Rising sea levels along coastlines not only threaten populations, but also pose a danger to agricultural crops, which may be damaged by surging amounts of saltwater. Researchers have, in response, sought to improve salt-tolerance in plants. In a newly published paper, an international team of scientists reports the identification of cell traits that are critical to tolerating saltwater inundation—a finding that potentially offers new pathways for creating plants that can survive in harsh environments. The research, which appears in the journal Current Biology, focuses ...

DECEMBER 8, 2025—(BRONX, NY)—Adults with chronic pain who participated in New York State's (NYS) Medical Cannabis Program were significantly less likely to require prescription opioids, according to a new study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine and led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System. “Chronic pain and opioid addiction are two of the most pressing health challenges in the United States,” said Deepika E. Slawek, M.D., M.S., the study’s lead author, ...

Immunotherapy for sepsis is effective when doctors tailor the treatment precisely to the patient’s immune system condition. While earlier research showed little benefit of immunotherapy in sepsis, a new study demonstrates that a targeted approach of immunotherapy does improve clinical outcomes. This is reported by a consortium of 33 hospitals in JAMA, led by Radboud university medical center and the Hellenic Institute for the Study of Sepsis. In sepsis, the immune system responds incorrectly to an infection, which can lead to life-threatening organ ...

About The Study: This cohort study of adults ages 45 or older with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection found a significant excess risk of cardiovascular events over 1 year, comparable in magnitude to influenza infection. These findings underscore the importance of RSV as a potential risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and highlight the need for vaccination to mitigate this burden.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Anders Hviid, MSC, DrMedSci, email aii@ssi.dk. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For ...

About The Study: This economic evaluation found that insurance premiums have increased at 3 times the rate of workers’ earnings since 1999, accompanied by escalating hospital prices. Health insurance prices increased at rates close to hospital prices during the COVID-19 pandemic but have since stabilized. This volatility reflects both pandemic-era shifts in health care utilization (e.g., limited clinician visits) and higher retained earnings for insurers. Corresponding Author: To ...

About The Study: In this cohort study, participation in New York State’s medical cannabis program was associated with reduced prescription opioid receipt during 18 months of prospective follow-up, accounting for unregulated cannabis use.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Deepika E. Slawek, MD, MPH, MS, email dslawek@montefiore.org. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.6496) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions ...

Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is a devastating neurological disorder that often leads to permanent neural dysfunction. Current treatments fail to address the core challenges of insufficient intrinsic axonal regeneration, lack of directional guidance, and an inhibitory pathological microenvironment. There is an urgent need for synergistic therapeutic strategies that integrate structural support, molecular regulation, and microenvironment optimization to achieve effective neural function recovery. Now, a joint research team from Zhejiang University and Fuzhou University has developed a collaborative ...

Cancer remains one of the most critical global public health challenges, exerting profound social, economic, and clinical burdens while limiting gains in human life expectancy. Despite advances in surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy, treatment failure and cancer recurrence are frequently driven by a subset of resistant tumor cells that evade conventional programmed cell death pathways. The scientific community has thus been actively exploring strategies to engage alternative intracellular “death switches” within malignant cells. In recent years, ...

Introduction Trace liquid analysis is crucial in fields such as biomedical diagnosis, environmental monitoring, and chemical process control. Traditional detection technologies often face bottlenecks including insufficient sensitivity, bulky equipment, and complex operations. Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) technology has emerged as a powerful tool for trace detection due to its molecular fingerprint identification capability. However, conventional SERS suffers from limitations such as low signal collection efficiency and intricate ...

Osaka, Japan – Individuals with type 2 diabetes often have a higher incidence of tooth decay, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Recent evidence indicates that hyperglycemia could lead to the overwhelming presence of sugars not only in urine but also in saliva, yet its contribution to the development, or pathogenesis, of tooth decay is still unknown. Researchers have now been able to demonstrate that this is directly influenced by blood sugar migration to saliva, changing the bacterial populations in the mouth to promote cavity development. In a study recently published in Microbiome, ...

During the year-end holiday season, the suicide rate declines, U.S. health statistics show. The month of December typically has the year’s lowest average daily suicide rate. And yet each year at this time, some news publications repeat the persistent but incorrect belief that suicides rise around the holidays. The Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania has been tracking this phenomenon for more than two decades, since the 1999-2000 holiday season. Last year, during the 2024-25 holiday season, December was ...

Astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have helped uncover new clues about the longest-lasting cosmic explosion ever observed, a gamma-ray burst that lasted nearly seven hours. The event, known as GRB 250702B, challenges decades of understanding about how and why these bursts occur.  Gamma-ray bursts are intense flashes of high-energy light produced by catastrophic cosmic events, usually lasting just a few seconds or minutes. But GRB 250702B broke all known records. After its initial detection by space-based observatories, researchers used some of the world’s largest ground-based telescopes ...

Climate change—including high temperatures and heat waves—has been shown to pose serious risks to the environment, food systems, and human health, but new research finds that it may also lead to delays in early childhood development. Published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the study found that children exposed to higher-than-usual temperatures—specifically, average maximum temperatures above 86 °F (30 °C)—were less likely to meet developmental milestones for literacy and numeracy, relative to children living in areas with lower temperatures. “While heat exposure has been linked to negative physical and mental ...

