EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2025. Highlights: The study included 100 professional athletes who participated in combat sports. Growing up in under-resourced neighborhoods was linked to thinner areas of the brain—a possible early sign of neurodegeneration. Athletes from highly disadvantaged neighborhoods had smaller brain volumes in areas important for movement and memory, including the thalamus, cerebellum and hippocampus. This link remained even after accounting for factors such as race and ethnicity, income and number of fights. The findings support a broader understanding of brain health—one that includes social and environmental ...

WASHINGTON –   A key discovery about the impact of stroke on a person’s ability to read reveals why a deficit occurs – a finding that presents a possible opportunity for new therapeutic strategies to help people recover one of the most important life skills. It’s long been known that people who experience a stroke can struggle with reading, but researchers weren’t clear exactly why. Now, a new study, led by researchers at Georgetown University, reveals that strokes can rob a person’s ability to use the meaning of words to help them recognize the words when reading.  “We usually ...

A Phase 1 human clinical trial to treat chronic spinal cord injury, the first of its kind in the world, has commenced to test the efficacy and safety of a revolutionary new treatment using nasal cells. The Griffith University trial has been three decades in the making and involves taking olfactory ensheathing cells, which are specialised cells involved in our sense of smell, from the nose as they have numerous therapeutic properties for repairing and regenerating nerves. Lead researcher Professor James St John, Head of Griffith’s Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research and Principal Researcher at the Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics, ...

All information can be found at: https://professional.dkms.org/research-grant Contact: grant@dkms.org   Since 2015, the DKMS Stiftung Leben Spenden has been supporting young international scientists with a doctoral degree in medicine or natural sciences (MD, PhD or equivalent, completed no more than 10 years ago) through the DKMS John Hansen Research Grant. Possible areas of research include transplant immunology, new approaches to treat complications following stem cell transplantation, donor selection, cell production, and novel diagnostic ...

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) have shown that 18FDG-PET, an imaging technique widely used to study other conditions, can also be used to monitor atherosclerosis by measuring cellular metabolism within arterial plaques. The findings, published in Science Translational Medicine, could improve the clinical management of this disease and accelerate the development of new treatments. Atherosclerosis—the underlying cause of most heart attacks and strokes—is a silent disease that progresses over many years without symptoms. The disease is characterized by the accumulation of fatty ...

In a survey study of more than 1,000 U.S. adults who were in committed, heterosexual relationships during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents were more likely than non-parents to report an increased desire for infidelity since before the pandemic, and were also more likely to report having actually cheated on their partner during the pandemic. Dr. Jessica T. Campbell of Indiana University Bloomington, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on August 13, 2025. Prior research has suggested that COVID-19 pandemic ...

Clinicians are more likely to indicate doubt or disbelief in the medical records of Black patients than in those of White patients—a pattern that could contribute to ongoing racial disparities in healthcare. That is the conclusion of a new study, analyzing more than 13 million clinical notes, publishing August 13, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Mary Catherine Beach of Johns Hopkins University, U.S. There is mounting evidence that electronic health records (EHR) contain language reflecting the unconscious biases of clinicians, and that this language may undermine the quality of care that patients receive. In the new study, researchers analyzed ...

Binge gaming was associated with depression, anxiety, and poor sleep, with boys more likely to report binge gaming than girls, in Hong Kong survey of 2,592 children and adolescents Article URL: http://plos.io/4moOETZ Article title: The roles of binge gaming in social, academic and mental health outcomes and gender differences: A school-based survey in Hong Kong Author countries: China Funding: This work was supported by the Health and Medical Research Fund (HMRF) [#16171001] and [#17180791] and General Research Fund (GRF) [#14607319] and [#14609820]. HMRF and GRF had no role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing the ...

North American monarch butterflies use magnetic fields to migrate to and from their overwintering sites - using cold temperatures to tune how they use magnetic fields - per experimental study, which might be disrupted under climate change Article URL: http://plos.io/4fhCt8X Article title: Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) only use magnetic cues for migratory directionality with orientation re-calibrated by coldness Author countries: U.S. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Specially adapted drones successfully use a "tap and go" approach to apply monitoring tags to whales, speeding up the process and avoiding human interference Article URL: http://plos.io/4meypZo Article title: Drone-based application of whale tags: A “tap-and-go” approach for scientific animal-borne investigations Author countries: U.S., Dominica, Canada Funding: This study was financially supported by Project CETI (https://www.projectceti.org) via Dalio Philanthropies (https://www.daliophilanthropies.org), OceanX (https://oceanx.org), Sea Grape ...

Analyzing the micromovements of recovering alcoholics in response to stimuli, along with their reaction times, might help predict if they will relapse following treatment Article URL: http://plos.io/3GSojP3 Article title: Investigating approach/avoidance tendencies in male AUD patients through a gait initiation task: An exploratory posturography study Author countries: Belgium, France, Canada Funding: S. Campanella and X Noel were funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.N.R.S., Belgium) and the Brugmann Foundation (UHC Brugmann, Brussels, Belgium). H Mouras would like ...

A drought lasting 13 years and several others that each lasted over three years may have contributed to the collapse of the Classic Maya civilisation, chemical fingerprints from a stalagmite in a Mexican cave have revealed. A detailed analysis of oxygen isotopes in the stalagmite allowed a team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, to determine rainfall levels for individual wet and dry seasons between 871 and 1021 CE, which overlaps with the Terminal Classic period of Maya civilisation. This is the first ...

