Overdose prevention sites and supervised consumption sites in Toronto are not associated with long-term increases in local crime, McGill University researchers have found. Over 10 years, crime reports remained stable or declined in neighbourhoods where sites opened, the researchers said. Their findings land amid debates across Canada about how harm reduction services intersect with public health and safety. “Opposition from the public and policymakers has often centred on neighbourhood safety and decline. We wanted to find out whether the data supported those claims,” said Dimitra Panagiotoglou, an associate professor in McGill’s ...

Weight says a lot. In the kitchen, it could mean cooking with too little or too much of an ingredient. For scientists, a molecule’s weight can help determine its makeup. This, in turn, can shed light on whether a potential drug is acting on the body or not working at all. Weight can even reveal what tumors are made of, potentially influencing treatment options. For measures like this and more, researchers turn to a technique called mass spectrometry. “A mass spectrometer is essentially a very precise scale,” says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Research Associate Professor Paolo ...

About The Study: This population-based cohort study found that U.S.-born individuals had significantly higher odds of infant mortality compared with non–U.S.-born individuals, particularly among full-term births and among those self-identifying as Black, Hispanic, white, or more than 1 race. Sudden unexpected infant death was a major contributor to these disparities. Investigation into the underlying factors contributing to these disparities is needed. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Giulia M. Muraca, MPH, PhD, email muracag@mcmaster.ca. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.52230) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In this cohort study, exposure to Migrant Protection Protocols was associated with higher rates of trauma during migration among asylum seekers. Such policies may be associated with adverse health outcomes for asylum seekers, with potential downstream implications for U.S. public health and security. The Migrant Protection Protocols were introduced in January 2019 and changed U.S. asylum procedures by requiring certain asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting immigration proceedings. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Kyle Joyner, MD, email kyle.joyner@med.usc.edu. To ...

By Chris Woolston The giant planet Jupiter has nearly 100 known moons, yet none have captured the interest and imagination of astronomers and space scientists quite like Europa, an ice-shrouded world that is thought to possess a vast ocean of liquid salt water. For decades, scientists have wondered whether that ocean could harbor the right conditions for life, placing Europa near the top of the list of solar system bodies to explore. A new study led by Paul Byrne, an associate professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences, throws cold water on the idea that Europa could ...

SAN ANTONIO — January 6, 2026 – Southwest Research Institute has upgraded its nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) laboratory to offer robust chemical analysis of organic compounds used in drug discovery and development. Through internally funded research, SwRI used the new laboratory to compare quantitative NMR (qNMR) to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), a conventional method used to determine the purity of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). SwRI’s research found that qNMR can be ...

Researchers are trying to understand why some wild species do better than others over time, as the environment changes. Researcher Kenneth Aase's research focuses on a new mathematical approach that could shed light on this question, which in turn could move us closer to understanding the loss of biological diversity. Aase is a statistician and a PhD research fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU's) Department of Mathematical Sciences. He is associated with the GPWILD ...

NEW YORK, NY – January 6, 2026 – The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation today revealed compelling new research pointing to major healthcare access challenges and financial burdens disproportionately affecting young adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The national survey, conducted by the Foundation, assessed healthcare and financial experiences across three groups: young adults aged 18-25, adults aged 26-64, and caregivers of pediatric patients under 18. The findings, published today in Crohn’s & Colitis 360, are based on ...

“Cable-driven systems excel at heavy-load transport but are limited by fixed anchoring points in unstructured environments,” explained study corresponding author Lihua Xie from Nanyang Technological University. The core innovations include (a) a human-in-the-loop knot planner integrating enclosing plane extraction, frontier-based path search, and knotting trajectory generation; (b) three key optimization metrics (enclosing planarity, tether visibility, tether clearance) ensuring task reliability; and (c) seamless integration of UAV mobility and winch load-bearing capability. “This system enables ...

PULLMAN, Wash. — Businesses looking for clearer insight into how consumers truly feel about their products, campaigns or brand decisions may find more authentic reactions on decentralized social media platforms, according to new research from Washington State University. The study, which was published in the European Journal of Marketing, found that people express stronger emotions and engage in less self-censorship on decentralized platforms than on traditional, centralized sites. Centralized platforms — such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X, formerly Twitter — are owned and operated by single corporations that control content and user data. Decentralized platforms ...

January 6, 2026 – The American Pediatric Society (APS) is pleased to announce that Vanderbilt University School of Medicine has been selected as the host institution for the newly reinstated APS Howland Visiting Professor Program. This program serves as an extension of the prestigious APS John Howland Award, the highest honor bestowed by APS in recognition of distinguished leadership and contributions to academic pediatrics. The 2025 APS John Howland Award recipient, renowned pediatric pulmonology leader Bonnie W. Ramsey, MD, will visit the institution to share her knowledge and experience, exchange ideas and ...

A team of researchers at the University of Waterloo have made a breakthrough in quantum computing that elegantly bypasses the fundamental “no cloning” problem.   Quantum computing is an exciting technological frontier, where information is stored and processed in tiny units — called qubits. Qubits can be stored, for example, in individual electrons, photons (particles of light), atoms, ions or tiny currents.   Universities, industry, and governments around the world are spending billions of dollars to perfect the technology for controlling these qubits ...

A pigment that makes feathers and hair orange helps prevent cellular damage by removing excess cysteine from cells. Pheomelanin is an orange-to-red pigment that is built with the amino acid cysteine and found in human red hair and fair skin, as well as in bird feathers. Previous research has shown that pheomelanin is associated with increased melanoma risk, raising questions about why evolution has maintained genetic variants that promote pheomelanin production. Ismael Galván and colleagues studied 65 adult zebra finches divided into treatment and control groups. In the ...

