As life expectancy continues to climb globally, the focus of many people has moved from longevity alone to living in good health. This has drawn attention to the need to extend “healthspan,” the period during which an individual maintains their vitality, independence, and good health, and is free from major age-related issues. Mitochondria, known popularly as the powerhouse of the cell, are central to this goal as they produce the energy essential for life in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Given that many age-related diseases and aging itself are strongly linked to the decline of mitochondrial function, mitochondria ...

Everyday acts of care—tightening a loose hinge, patching up a wall, or simply moving a crate—may seem mundane. But a new study from Ritsumeikan University shows that these small repairs are key to sustaining autonomy and an inclusive social life in a squatted space in Japan. The research, led by Associate Professor Kyoko Tominaga from the College of Social Sciences at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, explores how spatial practices within the squat at the Takayama Architecture Summer School (TASS) enable diverse residents to coexist through collaborative ...

            Today, the Arabian Gulf is home to manatee-like marine mammals called dugongs that shape the seafloor as they graze on seagrasses. A newly described fossil site in Qatar reveals that ancient sea cows engineered aquatic ecosystems in a similar way more than 20 million years ago.             In a paper published today in the journal PeerJ, researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History worked with collaborators at Qatar Museums to also name a new species of sea cow that was a miniature version ...

Termite pellets can linger long after the insects that dropped them have disappeared. By testing for microbes in the excrement, researchers can distinguish old droppings from fresh, and whether a colony is actively chewing its way through a home. Previous efforts to determine pellet age focused on testing hydrocarbon compounds or other chemicals in the pellets.  These studies have required expensive, specialized laboratory equipment and complicated extraction processes.  In some cases, researchers ...

Research Highlights: Long-term heart disease risk among women diagnosed with uterine fibroids was more than 80% higher than in women without uterine fibroids, according to a 10-year study of more than 2.7 million U.S. women. The elevated heart disease risk among those with uterine fibroids persisted among all races and ages but was particularly strong in women younger than 40. Researchers said more studies are needed to better understand and confirm the relationship between having uterine fibroids and increased heart ...

A new major study from Queen Mary University of London has found that smokers who use both cigarettes and e-cigarettes at the same time – known as dual use – are reducing their intake of harmful chemicals and are also more likely to eventually quit smoking than those who continue to smoke only. This challenges common fears about dual use. The study examined data from a large trial, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and Cancer Research UK (CRUK), which followed 886 adult smokers ...

A research team at the Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research (CNIR) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), together with Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), has developed a new class of ultra-thin, flexible bioelectronic material that can seamlessly interface with living tissues. The researchers introduced a novel device called THIN (Transformable and Imperceptible Hydrogel-Elastomer Ionic-Electronic Nanomembrane). THIN is a membrane just 350 nanometers thick that transforms from a dry, rigid film into an ultra-soft, tissue-like interface ...

When two homozygous plant lines with different characteristics are crossed, the resulting offspring are often more robust and productive than their parents. This phenomenon is called heterosis. It can be caused by positive variants of genes that dominate negative ones, or by complex interactions among numerous genes that ‘communicate’ with each other and influence one another. The research team has developed a new statistical method that can analyse these gene interactions more quickly and accurately. Rather than testing billions of possible gene combinations individually, the new method, hQTL-ODS ...

Astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS, and the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (IREx) at the University of Montreal (UdeM) have made a striking discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). For the very first time, scientists have continuously monitored the atmosphere escaping from an exoplanet throughout a complete orbit. The result: the gas giant WASP-121b is surrounded not by one, but by two immense helium tails ...

Much remains to be known about the chemical composition of small asteroids. Their potential to harbour valuable metals, materials from the early solar system, and the possibility of obtaining a geochemical record of their parent bodies makes them promising candidates for future use of space resources. A team led by the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) has analyzed samples of C-type asteroids, carbon-rich minor bodies of the Solar System, progenitors of the carbonaceous chondrites. Their findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, support the idea that these asteroids ...

One in five young people in the UK now access specialist mental health care by age 18 – a four-fold increase in under two decades, new research suggests.  Figures from Wales – which researchers say serve as an accurate indicator for the whole of the UK – indicate a consistent year-on-year rise in service use, with a sharp acceleration after 2010.   Experts warn that existing services may no longer meet the needs of today’s young people, with many treatment decisions based on decades-old evidence.  Rates of mental ill health among young people have been rising across the world. Despite this, there has been a lack of evidence on the proportion ...

A new paper in Rheumatology Advances in Practice, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that Tik Tok videos about gout are commonly misleading, inconsistent, or inaccurate. Gout is a painful inflammatory arthritis caused by high urate in the blood that crystallizes and deposits in the joints. An estimated forty-one million people worldwide suffer from gout, with physicians diagnosing about seven million new cases a year. There are persistent gaps in awareness and understanding about gout among patients and the public. Although rheumatology guidelines recommend long-term urate-lowering therapy for ...

In a new publication, Professor José-María Martín-Olalla, from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Seville, has described the direct link between the vanishing of specific heats at absolute zero—a general experimental observation established in the early 20th century—and the second law of thermodynamics. The study, published in Physica Scripta, reinterprets a 100-year-old problem and completes the consequences of the principle of increasing entropy in the universe. The new study follows another published in the European Physical Journal Plus in ...