Research from scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have shed new light on an age-old question: what makes the human brain unique? The team’s discovery comes from their investigation of human-accelerated regions (HARs) — sections of the human genome that have accumulated an unusually high level of mutations as humans have evolved. There is a lot of scientific interest in HARs, as they are hypothesized to play an essential role in conferring human-specific traits, and ...

Researchers predict that future climatic change is likely to cause declines in reindeer abundances and their distribution at rates rarely seen over the last 21,000 years. Reindeer, also known as caribou in North America, are an Ice Age species that have survived many episodes of Arctic warming. They are uniquely adapted to Arctic environments, where they regulate ecosystems and sustain the livelihoods of many Indigenous Peoples. Despite being one of the most abundant herbivores in the Arctic, climate change has contributed to a loss of nearly two-thirds of their global abundance over the last three decades. An international team of researchers, led by the University of ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Cornell University research offers a number of alternatives to neonicotinoids (neonics) that might work for farmers who grow large-seeded vegetable crops such as snap bean, dry bean and sweet corn. This class of insecticides has devastating ecological impacts, especially to pollinators, beneficial insects and aquatic invertebrates.   “We wanted to find other options for growers to protect their vegetable crops from major pests. The impetus was to identify new products including those in the registration pipeline,” said Brian Nault, professor of entomology. “My program ...

In the selection of specialty coffees, those that score above 80 points in blind tests are free of physical and sensory defects. Greenish-colored beans are known to give the drink an astringent taste, which is described as harsh, pungent, and dry. These beans are therefore discarded, along with broken, black, burnt, pitted, or undersized beans. However, in a study published in the journal Food and Bioprocess Technology, researchers from the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU) in Patos de Minas (state of Minas Gerais, Brazil) conducted a series of fermentations with ripe and ...

Thanks to new advances in cancer care, more and more people are surviving cancer, with a projected total of 22.5 million survivors by 2032. The need for proper cancer survivorship care grows with each new case of remission, but according to new research from the University of Missouri School of Medicine, primary care could fill that need, given enough support.  Cancer survivorship care is complex, particularly after primary treatment has ended. Standard care addresses side effects from the treatment, encourages healthy lifestyle habits, discusses the patient's mental health, monitors cancer recurrence and screens for new cancers.  “Previous ...

Today about 300,000 people nationally living with a spinal cord injury and with respiratory complications being the most common cause of illness and death, according to the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.   But the results of a new study, led by researchers at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine, show promise that a group of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord—called interneurons—can boost breathing when the body faces certain physiological challenges, such as exercise and environmental conditions associated with altitude. The researchers believe their discovery could ...

Public health officials had an unprecedented tool for near-instant, widespread communication during the COVID-19 pandemic and mpox epidemic: social media. Now, one of the first studies of its kind, led by a health policy expert with the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, has found that X (Twitter at the time of the events) brought advantages — as well as disadvantages — in getting the word out. “For the year that the COVID-19 pandemic and mpox outbreak overlapped, we wanted to understand how health authorities in Chicago used X: the nature of the posts, what information was shared, how it was presented to the public and how all of that ...

NEW ORLEANS, August 13, 2025 — Answer ALS, in collaboration with ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI) and Augie’s Quest, today announced plans to launch Champion Insights, an ambitious research initiative designed to uncover critical genetic and metabolic mechanisms that may explain the significantly higher incidence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) among endurance athletes, military service members, and potentially other high-performing populations. ALS is a devastating neurodegenerative disease with no cure, affecting more than 5,000 Americans annually, and ...

By Leah Shaffer The process of biomanufacturing requires engineering microbes to produce useful chemicals and materials from carbon neutral processes. But current biomanufacturing cannot get beyond small production scale unless it can outcompete big oil. The petrochemical industry produces chemicals and material building blocks at a low cost because these processes can run nonstop. However, performing microbial biomanufacturing continuously faces numerous challenges and presents a significant hurdle for economically viable bioproduction. At the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers are ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – August 13, 2025) A computational approach by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists promises to make designing T cell-based immunotherapies that target two cancer-related antigens at the same time far easier and faster. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are a type of immunotherapy that reprograms a patient’s immune cells to target a tumor-specific protein antigen. Targeting just one cell surface antigen often is not enough to eradicate the tumor. Thus, scientists ...

While we know much of the story of how humans evolved, the puzzle is still missing critical pieces. For example, fossil evidence for human evolution between 2 and 3 million years ago is patchy. It’s frustrating because we know that the branch of the hominin family tree that includes humans, or Homo sapiens, appears in the fossil record for the first time in this period.   Today, Homo sapiens (which anthropologists shorten to Homo), is the only hominin species alive. But in the past, Homo wasn’t alone. We coexisted and competed with other branches of the human family tree. Research ...

Researchers have controlled the evolution of E. coli bacteria in the lab in order to dramatically increase the amount of plasmid DNA (pDNA) these modified bacteria produce. The advance is significant because pDNA is an essential – and expensive – ingredient in many gene therapies, and the new technique could drive down the cost of these medical treatments. pDNA are found naturally in many bacteria and differ from other forms of DNA because the double helix shape most people are familiar with forms a circle, rather than the linear shape found in humans and most other organisms. “pDNA is relatively easy to work with in the lab – it’s stable and easy ...

Ultrasound AI, a pioneer in artificial intelligence applications for medical imaging, today announced the publication of groundbreaking findings from its PAIR (Perinatal Artificial Intelligence in Ultrasound) Study in The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine. The study was performed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Kentucky and validates Ultrasound AI’s proprietary technology that more accurately predicts time to delivery using only standard ultrasound images. This technology offers a non-invasive, efficient, and scalable tool ...