Quanta Books is delighted to announce two new upcoming books by mathematician Terence Tao and theoretical physicist David Tong. Six Math Essentials will be Tao’s first math book written for a popular audience. In the book, Tao — a recipient of the Fields Medal and one of the world’s top mathematicians — will explore six ideas that have guided mathematicians throughout history. This short and friendly volume is for all readers, Tao says, because he believes that “mathematics has become unnecessarily intimidating and abstruse to the general public while being more essential than ever in the modern world.” Six Math Essentials will ...

Two new research projects will bring new instruments to established astronomical observatories, expanding the capabilities of mid-sized telescopes and advancing studies of planet and star formation. The projects are the first to be supported under the Instrumentation for Astrophysics program, an initiative supported by The Kavli Foundation, the WoodNext Foundation, and philanthropist Kevin Wells. The awards total $4.8 million in philanthropic support. By pairing new technology with proven observatories, the program ...

As global temperatures rise, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists work to grow stronger, more resilient crops. Yet, this process is challenging. Plants often have several related genes that control desirable traits, such as size or drought resistance. Finding genes with overlapping functions, or “redundant genes,” is a near-impossible scavenger hunt. “Most of the time, there are major limitations in the pathway to crop improvement,” said Iacopo Gentile, a postdoc in CSHL’s Zachary ...

Soil salinity is a key abiotic stress factor. Salt stress substantially impairs plant growth, development, and productivity, significantly reducing crop yields worldwide. It induces various kinds of stress in plant organs, including toxic ion accumulation, oxidative stress, and osmotic stress. Notably, high sodium ion (Na⁺) levels affect protein synthesis, photosynthetic efficiency, nutrient homeostasis, and enzyme activities, causing long-term damage to plants. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying salt tolerance. Recently, scientists have implicated myosin XI, a motor protein that primarily facilitates intracellular trafficking and organelle ...

Indoor air quality has become an urgent concern in recent times, as we spend a considerable amount of time inside our home. Advances in measurement technologies have revealed that small, otherwise invisible ultrafine particles (UFPs) pose a significant threat to indoor air quality. While there are outdoor sources of this particulate air pollutants, the most common source lies indoor. The UFPs emitted by small home appliances equipped with electric heating coils and brushed DC motors can reach to the users as they are deployed close to the users without any preventive shield. In a new study published from Pusan National University (PNU), a group of researchers led by Professor ...

Indigenous communities will be empowered to renew and rebuild their own legal systems with support from Next Steps: Rebuilding Indigenous Law, the new research initiative from the University of Victoria (UVic) Faculty of Law.  “UVic is in the forefront of a profound shift in how education and research can be done—with Indigenous Peoples as co-creators and leaders,” says Qwul’sih’yah’maht, Robina Thomas, acting president and vice-chancellor of the University of Victoria. “Next Steps not only represents a model ...

Acoustic waves are best known as the invisible delivery agents bringing voices, car horns, or our favorite song to our ears. But the waves can also move physical objects, like an item vibrating atop a concert speaker — offering the power to turn sound into a tool.  Since receiving a 2024 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Zhenhua Tian and his team have explored how to use acoustic waves as invisible grabbers to manipulate fluid flows and tiny particles on electronic chips. ...

A subtle change in how climate risk is communicated—mentioning a person’s local area—can significantly increase attention to disaster preparedness messages, according to a new study by researchers at the Stockholm School of Economics and Harvard University, published in Nature Human Behaviour. The findings offer a practical, low-cost strategy for governments, insurers and local authorities seeking to boost climate resilience in vulnerable communities. In a large field experiment involving nearly 13,000 homeowners in wildfire-prone areas ...

An international research team led by Professor Marc-Emmanuel Dumas at Imperial College London & CNRS together with Prof. Patrice Cani (Imperial & University of Louvain, UCLouvain), Dr. Dominique Gauguier (Imperial & INSERM, Paris) and Prof. Peter Liu (University of Ottawa Heart Institute) has uncovered a surprising ally in the fight against insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes: a microbial metabolite called trimethylamine (TMA). Published in Nature Metabolism, the study reveals that ...

A new brain implant stands to transform human-computer interaction and expand treatment possibilities for neurological conditions such as epilepsy, spinal cord injury, ALS, stroke, and blindness – helping to manage seizures and restore motor, speech, and visual function. This is done by providing a minimally invasive, high-throughput information link directly to and from the brain. The transformational potential of this new system lies in its small size and ability to transfer data at high rates. Developed by researchers at Columbia University, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania, this brain-computer interface (BCI) relies ...

Getting enough sleep and staying active are two of the most important things we can do for our health, but new research shows that most people struggle to achieve both, and that sleep may hold the key to moving more. A study led by Flinders University analysed more than 28 million days of real-world health data from over 70,000 people across the globe and found that fewer than 13% consistently meet recommended sleep and physical activity targets. The findings suggest that improving sleep quality could be an effective way to boost daily activity. The research team examined data collected over three ...

Highly reactive organometallic reagents, like organolithiums (molecules with a carbon–lithium bond) are essential reagents in organic synthesis because of their applications from polymer synthesis to pharmaceuticals, and more. Lithium resources, however, are difficult to access because concentrated deposits are geographically restricted and modern extraction methods are burdened with environmental costs. Replacing lithium with sodium would be a significant contribution towards environmentally friendly organic synthesis because it is >1000 times more abundant and its extraction from seawater is sustainable ...