when the massive Caldor Fire entered the basin, burning more than 222,000 acres and forcing roughly 30,000 people to evacuate during one of the hottest, driest summers on record. Outside of the Lake Tahoe Basin, the fire destroyed over 1,000 structures, many of them homes. Decades of fuel-reduction treatments conducted by federal, state and local land managers to protect people’s communities well before the fire are widely credited for ...

Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?  The famous question, though implausible, reflects a ubiquitous tradeoff between quantity and quality. Now, a new study shows that this dilemma operates in biology at the evolutionary scale.  Research published on December 19, 2025, in the journal Science Advances found that certain ant species structure their colonies by favoring quantity over quality. These species invest less into each individual’s cuticle—the protective layer of the exoskeleton—which liberates nutritional resources ...

Transposable elements are stretches of DNA that can move around the genome. Many of these DNA sequences originate from long ago, when viruses inserted their genetic material into our ancestors’ genomes during infection. Today, these viral transposable elements make up around 8-10% of the mammalian genome.   Once disregarded as “junk” DNA, we now know that many transposable elements play an important role in influencing how genes are turned on ...

The protein factories in our cells – so-called ribosomes – have a central task: during a process known as translation, amino acids are linked together according to messenger RNA, forming a growing peptide chain that later folds into a functional protein.  However, before a newly emerging protein can even begin to fold, it must be processed and transported to the correct location within the cell. As soon as it emerges from the ribosome, enzymes can remove its initial amino acid, attach small chemical groups, or determine to which cellular compartments the ...

University of Leicester engineers have unveiled a concept for a device designed to magnetically ‘cloak’ sensitive components, making them invisible to detection. A magnetic cloak is a device that hides or shields an object from external magnetic fields by manipulating how these flow around an object so that they behave as if the object isn’t there. In a new study for Science Advances, a team of engineers at the University of Leicester have demonstrated for the first time that practical cloaks can be engineered using superconductors and soft ferromagnets in forms that can be manufactured. Using computational and theoretical techniques ...

In a study published in Science Advances on December 19, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from international institutions, explored the impact of mountain building and climate cooling over 30 million years across five major mountain systems in the Northern Hemisphere and revealed that these processes are key drivers of the rich plant diversity found in the Earth's alpine biome. Mountain regions harbor a disproportional share of the world's plant species, but the processes responsible for assembling this diversity over deep time have remained unclear. ...

Using a specially developed simulation model, researchers at the University of Cologne have traced and analysed the dynamics of possible encounters between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans on the Iberian Peninsula during the Palaeolithic period for the first time. Between approximately 50,000 and 38,000 years ago, the first anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe, where they encountered Neanderthal populations. The team analysed the respective settlement areas and the movement patterns of both groups. Were there any interactions between the groups, and did they mix? And how were population dynamics influenced by climatic events? The ...

University of Phoenix College of Doctoral Studies announced the publication of “Burnout and Autonomy in the Modern Workforce: The Role of AI-Driven Skilling in Equity and Resilience,” a new white paper by Rheanna Reed, D.M., which draws on five years of University of Phoenix Career Optimism Index® data, to examine how burnout, autonomy, equity and artificial intelligence (AI) intersect in the U.S. workforce and outlines strategies employers can use to build a more resilient, future-ready workforce. Reed integrates these findings with peer-reviewed scholarship on burnout, self-determination, the Job Demands-Resources model, and equity in access to opportunity to argue that ...

Generative AIs may not be as creative as we assume. Publishing December 19 in the Cell Press journal Patterns, researchers show that when image-generating and image-describing AIs pass the same descriptive scene back and forth, they quickly veer off topic. From 100 diverse prompts, the AI pairs consistently settled on 12 themes, including gothic cathedrals, natural landscapes, sports imagery, and stormy lighthouses. These recurrent themes likely reflect biases in the ...

A large-scale model study now shows how the global food system can contribute to the fight against global heating. It identifies 23 levers, calculates their effectiveness and concludes: a decisive transformation of this sector alone, without the indispensable energy transition, can limit the global temperature increase to 1.85°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. In addition, food will become healthier and cheaper, and agriculture will be more compatible with biodiversity conservation. The study was led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in Nature Food. The study ...

