Research Highlights: Adults who were light smokers — smoking 2-5 cigarettes daily — were more than twice as likely than those who did not smoke to have serious health problems and had a 60% increased risk of death from any cause, according to a study of more than 320,000 adults followed for 20 years. While quitting smoking greatly reduced smoking-related health risks in the first 10 years, it may take 30 years or more for health risks among people who previously smoked to be on par with people who never smoked. The message: Don’t smoke — and for those who do, quit early in life and strive to ...

Bladder cancer ranks among the ten most common types of cancer worldwide. The main treatment is bladder removal surgery, and despite advances in systemic therapies, recurrence is frequent in the most aggressive forms of the disease. For this reason, researchers have been seeking less invasive and more effective strategies to fight it. A study involving the D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) and published in Biochemical Genetics points to a promising path: by blocking a small molecule called miR-21, bladder cancer cells lose their ability to multiply and spread. This discovery could ...

PHOENIX — Current genetic screening guidelines fail to identify most people with an inherited condition known as familial hypercholesterolemia that can cause dangerously high cholesterol and early heart disease, a Mayo Clinic study found.  The condition often passes silently through families for generations. It is highly treatable, yet people who remain undiagnosed are at greater risk for heart attacks and strokes.  Cardiovascular disease remains the leading ...

Assessing the severity of illness in critically ill patients is a crucial task in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) worldwide. However, current systems are often based on local realities and can fail when applied to international contexts. An article published in the journal Critical Care Science, co-authored by researchers from the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), argues that an international scoring system is urgently needed for intensive care medicine research and for the advancement of global public health. Speaking the Same Language in the ICU Severity scores ...

URBANA, Ill. – Chronic Wasting Disease, a prion protein disease that is fatal in elk, deer, and other cervids, has spread rapidly across the United States since it was first identified in 1967. CWD has now reached Idaho near the Oregon border, causing concern for the Columbian white-tailed deer, a rare subspecies found only in two regions in Oregon. The deer have little genetic protection against CWD, but a new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows that about half of Oregon elk carry a gene that makes them less susceptible to ...

UCLA research finds that fewer than 1 in 4 eligible younger adults completed colorectal cancer screenings after the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) lowered the recommended screening age to 45 from 50. The researchers had suspected that unmet social needs such as insecure access to housing, transportation, or food may have played a role in suboptimal screening rates, but their investigation found no significant differences in testing uptake for this early midlife cohort after controlling for sociodemographic and clinical covariates, leaving the barriers ...

A study published in the Journal of Critical Care, conducted with the participation of the D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), investigated how to measure efficiency in the use of resources for patients with severe community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), an illness contracted outside hospital settings and most common among older adults. Severe CAP represents one of the greatest challenges for ICUs. It requires complex resources, ranging from prolonged hospitalizations to respiratory support, directly affecting hospitals’ ability to deliver quality care. Despite its ...

Growing from a single cell into a complex organism with specialized tissues and organs requires a complex and coordinated process. But the mechanical signals that guide tissue and organ development—cells pushing, pulling, compressing, and swelling against one another and their environment—remain mysterious. Researchers from the University of Rochester’s Department of Biomedical Engineering will shed new light on tissue and organ development by studying how cells interact mechanically with the extracellular matrix, a biological polymer produced by cells that acts like scaffolding for building more complicated structures. Assistant Professor Marisol ...

Cambridge, MA -- Determining the least expensive path for a new subway line underneath a metropolis like New York City is a colossal planning challenge — involving thousands of potential routes through hundreds of city blocks, each with uncertain construction costs. Conventional wisdom suggests extensive field studies across many locations would be needed to determine the costs associated with digging below certain city blocks. Because these studies are costly to conduct, a city planner would want to perform as few as possible while still gathering the most useful data for making an optimal decision. With ...

A new heart monitoring system combining 3D printing and artificial intelligence could transform the way doctors measure and diagnose patients' heart health. Developed at SFU’s School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering, the system features reusable dry 3D-printed electrodes embedded in a soft chest belt – the folding origami-shaped design uses gentle suction to stick to the skin. Carbon-based ink printed on the suction cup replaces electrolyte gel, conducting the heart’s electrical signals through to a wearable ...

Using human cells and cutting-edge technology, the team created a three-dimensional (3D) model that accurately simulates the brain invaded by aggressive cancer. Published in Biofabrication, the study combines frontier science, advanced technology, and international collaboration — while also carrying a personal story: part of the team is formed by a couple of scientists who quite literally bring their work home. Brain metastasis occurs when cancer cells migrate from the original tumor — in this case, the skin — to the brain. This stage of the disease is among the most challenging to treat, and it is associated with over 90% of cancer-related deaths. “When melanoma ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- In an MIT classroom, a professor lectures while students diligently write down notes they will reread later to study and internalize key information ahead of an exam. Humans know how to learn new information, but large language models can’t do this in the same way. Once a fully trained LLM has been deployed, its “brain” is static and can’t permanently adapt itself to new knowledge. This means that if a user tells an LLM something important today, it won’t remember ...

Everyday life on the internet is insecure. Hackers can break into bank accounts or steal digital identities. Driven by AI, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Quantum cryptography promises more effective protection. It makes communication secure against eavesdropping by relying on the laws of quantum physics. However, the path toward a quantum internet is still fraught with technical hurdles. Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have now made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the ‘quantum repeater’. They report their results in Nature Communications ...

