UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 19:01 US ET ON WEDNESDAY 10TH DECEMBER 2025 / 00:01 UK (GMT) ON THURSDAY 11TH DECEMBER 2025   The Vatican’s eco-friendly farm, recently inaugurated by the first ever Augustinian pope, echoes his order’s forgotten early history, new research argues. Dr Krisztina Ilko challenges major assumptions about the medieval Catholic Church and early Renaissance.   A scorched cherry twig miraculously sprouting; a diseased swamp restored to ‘peak fertility’; ...

A new study published in Addiction has identified genetic factors that influence both a person’s risk of developing an addiction and their educational attainment. Researchers found that some genetic variants affect both traits in opposite directions, meaning that a higher genetic risk for addiction is associated with an increased likelihood of lower educational attainment. Lead author Dr. Judit Cabana-Domínguez from the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) explains: “We have long known that substance use problems and school difficulties often appear together and make each other worse.  ...

A combination of missed prevention opportunities and health inequalities can result in the early deaths of people living with epilepsy and intellectual disabilities, a study has shown. Around 1.2million people in England have some form of intellectual disability, with epilepsy estimated to impact 20-25% of them – up to 300,000 people – compared to just 1% of the general population. However, until now there has been no national-level population-based evidence on the risks and protective factors specifically contributing to epilepsy-related deaths in people with intellectual disability. This new research aims to ...

A major international survey of people receiving electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) has found that most patients are not asked about the childhood adversities or recent life stressors that they believe caused their difficulties.  The survey findings, published in the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, suggest that people are prescribed ECT, often against their will, without the underlying causes of their mental health problems being recognised and addressed by other therapeutic means.  The ...

Researchers at Duke University used CRISPR technologies to discover previously unannotated stretches of DNA in the ‘dark genome’ that are responsible for controlling how cells sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their local environment. Understanding how these DNA sequences affect cellular identity and function could give researchers new therapeutic targets for illnesses that involve changes to mechanical properties of tissues, including fibrosis, cancer and stroke, as well as long-term issues such as neurodegeneration and even aging. This work appears online on September 25 in the journal Science. The ...

Today at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), researchers presented the initial findings from a major multi-year collaboration between the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group (ECOG-ACRIN) and Caris Life Sciences® (Caris) focused on transforming recurrence risk assessment in early-stage breast cancer through artificial intelligence (AI). The public-private partnership pairs ECOG-ACRIN’s extensive clinical trial expertise and biorepository resources with Caris’ comprehensive MI Cancer Seek® whole exome and whole transcriptome profiling, whole slide imaging, ...

The March 28, 2025, Myanmar earthquake is giving scientists a rare look into how some of the world’s most dangerous fault systems behave, including California’s San Andreas Fault. Earthquakes are notoriously messy and complex, but this one struck along an unusually straight and geologically “mature” fault, creating near-ideal conditions for researchers to observe how the Earth releases energy during a major continental rupture. An international team of researchers led by The University ...

Florida State University researchers have created a new crystalline material with unusual magnetic patterns that could be used for breakthroughs in data storage and quantum technologies. In a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the research team showed that when two materials with neighboring chemical compositions but different structure types are combined, they can form a new material that exhibits a third structure type with highly unusual magnetic properties. Atoms in magnetic materials act as extremely small magnets, ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — A new Mayo Clinic study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has uncovered that an off-the-shelf, dual-antibody therapy can generate deep and durable responses in extramedullary multiple myeloma — one of the most aggressive and treatment-resistant forms of the disease.  "We are seeing powerful responses in a disease that historically has resisted every therapy," says Shaji Kumar, M.D., a Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center hematologist and senior author of the study. "By recruiting T cells ...

A noninvasive blood test to detect genetic material shed by tumors may help clinicians identify adverse events related to treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs, investigators at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have found. In a Dec. 11 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers described how they measured cell-free DNA to identify tissue damage to nine organs in a study involving 14 patients with solid tumors who received immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, a treatment that helps boost the immune system’s ability to attack cancer. The test determined that the six patients in the cohort who had immune-related adverse events ...

The American College of Cardiology is launching an early cardiovascular disease prevention education program to honor the contributions of Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, MACC, and his lifelong commitment to establishing a culture of prevention in children. The Fuster Prevention Forum is an in-person educational course that will teach clinicians effective ways to educate children, parents and educators in their communities on nutrition, physical activity and emotional well-being. “Valentin Fuster has a legacy of promoting heart healthy behaviors early ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2025 Highlights: A new guideline by the American Academy of Neurology says psychological interventions are possibly effective in helping people achieve freedom from functional seizures. Functional seizures, previously known as psychogenic nonepileptic seizures or non-epileptic attack disorder, can look or feel like seizures from epilepsy or fainting, but they have their own typical features. The guideline says appropriate treatment may decrease the frequency of functional seizures, decrease anxiety and improve quality of life. The guideline recommends that antiseizure ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2025 Highlights: GLP-1 drugs show a potential link to reduced epilepsy risk in people with type 2 diabetes. People taking GLP-1 drugs were 16% less likely to develop epilepsy than those on DPP-4 inhibitors. Semaglutide showed the strongest association with lower epilepsy risk among the GLP-1 drugs studied. The study is preliminary and does not prove causation; randomized, controlled trials are needed to confirm these findings. The drug tirzepatide was not included as it was introduced during the study period. MINNEAPOLIS — A preliminary study of people with diabetes suggests ...