Natural killer (NK) cells are the bodyguards of our immune system. As a first line of defense, they destroy invading pathogens, foreign bodies, and infected cells in early stages, thereby preventing them from spreading. NK cells can circulate within the blood stream (circulatory) or reside in tissue and organs. Having too few NK cells can lead to immune system dysfunction and increase susceptibility to disease. Anxiety disorder and insomnia are two conditions that can disrupt the normal functioning of the immune system. Given these disorders ...

There are plants that are neither green nor sexually reproductive, but precisely because of that they teach us a lot about what it means to be a plant. New research with Kobe University participation took a close look at Balanophora to learn how such non-green, asexual plants evolve and live. “My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” says Kobe University botanist SUETSUGU Kenji. He continues, “For many years I have been fascinated by plants that have abandoned photosynthesis, and I want ...

Naoise Mac Giollabhui, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham, is the lead author of a paper published in American Journal of Psychiatry, “Effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity and anhedonia in depressed individuals with elevated inflammation: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” Richard Liu, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham, is the senior author. Q: How would you summarize your study ...

Artificial intelligence and machine learning could become dramatically more efficient, thanks to a new type of computer component developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Tohoku University, in collaboration with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The technology is based on "probabilistic bits," or "p-bits", which are hardware elements that naturally fluctuate between 0 and 1. Unlike conventional digital bits, which are fixed in value, p-bits can efficiently explore many possibilities. This makes them well-suited for solving problems such as optimization and inference, tasks that ...

Research Background Hydrogen energy is vital for renewable energy storage and "dual carbon" goals, but 95% of global hydrogen production relies on fossil fuel reforming (emitting ~1.3 billion tons of CO₂ yearly), driving demand for green hydrogen via water electrolysis. Anion exchange membrane water electrolysis (AEMWE) combines the advantages of alkaline water electrolysis (noble-metal-free, low cost) and proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (high current density, compact structure), but its industrialization is limited by traditional ...

Background and Motivation The United States debt ceiling—the legal limit on federal borrowing—has been a recurring source of political and economic uncertainty, especially as U.S. national debt has nearly doubled over the past decade. While existing research has explored how broad economic policy uncertainty affects financial markets, little attention has been paid to the specific impact of debt ceiling uncertainty on commodity markets, particularly crude oil. Given oil’s central role in the global economy, understanding ...

University of Sydney marine biologists have identified a devastating combination of coral bleaching and a rare necrotic wasting disease that wiped out large, long-lived corals on the Great Barrier Reef during the record 2024 marine heatwave. The study, led by Professor Maria Byrne and Sydney Horizon Fellow Dr Shawna Foo, found that bleaching triggered by extreme ocean temperatures was followed by an unprecedented outbreak of black band disease that killed massive Goniopora corals, also known as flowerpot or daisy coral, at One Tree Reef on the southern Great Barrier ...

Background Producing fusion energy requires heating plasma to more than one hundred million degrees and confining it stably with strong magnetic fields. However, plasma naturally develops fluctuations known as turbulence, and they carry heat outward and weaken confinement. Understanding how heat and turbulence spread is therefore essential.   Conventional theory has assumed that heat and turbulence move gradually from the center toward the edge. Yet experiments have sometimes shown heat and turbulence spreading much faster, similar to American football players passing a ball quickly across long distances so that a local change influences the entire field almost at once. Clarifying ...

Humans are far closer to meerkats and beavers for levels of exclusive mating than we are to most of our primate cousins, according to a new University of Cambridge study that includes a table ranking monogamy rates in various species of mammal. Previous evolutionary research has used fossil records and anthropological fieldwork to infer human sexual selection. While in other species, researchers have conducted long-term observations of animal societies and used paternity tests to study mating systems. Now, a new approach by Dr Mark Dyble from Cambridge’s Department ...

A remarkably preserved horseshoe crab fossil from North America offers rare insight into some of the earliest known cases of animal disease in a Late Carboniferous swamp – more than 300 million years before the age of dinosaurs. The specimen, uncovered from the mass-burial fossil deposit at the famous Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois in the US, shows more than 100 small pits across the front of its shell, representing one of the earliest documented examples of microbial or algal infection killing groups of these ancient aquatic animals. “Ancient ...

Doctors treating seriously ill patients in an emergency setting may want to give the sedative etomidate, rather than ketamine, while placing a breathing tube, according to a randomized trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The Randomized Trial of Sedative Choice for Intubation (RSI) is the first multicenter trial to demonstrate significant cardiovascular risks of high doses of ketamine (low blood pressure, arrhythmia), side effects that have not been well studied in the past. “We know that patients receive treatments every day in hospitals around the world that have never been evaluated in a rigorous study ...

If quantum computing is going to become an every-day reality, we need better superconducting thin films, the hardware that enables storage and processing of quantum information. Too often, these thin films have impurities or other defects that make them useless for real quantum computer chips. Now, Yuki Sato and colleagues at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) in Japan have discovered a way to make a superconducting thin film from iron telluride, which is surprising because it is not normally superconducting. The fabrication process reduces distortion in the crystal structure, ...