Yi Du and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences published an article in the open access journal PLOS Biology on November 18th detailing their findings about a new way our bodies naturally respond to music. Given a steady beat, our eyes blink in synchrony. The neurological process that helps us move with the music is known as auditory-motor synchronization. This describes the way you tap your foot along with the radio or bob your head at a concert, or why some runners listen to songs with a specific number of beats per minute ...

An analysis of data from almost two dozen long-term studies finds that even low-intensity smokers have a substantially higher risk of heart disease and death compared to people who never smoked, even years after they quit. Michael Blaha of the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease, USA, and colleagues report these findings November 18th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine. Previous research has shown that smoking cigarettes increases a person’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease, but the exact relationship between how heavily a ...

Researchers have developed a high-fidelity 13-degree-of-freedom nonlinear model and an intelligent algorithm for wind turbine dynamic analysis. This framework accurately captures complex tower-blade interactions, including often-neglected torsional effects, achieving a remarkable agreement with high-fidelity benchmarks. Published in Smart Construction, this work provides a powerful and efficient tool for structural assessment and future optimization of large-scale wind energy systems. The global push for sustainable energy has cemented wind power's role in the renewable transition. However, designing safe and cost-effective ...

A combination blood stem cell and pancreatic islet cell transplant from an immunologically mismatched donor completely prevented or cured Type 1 diabetes in mice in a study by Stanford Medicine researchers. Type 1 diabetes arises when the immune system mistakenly destroys insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas. None of the animals developed graft-versus-host disease — in which the immune system arising from the donated blood stem cells attacks healthy tissue in the recipient — and the destruction of islet cells by the native host immune system was halted. After the transplants, the animals did not require the use of the immune suppressive drugs ...

Researchers from the Plant Genetics team of the Regional Service for Agri-Food Research and Development of the Principality of Asturias (Serida) have just published a first version of the genome of the Faba Granja Asturiana variety. This advance is key for the genetic improvement and conservation of one of Asturias’ most emblematic legumes. The work has been published in the journal Data in Brief under the title “Chromosome-level dataset from de novo assembly of a Fabada common bean genotype using Illumina and PacBio ...

Gestational diabetes can cause a multitude of complications in the offspring, but to date, the reasons are incompletely understood. A new study, exploring a foundational step in the process of building proteins from genetic material, called splicing, reveals that this process is affected, altering how the placenta reads and processes genetic instructions. Researchers found that in pregnancies affected by gestational diabetes, hundreds of genetic messages are assembled incorrectly, potentially disrupting how the placenta functions. ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS Among 11,600 youth in Massachusetts who started buprenorphine, only 1 in 4 maintained high adherence for a full year Those who remained adherent for 12 months had almost half the risk of overdose, and fewer emergency department visits and hospitalizations, compared with those who discontinued early Findings suggest that longer, more consistent treatment could be lifesaving for youth amid the ongoing fentanyl crisis   New research from Mass General Brigham finds that adolescents and young adults who ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18, 2025 — The average global temperature has risen by 1.5 C since the pre-industrial era due to climate change, and it is poised to continue increasing. In response, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has developed the Global Warming Potential (GWP) metric, a unit of measurement that compares a specific gas’s contribution to climate change to that of carbon dioxide. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is particularly bad, with a GWP about 17,000 times higher than carbon dioxide. But NF3 is critical in the semiconductor industry for etching and cleaning, and its use has increased more than twentyfold over the past 30 years. Though NF3 is often viewed as ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants, the 50% incentive, automatic enrollment in the Eat Well, Be Well program, the first state-level SNAP fruit and vegetable incentive program launched in Rhode Island, was not associated with significant relative changes in fruit and vegetable intake, but was associated with benefits among participants already consuming more fruits and vegetables. Enhanced implementation, including broader retail ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18, 2025 — Aggressive cancer cells are masters of movement. When they spread through the body, they cause metastasis, which significantly reduces a person’s chance of survival. For this spreading to take place, they can switch between different cell states — behaviors of cells — that move with different strategies. A previous study revealed two specific metastatic cancer lines — MV3 (melanoma) and HT1080 (fibrosarcoma) — are capable of making a similar switch when the gaps in tissue are very tight. However, the study found that only one of the cell lines did so by switching motility modes in response ...

Our body’s “blood factory” consists of specialized tissue made up of bone cells, blood vessels, nerves and other cell types. Now, researchers have succeeded for the first time in recreating this cellular complexity in the laboratory using only human cells. The novel system could reduce the need for animal experiments for many applications. The bone marrow usually works quietly in the background. It only comes into focus when something goes wrong, such as in blood cancers. In these cases, understanding exactly how blood production in our body works, and how this process fails, becomes critical. Typically, bone marrow research relies heavily ...

Professor Gideon Wasserberg at UNC Greensboro has been awarded a prestigious $3.7 million National Institutes of Health R01 grant to advance his research on controlling sand flies, the vectors of the parasitic disease leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis affects more than 1 million people each year and is found in approximately 90 countries in tropical and arid regions of the world, putting approximately 1 billion people at risk. The most common form, cutaneous leishmaniasis, typically causes skin ulcers, which can last months or even years and leave significant scars. The more serious visceral form of the disease, which attacks internal organs, often affects children ...