A new report published in The Lancet issues a fresh clarion call: plastic pollution is a grave and growing danger to human and planetary health. As Ministers and diplomats arrive in Geneva for the final round of talks to conclude a global plastics treaty, the report provides the most up-to-date assessment of the links between health and plastic pollution across the full life cycle of plastic.  An estimated 8 billion metric tons of plastic waste now pollute the planet. Micro- and nanoplastic particles and multiple plastic chemicals are found in ...

New research to be presented at this year’s Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Vienna, Austria (15-19 September) suggests that living in a rural environment in the first five years of life could increase the risk of developing type 1 diabetes compared with living in urban environments. The study is by Samy Sebraoui and Professor Soffia Gudbjornsdottir, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues. Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a chronic autoimmune disease where the body's immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, called beta cells. This ...

  DENVER - A new editorial published in Comprehensive Physiology underscores the critical importance of understanding heart-lung interactions in pulmonary vascular disease (PVD). Tim Lahm, MD, a pulmonologist and researcher at National Jewish Health, along with a team of esteemed colleagues from institutions across the country, urges the scientific community to confront the major knowledge gaps that hinder progress in improving patient outcomes. The editorial, titled "Towards a Better Understanding of Heart-Lung Interactions in Pulmonary ...

Five faculty members at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville — Christopher Cherry, Virginia Corrigan, Bernard Issa, Hector Pulgar and Tong (Toni) Wang — have been selected to receive Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards for the 2025-26 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in ...

Water is an essential requirement for life on Earth — it supports everything from cellular processes to ecosystems. Five papers published in ACS journals provide new insights to help protect natural water sources and ensure that more people have access to safe drinking water. Reporters can request free access to these papers by emailing newsroom@acs.org. Reducing salt contamination of tidal rivers. Across the globe, the saltwater portion of tidal rivers — which rise and fall with the ocean tides — has been traveling farther upstream in the last few decades. Researchers publishing in Environmental ...

University of Oklahoma Associate Professor Dustin Condren, Ph.D., has been named a 2025-2026 Fulbright U.S. Scholar by the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Condren is among around 400 scholars selected nationwide for the prestigious international award. The Fulbright Scholars program aims to promote mutual understanding between the people of the U.S. and those from other nations. Candidates are chosen based on their academic achievements and the strength of their proposed project. “We are immensely proud of Dr. Condren for being ...

More than a decade ago, researchers found that an acute complication of type 1 diabetes, diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), can be resolved with the hormone leptin, even in the absence of insulin.   An analysis published today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation explains how leptin affects the brain and how it might be used in future therapeutics.  DKA happens when the body is unable to make insulin and begins to break down fat for fuel. This can lead to a life-threatening buildup of sugar (glucose) and ketoacids in the blood. Doctors have typically administered insulin to address ...

Oysters and mangroves are both essential to protecting and restoring Florida’s coastlines that they call home, including defending them against storms. As mangrove populations are increasing due to successful restoration efforts and favorable weather, however, their strong comeback may pose unintended consequences for oysters, according to new research from UCF graduate student Katherine Harris and Pegasus Professor Linda Walters published in the Marine Ecology Progress Series. To protect Florida’s coastlines, the researchers hope their new findings can initiate efforts ...

In recent years, doctors and scientists are increasingly studying long-lasting illnesses that begin after someone recovers from an infection. Two of the most well-known examples are long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). It has been estimated that 400 million people, globally, may have Long COVID, and nearly half of them meet criteria for ME/CFS. These conditions were often misunderstood or overlooked in the past, but that is starting to change. Researchers are now studying them as part of a larger group of illnesses called post-acute infection syndromes, or PAISs. A new review by Mass General Brigham investigator Anthony L Komaroff, ...

A recent multicenter clinical trial has uncovered inflammatory pathways that contribute to asthma flare-ups in children that occur despite treatment, according to findings published in JAMA Pediatrics. Eosinophilic asthma is characterized by high levels of eosinophils, a type of white blood cell involved in the body’s immune response. While eosinophils typically help fight infections, in eosinophilic asthma, they accumulate in the lungs and airways, causing chronic inflammation, swelling and damage to the respiratory system. Eosinophilic asthma is driven by type 2 (T2) inflammation, an immune response ...

Cell membranes cradle, protect, and gatekeep living cells. Membranes can even affect how a cell behaves. But membranes’ own erratic behavior has puzzled scientists for years.  Turns out, it’s all about perspective: When physicist Rana Ashkar’s team members looked at how membranes behave on the nanoscale, they were able to identify unified biophysical laws that membranes have adhered to all along.   Published in Nature Communications, these findings have significant implications for disease ...

New York, NY [August 1, 2025]— In a discovery that could guide the development of next-generation antidepressants and antipsychotic medications, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have developed new insights into how a critical brain receptor works at the molecular level and why that matters for mental health treatments. The study, published in the August 1 online issue of Science Advances, focuses on the 5-HT1A serotonin receptor, a major player in regulating mood and a common target of both traditional antidepressants and newer therapies such as psychedelics. Despite its ...

Researchers have discovered a protein which is critical for steering melanoma cancer cells as they spread throughout the body. The malignant cells become dependent on this protein to migrate, pointing to new strategies for impeding metastasis.  The protein eIF2A is generally thought to spring into action when a cell is under stress, helping ribosomes launch protein synthesis. But according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances, eIF2A has a completely different role in melanoma, helping cancerous cells control movement.  “Malignant cells that metastasize ...