About The Study: In July 2025, an Executive Order was issued that ended support for Housing First and sought to eliminate discretionary federal spending on such programs. Though not all housing offered on a Housing First basis would end if federal funding for these programs ceased, there will nevertheless be harmful consequences. This study projects that the number of people experiencing homelessness will increase by 5% within a year in addition to the already increasing trend. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Joshua A. Barocas, MD, email joshua.barocas@cuanschutz.edu. To ...

About The Study: In this quality improvement study using a controlled simulation, commercial large language models (LLM’s) demonstrated substantial vulnerability to prompt-injection attacks (i.e., maliciously crafted inputs that manipulate an LLM’s behavior) that could generate clinically dangerous recommendations; even flagship models with advanced safety mechanisms showed high susceptibility. These findings underscore the need for adversarial robustness testing, system-level safeguards, and regulatory oversight before clinical deployment. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding ...

Bromine-based flow batteries operate through the redox reaction between bromide ions and elemental bromine, offering advantages such as abundant resources, high redox potential, and good solubility. However, the substantial bromine generated during the charging process can corrode battery components, shorten cycle life, and increase system costs. Although traditional bromine complexing agents can alleviate corrosion to some extent, they often induce phase separation, compromising electrolyte homogeneity and adding complexity to the system. In ...

AURORA, Colo. (Dec. 18, 2025) – Eliminating federal funding for Housing First programs, initiatives that provide people experiencing homelessness (PEH) with stable housing without requiring sobriety or treatment, could lead to a sharp rise in homelessness nationwide, according to a new study published today in JAMA Health Forum. Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz estimate that ending support for federally funded permanent supportive housing (PSH) and rapid rehousing (RRH) programs would result in 44,590 additional ...

Australian researchers have discovered that the TAK1 gene helps cancer cells survive attack from the immune system, revealing a mechanism that may limit the effectiveness of immunotherapy treatments. Cancer immunotherapies can work very well, but underperform in some cases due to tumours’ inbuilt survival processes that help them resist attack by the immune system. Researchers at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI) and WEHI discovered that the TAK1 gene acts like a safety switch that protects cancer cells from the powerful signals generated by ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Marine bacteria are key to determining whether carbon is recycled near the ocean surface or transported to deeper waters, but many operate in constant threat of being infected by viruses called phages, and mutate to fend off those infections. The resulting evolutionary arms race between bacteria modifying themselves and viruses fighting back raises questions: What does it cost a cell to resist infections, and how does that alter how ecosystems function? In a new study, researchers ...

“Epigenetic age is a biological metric of overall health and may predict mental health responses to unprecedented stressors.” BUFFALO, NY — December 19, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Volume 17, Issue 11 of Aging-US on November 18, 2025, titled “Epigenetic age predicts depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging: importance of biological sex.” This study, led by Cindy K. Barha of the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia, along with Teresa Liu-Ambrose of the University ...

The Bharat Innovates 2026 National Basecamp was formally inaugurated today at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), marking a significant milestone in India’s efforts to identify, strengthen, and globally position its most promising deep-tech innovations. The three-day National Basecamp, taking place from December 18 to 20, 2025, brings together approximately 400 shortlisted startups and research-led innovations that have been selected through a rigorous, multi-stage national screening process. The shortlisted startups and innovators are some of India’s brightest and most impactful, with the potential to ...

Economists call it “income mobility”. This means how easy or difficult it is for you or your family to go up or down in income compared to others in the community around you. People in Norway have a high level of income mobility. It is quite possible for people to increase their incomes. But also for those incomes to drop. “Your income is the sum of what you earn from work and from capital income,” says Professor Roberto Iacono at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's ...

On December 8, 2025, Space: Science & Technology was officially indexed in the Web of Science: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). All articles published since 2021 will be progressively included into the SCIE database. The editorial team would love to extend our heartfelt gratitude to the hosts of the journal: Beijing Institute of Technology and the China Academy of Space Technology, as well as to Editor-in-Chief Prof. YE Peijian, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the entire Editorial Board, all authors and reviewers for their invaluable contributions. We also sincerely thank all ...