A collaborative team of researchers (that includes students and senior researchers at Arizona State University (ASU), Coastal Carolina University, The University of the South in the US and researchers in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, The University of the West Indies at Cave Hill (Barbados), University of Cape Town (South Africa), Institut Pasteur (France) have identified two previously unknown circoviruses in short-finned pilot whales and orcas from the Caribbean region of the North Atlantic Ocean. The findings represent the first detection of cetacean circoviruses in this region and ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The cannabis marketplace continues to grow and evolve, offering consumers new ways to use cannabis — and new ways to combine it with other substances, such as alcohol. That practice can be particularly detrimental to adolescents, who are known to use both substances in high numbers. And when it comes to cannabis use and binge drinking among high school seniors, modality matters, according to new research from the University at Buffalo finding that differing modes of cannabis consumption may be associated with risky alcohol use behaviors in this population. The study is among the first to evaluate modes of cannabis use on binge drinking outcomes ...

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have developed Spheromatrix, a simple and low-cost technology that enables tumor models to be grown, frozen, and stored for future use in cancer drug testing. Spheromatrix is made from specially engineered filter paper patterned to support the growth of tumor spheroids in a controlled, reproducible manner. Unlike conventional approaches, which are expensive, complex, and cannot be preserved, this platform enables researchers to build biobanks of ...

Canadian researchers want to clarify the concepts related to safe opioid supply to better assess their impact and guide public-health policies. In Canada, thousands of people use contaminated street opioids. To reduce overdoses, the country has been experimenting for the past 10 years with the distribution of pharmaceutical opioids as an alternative to illicit drugs. This method is often referred to as “safe supply” or “safer supply.” What exactly do these terms, which emerged in the late 2010s and are central to Canadian harm reduction policies, mean? In a study published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, ...

New species of tiny pumpkin toadlet discovered in Brazil highlights need for conservation in the mountain forests of Serra do Quiriri Article URL: https://plos.io/48orUxO Article title: A new species of Brachycephalus (Anura: Brachycephalidae) from Serra do Quiriri, northeastern Santa Catarina state, southern Brazil, with a review of the diagnosis among species of the B. pernix group and proposed conservation measures Author countries: Brazil, U.S., Germany Funding: The field work was funded by Fundação ...

Reciprocity matters--people were more supportive of climate policies in their country if they believed other countries were making significant efforts themselves, per survey of 4,000 Chinese, Indian, Japanese and US citizens.   Article URL: https://plos.io/4pfhbgj Article Title: They reduce, we reduce: Perception of other countries’ climate effort predicts support for climate policies   Author Countries: China, Japan, Sweden Funding: The work described in this study was supported by grants awarded to Kim-Pong Tam from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 16601122 ...

Stanford Medicine investigators have unearthed the biological process by which mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19 can cause heart damage in some young men and adolescents — and they’ve shown a possible route to reducing its likelihood. Using advanced but now common lab technologies, along with published data from vaccinated individuals, the researchers identified a two-step sequence in which these vaccines activate a certain type of immune cell, in turn riling up another type of immune cell. The resulting inflammatory activity directly injures heart muscle cells, while triggering further ...

Nijmegen, 10 December 2025 - More than a decade after the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, scientists are still working to understand how human-specific DNA changes shaped our evolution. A new study by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, published in Science Advances, offers an innovative approach: by scanning DNA of hundreds of thousands of people in a population biobank, researchers can identify individuals who carry the very rare archaic versions of these genetic changes, making it possible to directly observe their real-world effects in living humans.   It’s just over a decade since scientists first reported successfully sequencing the virtually ...

Key takeaways Harvard atmospheric scientists directly sampled 5-day old wildfire smoke in the upper troposphere and found large particles that are not reflected in current climate models. The large particles had a measurable cooling effect, with potential implications for future climate predictions Some wildfires are so intense, they create their own weather – thunderstorms driven by heat that hurtle smoke as high as 10 miles into the sky like giant chimneys. When these smoke plumes reach the thin, calm air of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, they can persist for weeks or even months – yet their ...

With the help of artificial intelligence, an international team of researchers has made the first major inroad to date towards a new and more effective way to fight the monkeypox virus (MPXV), which causes a painful and sometimes deadly disease that can be especially dangerous for children, pregnant women and immunocompromised people. Reporting in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the team found that when mice were injected with a viral surface protein recommended by AI, the animals produced antibodies that neutralized MPXV, suggesting the breakthrough could be used in a new mpox vaccine or antibody ...

Researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have developed a new type of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell that elicits a more controlled immune response to cancer in mice—effectively killing cancer cells, including those that typically escape detection, with fewer toxic side effects. The engineered CAR T cells may someday offer a way to more safely treat blood cancers and reduce the chance of relapse. The results were just published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. CAR T cell therapy ...

New Study Reveals Industrial Revolution’s Uneven Health Impacts Across England Bone chemistry uncovers hidden stories of pollution, gender, and life in industrializing Britain An interdisciplinary team of scientists has uncovered new evidence showing that the health impacts of the Industrial Revolution varied more widely across England than previously believed. The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, challenge the longstanding narrative that industrial cities were uniformly polluted while rural communities remained comparatively untouched ...