In May 2025, the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer published a pioneering study entitled “NeoPred: dual-phase CT AI forecasts pathologic response to neoadjuvant chemo-immunotherapy in NSCLC”, led by Professor Jianxing He’s team from the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University / National Center for Respiratory Medicine. The study introduces NeoPred, a multimodal artificial intelligence model that combines dual-phase CT scans (pre-treatment and pre-surgery) and clinical features ...

Astronomers have uncovered a vast cloud of energetic particles — a ‘mini halo’ —  surrounding one of the most distant galaxy clusters ever observed, marking a major step forward in understanding the hidden forces that shape the cosmos. The mini-halo is at a distance so great that it takes light 10 billion years to reach Earth, making it the most distant ever found, doubling the previous distance known to science.   The discovery demonstrates that entire galaxy clusters, among the largest ...

Attention scan: How our minds shift focus in dynamic settings    A person’s capacity for attention has a profound impact on what they see, dictating which details they glean from the world around them. As they walk down a busy street, the focus of their attention may shift to a compelling new billboard advertisement, or a shiny Lamborghini parked on the curb.    Attention, however, can be fleeting. When that person reaches a busy intersection, for instance, details of the billboard or sportscar disappear. The person’s attention instead ...

They’re a common office menace: the nosy coworker. They read over shoulders, loiter as friends chitchat, ask uncomfortable personal questions. It can be tempting to duck for cover whenever you see them heading your way. But separating the prying and obtrusive from the merely curious and concerned can be challenging. What one person considers nosy, another might think is friendly; some people are open books, others like to keep their personal lives private. Those blurry lines aren’t just issues for the 9-to-5 crowd to navigate, they’ve been a thorny problem for researchers ...

On average, four planes crash each day in the United States with almost all of aircraft involved being single-engine plans. One in five of those crashes were caused by inflight loss of control, defined by the Federal Aviation Administration as “unintended departure of an aircraft from controlled flight.” Nearly half of accidents caused by inflight loss of control are fatal. New research from a University of Arkansas mechanical engineering assistant professor, Neelakshi Majumdar, investigates why inflight loss of control occurs in general aviation, which includes all civil flights except for commercial transports of people or cargo, and how pilots can prevent ...

A new study from the University of Michigan Rogel Health Cancer Center, published in Science, sheds light on how two distinct classes of mutations in the FOXA1 gene—commonly altered in prostate cancer—drive tumor initiation formation and therapeutic resistance. FOXA1, a key transcription factor that facilitates androgen receptor binding to DNA, is mutated in 10–40% of hormone-dependent prostate cancers. While common, the exact ways these mutations alter cancer cells have remained elusive—until now. Rogel researchers, including Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., S.P. ...

As sport-related concussions continue to spark global concern, researchers at the University of South Australia (UniSA) are turning their attention to a largely overlooked group – non-professional athletes – calling for more rigorous return-to-play assessments to protect everyday players. In a new study, researchers suggest that current return-to-play protocols for semi-elite and community sport athletes might not be enough to ensure the safety of players following a concussion.   A ...

It has been known for several years that abnormal chromosome numbers lead to protein imbalances in the affected cells. Researchers at RPTU have now investigated the detailed effects of such imbalances. Surprisingly, they found that imbalanced proteome changes impair mitochondrial function. This, in turn, could be relevant for the drug treatment of cancer. The results are published in the journal Nature Communications. Every healthy human cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, which must be duplicated and ...

Irvine, Calif., June 26, 2025 – By examining squid skin cells three-dimensionally, a University of California, Irvine-led team has unveiled the structures responsible for the creatures’ ability to dynamically change their appearance from transparent to arbitrarily colored states. The group of scientists, which included collaborators from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, found that in vibrantly colored squid mantle tissues, light-manipulating cells called iridophores or iridocytes contain stacked and winding columns of platelets from a protein called reflectin, with the columns functioning as Bragg ...

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 13.5% of American households experienced food insecurity at some time during 2023. That means 18 million families didn’t have enough to meet their needs and often didn’t know where the next meal would come from. In her past research, Binghamton University, State University of New York Associate Professor Lina Begdache, PhD ’08, has explored how our diets affect our mental health and overall moods. But how does a lack of nutrition change our resilience, stress mindset and level of mental distress, particularly across age and gender? In a recent paper published in Health Science Reports, Begdache, ...

A team of Canadian and French researchers has confirmed that northern Quebec is home to the oldest known rocks on Earth, dating back 4.16 billion years. Under the leadership of Jonathan O’Neil, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, this major discovery is the fruit of a collaboration involving Christian Sole (who completed a master’s at the University of Ottawa in 2021), Hanika Rizo, (a professor at Carleton University), Jean-Louis Paquette (a now-deceased researcher ...

A new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School has found that damage to a specific region of the brain may contribute to criminal or violent behavior. The study, titled “White matter disconnection in acquired criminality”, was published recently in Molecular Psychiatry. The investigation analyzed brain scans from individuals who began committing crimes after sustaining brain injuries from strokes, tumors or traumatic brain injury. The study compared these 17 cases to brain scans from 706 individuals with other neurological ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – When an extreme weather event occurs, the probability or risk of other events can often increase, leading to what researchers call “cascading” hazards.  For example, the danger of landslides or debris flows following wildfires in California, recent flash floods in West Virginia or when historic flooding occurred in North Carolina as Hurricane Helene made its way inland. Such occurrences leave lasting imprints on the landscape that can prime the Earth’s surface for subsequent events.  As part of a collaboration by dozens of researchers across the country, a new paper published in Science, "Cascading land surface ...