Researchers at Kyoto University have discovered that an immune molecule found only in primates, called IGFL2, plays a key role in regulating inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). IGFL2 is produced by a subset of immune cells in the joints of patients with RA and acts like fuel on a fire: it activates more immune cells, further amplifying inflammation and worsening joint damage. They also found that IGFL2 levels were much higher in the blood of patients with RA, especially in those with more severe symptoms. These findings support IGFL2’s potential as a diagnostic marker, a tool for monitoring disease progression, ...

Lighting plays a crucial role when it comes to visual storytelling. Whether it’s film or photography, creators spend countless hours, and often significant budgets, crafting the perfect illumination for their shot. But once a photograph or video is captured, the illumination is essentially fixed. Adjusting it afterward, a task called “relighting,” typically demands time-consuming manual work by skilled artists.  While some generative AI tools attempt to tackle this task, they rely on large-scale neural networks and billions of training images to guess how light might interact with a scene. But the process is often ...

Berkeley — Gray wolf pups are born nearly helpless: blind, deaf and lacking the acute sense of smell of their elders. They usually remain in the safe confines of their den until they are at least three weeks old. That is why UC Berkeley biologists were surprised to observe gray wolves near Yellowstone National Park traveling 20 kilometers or more over rugged, mountainous terrain, with very young pups in tow.  “The first time I saw a camera trap photo of a wolf carrying its pup, I just cracked up because the pup is being carried by its butt,” said Avery Shawler, first author of a new study presenting the findings, which appeared ...

Researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have used artificial intelligence to tackle a critical problem facing the future of energy storage: finding affordable, sustainable alternatives to lithium-ion batteries. In research published in Cell Reports Physical Science, the NJIT team led by Professor Dibakar Datta successfully applied generative AI techniques to rapidly discover new porous materials capable of revolutionizing multivalent-ion batteries. These batteries, using abundant elements like magnesium, calcium, aluminum and zinc, offer a promising, cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion batteries, ...

In cheminformatics, where machine learning is transforming our understanding of how molecular properties are predicted and explained, a critical challenge has long remained: making these powerful but often "black box" models easier to interpret. Recently, researchers at the Australian National University developed a breakthrough solution: a "regional explanation" method that helps reveal how molecular structures drive their properties. This research was published June 3 in Intelligent ...

Partisan animosity is a powerful driver of protest participation -- sometimes nearly matching or even exceeding concern about the actual issues, according to a new study published in the journal Social Forces. The research, conducted by political scientist Seth Warner at the University of Connecticut, analyzed three nationally representative surveys fielded between 2014 and 2022. Each focused on a different protest movement: Black Lives Matter, the climate movement, and the Tea Party. Warner matched survey questions to these movements’ core grievances ...

Reston, VA (August 1, 2025)—New research has been published ahead-of-print by The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM). JNM is published by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, an international scientific and medical organization dedicated to advancing nuclear medicine, molecular imaging, and theranostics—precision medicine that allows diagnosis and treatment to be tailored to individual patients in order to achieve the best possible outcomes. Summaries of the newly published research articles are provided below. New Imaging Tool Targets Hidden Liver Tumors Liver cancer is hard to monitor after treatment, ...

“[…] we were able to reproduce systemic rejuvenating effects of circulating blood factors on the human skin, which have been so far only demonstrated in rodent heterochronic parabiosis studies.” BUFFALO, NY — August 1, 2025 — A new research paper featured on the cover of Volume 17, Issue 7 of Aging (Aging-US) was published on July 25, 2025, titled “Systemic factors in young human serum influence in vitro responses of human skin and bone marrow-derived blood cells in a microphysiological co-culture system.” The study, led by first author Johanna Ritter and corresponding ...

A comprehensive survey published May 23 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal maps out the role of large language models in task planning, underscoring the growing influence of artificial intelligence in complex decision-making tasks. Traditionally reliant on expert systems and manual configuration, task planning is essential for organizing action sequences to achieve defined goals, and is now being redefined by the advanced reasoning capabilities of large language models. The survey offers a comprehensive synthesis of how these models are reshaping ...

Medicare drug plans are increasingly excluding coverage of new specialty drugs that treat complex conditions like cancers and autoimmune diseases. New research from the USC Schaeffer Center shows how these barriers may come at a cost to patients’ health. In a large study of Medicare beneficiaries with multiple sclerosis (MS), researchers found those in plans with broader coverage of MS treatments had significantly lower risk of developing new or worsening symptoms months later. The findings, published Aug. 1 in JAMA Network Open, suggest that plans with narrower coverage of MS treatments may be linked to worse health ...

A new paper published today in Cell highlights how researchers have leveraged AI-based computational protein design to create a novel synthetic ligand that activates the Notch signaling pathway, a key driver in T-cell development and function. These so-called soluble Notch agonists can be broadly applied to optimize clinical T-cell production and advance immunotherapy development. Notch signaling is central to many cellular differentiation processes and is essential in transforming human immune cells into T-cells that target ...

About The Study: This cross-sectional study found that when adolescents had their phones at school, they spent nearly an hour per school day on smartphones, with most of this time on social media. The results extend prior work indicating that smartphone use during instructional hours, especially social-specific use, is not trivial. These results also highlight developmental differences, with younger adolescents using smartphones and social media less than older adolescents. Corresponding author: To contact the corresponding author, Scott H. Kollins, Ph.D., email scott@aura.com. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi: ...