Could Southeast Asia become carbon neutral by 2050, even as energy demand increases? The region is growing quickly and still relies heavily on fossil fuels. A modeling study by Bin Su and colleagues provides an energy system optimization model with pathways to net-zero emissions by 2050 for the electricity and hydrogen sectors in members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The model simulates energy production and demand ...

The emergence of carbon-neutral energy systems such as high-temperature electrolysis, solar thermal power plants, small modular reactors, and hydrogen- and ammonia-based processes has necessitated the development of novel structural materials that exhibit outstanding corrosion resistance and mechanical properties even at high temperatures and under harsh environments. Notably, traditional austenitic stainless steels (ASSs) fail in these conditions. Addressing this technological gap, materials science engineers have come up with Ni- and Fe-based ...

University of Warwick researchers discover rapid, jasmonate-driven, early immune response in plants using breakthrough live-imaging tool. Plants mobilise their immune defences far earlier than scientists have believed for decades — and through a previously overlooked early signalling mechanism - according to a new study published in Nature Plants. Unlike animals, plants are literally rooted to the spot and cannot deploy specialised immune cells or antibodies, nor run away. Instead, every cell must be capable of responding to attack from pathogenic viruses, bacteria, fungi, or insect pests. When attacked plants quickly initiate defence responses ...

A poor night’s sleep portends a bleary-eyed next day, but it could also hint at diseases that will strike years down the road. A new artificial intelligence model developed by Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues can use physiological recordings from one night’s sleep to predict a person’s risk of developing more than 100 health conditions. Known as SleepFM, the model was trained on nearly 600,000 hours of sleep data collected from 65,000 participants. The sleep data comes ...

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have uncovered a long‑elusive molecular ‘reshuffle', a breakthrough that tackles one of chemistry’s most persistent challenges and could transform the way medicines are manufactured.  In a paper published today (6th January) in Nature Chemistry, researchers from the School of Chemistry have found a key to unlocking an 80-year-old chemical puzzle, which could have important ramifications for fine chemical processes like those involved in the manufacture of medicines.  Chiral molecules are asymmetric or non-superimposable on their mirror image. Each side is different, existing in “right hand” ...

The maternal microbiome and immune system have both independent and synergistic effects on fetal brain health - changes in the mother’s immune system have been linked to an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in children. A new study, published today in Nature Neuroscience, expands our understanding of this “gut-immune axis” by mapping the impact of stressors during pregnancy – namely changes in the microbiome and activation of the immune system - on the neuroimmune landscape of the developing fetal brain. The research team, led by ...

One of the great successes of 20th-century physics was the quantum mechanical description of solids. This allowed scientists to understand for the first time how and why certain materials conduct electric current and how these properties could be purposefully modified. For instance, semiconductors such as silicon could be used to produce transistors, which revolutionized electronics and made modern computers possible.   To be able to mathematically capture the complex interplay between electrons and atomic nuclei and their motions in a solid, physicists ...

LA JOLLA, California, USA, 6 January 2026 -- In a revealing Genomic Press Interview published today in Genomic Psychiatry, Dr. Maria Margarita Behrens recounts an extraordinary scientific journey that wound through four countries and multiple disciplines before arriving at fundamental questions about how the brain develops and what goes wrong in psychiatric disorders. Her work now stands at the forefront of international efforts to decode the molecular signatures that define every cell type in the human brain. Dr. Behrens serves as a faculty member in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and holds ...

TIANJIN, CHINA, 6 January 2026 -- A comprehensive genetic investigation led by Dr. Feng Liu at Tianjin Medical University General Hospital has uncovered striking molecular connections between schizophrenia and bone health, identifying 195 shared genetic loci that may explain why psychiatric patients face elevated fracture risks. The peer-reviewed research, published in Genomic Psychiatry, analyzed genomic data from over half a million individuals and reveals that these two seemingly unrelated conditions suggest overlapping biological pathways at the molecular level. The finding carries immediate clinical weight. Patients with schizophrenia experience osteoporosis at rates far ...

ADELAIDE, South Australia, AUSTRALIA, 6 January 2026 -- A genetic mutation passed from mother to children in families affected by schizophrenia has now been shown to completely silence a brain receptor that pharmaceutical companies are racing to target with new drugs. Researchers at Flinders University, publishing their peer-reviewed findings in Genomic Psychiatry, demonstrate that this single amino acid change transforms the trace amine-associated receptor 1 (TAAR1) from a functioning cellular gatekeeper into a molecular dead end. The discovery carries weight far beyond basic science. Several drug companies have invested heavily in TAAR1-targeting medications, ...

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina, USA, 6 January 2026 -- A comprehensive mini-review published today after peer review in Brain Medicine by Dr. Tao Ma and colleagues at Wake Forest University School of Medicine synthesizes emerging evidence that two isoforms of a critical cellular energy sensor play distinct, and sometimes opposing, roles in Alzheimer's disease. The analysis proposes that this overlooked complexity may explain why pharmacological approaches targeting AMP-activated protein kinase have yielded frustratingly mixed results in treating the disease that ...

KODAIRA, Tokyo, JAPAN, 6 January 2026 -- In a revealing Genomic Press Interview published today in Genomic Psychiatry, Dr. Noritaka Ichinohe challenges a foundational assumption that has quietly constrained psychiatric research for decades: the belief that meaningful explanation requires averaging away individual differences. His three decades of translational neuroscience across Japanese research institutions have instead demonstrated that biological heterogeneity, far from being statistical noise to eliminate, constitutes the very phenomenon demanding ...