“Sleeping on it,” especially dropping deeper than a doze, might help people gain insight into certain kinds of tasks, according to a study published June 26th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Anika Löwe, Marit Petzka, Maria Tzegka and Nicolas Schuck from the Universität Hamburg, Germany, and colleagues. Humans sometimes find that they have a sudden “eureka” moment on a problem they’ve been working on, producing sudden insight or breakthroughs. Scientists have yet to have their ...

The Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt (NGB) – a complex geological sequence in northeastern Canada – harbors surviving fragments of Earth’s oldest crust, dating back to ~4.16 billion years old, according to a new study. The preservation of Hadean rocks on Earth’s surface could provide valuable insights into the planet’s earliest times. Much about Earth’s earliest geologic history remains poorly understood due to the rarity of Hadean-age (>4.03 billion-year-old) rocks and minerals. These ancient materials are typically ...

Using an innovative “digital fossil-mining” approach, researchers have uncovered hundreds of previously hidden fossil squid beaks, revealing a record that squids originated and became ecologically dominant roughly 100 million years ago – well before the end-Cretaceous extinction. Squids are the most diverse and globally distributed group of marine cephalopods in the modern ocean, where they play a vital role in ocean ecosystems as both predators and prey. Their evolutionary success is widely considered to be related ...

In a Review, Brian Yanites and colleagues argue the need for a unified, interdisciplinary approach to studying cascading land surface hazards. Earth’s surface is continually shaped by a range of natural processes, from slow erosion to sudden disasters like earthquakes and floods. Notably, one hazardous event can trigger a series of subsequent, interrelated disasters, or ”cascading hazards,” that unfold over timescales ranging from seconds to centuries. However, despite their growing impact on human populations, a comprehensive mechanistic ...

By flipping an evolutionarily disabled genetic switch involved in Vitamin A metabolism, researchers have enabled ear tissue regeneration in mice. Unlike some animals such as fish and salamanders, mammals have limited capacity to regenerate damaged tissues or organs fully. A variety of strategies have been explored to trigger regeneration in mammals, such as stem cell therapies, gene editing, and electrical stimulation. While these approaches have shown promise, none have fully restored organ function. This is likely ...

Squids first appeared about 100 million years ago and quickly rose to become dominant predators in the ancient oceans, according to a new study published in the journal Science. A team of researchers from Hokkaido University developed an advanced fossil discovery technique that completely digitizes rocks with all embedded fossils in complete 3D form. It allowed them to identify one thousand fossilized cephalopod beaks hidden inside Late Cretaceous rocks from Japan. Among these small and fragile beaks were 263 squid specimens including about 40 different species that had never been seen before. Squids are rarely preserved as fossils because they don’t have hard shells. ...

Public attitudes around solar geoengineering become less politically partisan with more familiarity, suggesting that increasing public awareness of the technology could foster bipartisan engagement. ### Article URL: https://plos.io/4elOWIw Article Title: Political ideology and views toward solar geoengineering in the United States Author Countries: United Kingdom, United States Funding: RMA and BM's work is supported by Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. DE's work on this ...

Four discrete cross-sectional surveys of US adults from 2020-2024 reveal US adults reporting high confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dropped from 82 percent in February 2020 to a low of 56 percent in June 2022, according to a study published June 26, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Amyn A. Malik and colleagues from UT Southwestern Medical Center, United States. Surveys have shown the US public’s trust in public health entities has decreased since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in 2020. This study is ...

Extreme droughts in LMICs are associated with increased sexual violence against girls and young women, emphasizing how climate change can indirectly exacerbate social vulnerabilities. ### Article URL: https://plos.io/4liX0Me   Article Title: Extreme drought and sexual violence against adolescent girls and young women: A multi-country population-based study  Author Countries: Australia, France, Indonesia, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, United States Funding: Funding from the Healthy Environments and ...

Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake in motion during the act of releasing tectonic pressure on a major fault zone at the bottom of the ocean. The slow earthquake was recorded spreading along the tsunami-generating portion of the fault off the coast of Japan, behaving like a tectonic shock absorber. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin described the event as the slow unzipping of the fault line between two of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Their results were published in Science. “It's like a ripple moving across the plate interface,” said Josh Edgington, who conducted the work as a doctoral student ...

The transition to agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle is one of the great turning points in human history. Yet how this Neolithic way of life spread from the Fertile Crescent across Anatolia and into the Aegean has been hotly debated. A Turkish-Swiss team offers important new insights, by combining archaeology and genetics in an innovative way. How open are people to experimenting with new ways of life? Did farming spread from its origins in Anatolia to neighboring regions by farmers migrating? Or ...

Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Queen Mary University of London have discovered that a new generation of ash trees, growing naturally in woodland, exhibits greater resistance to the disease compared to older trees. They find that natural selection is acting upon thousands of locations within the ash tree DNA, driving the evolution of resistance. The study, published in Science, offers renewed hope for the future of ash trees in the British landscape and provides compelling evidence for a long-standing prediction of Darwinian theory. Ash dieback, caused by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, arrived in Britain in 2012, prompting an emergency COBRA meeting. The ...