While all people are innately driven to find meaning in their lives, this subconscious desire pulls some people to conspiracy theories and dangerous belief systems. After an extensive review of psychological research, renowned social psychologist Arie Kruglanski and journalist Dan Raviv show how people’s need for ‘significance’ propels our actions, governs our feelings, and dominates our thoughts in their new book The Quest for Significance. “Experts on human motivation contend that all people share the same set of basic needs, and everything people do, try to attain, or avoid is in the service of satisfying one or more of those basic needs,” ...

At a time when cancer research is experiencing uncertainty and setbacks, the Colorectal Cancer Alliance (Alliance) is strengthening its commitment to its Project Cure CRC initiative because tomorrow can’t wait. Project Cure CRC funds cutting-edge colorectal cancer (CRC) research and aims to improve patient outcomes through its dynamic patient navigation portal, BlueHQ.org. As the leading nonprofit dedicated to ending the disease, the Alliance awarded three new grants from Project Cure CRC and is presenting two poster sessions at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2025, April 25-30, in Chicago, IL. To date, the total Project Cure ...

Body appreciation differs between Middle-Eastern and Western societies, a new international study can reveal, highlighting how cultural and family influences shape body image and eating behaviours in young women. Led by Flinders University and published in the journal Body Image, the study surveyed over 850 women aged 18–25 in Australia and Lebanon, examining the roles that mothers and sisters play in shaping body dissatisfaction, body appreciation, and eating patterns. Lead author, registered psychologist and PhD candidate Melanie ...

QUT researchers have identified a new material which could be used as a flexible semiconductor in wearable devices by using a technique that focuses on the manipulation of spaces between atoms in crystals. In a study published in the prestigious journal Nature Communication (http://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58104-x), the researchers used “vacancy engineering” to enhance the ability of an AgCu(Te, Se, S) semiconductor, which is an alloy made up of silver, copper, tellurium, selenium and sulphur, to convert body ...

GPs may soon be able to identify patients with an increased risk of lung cancer up to 4 months earlier than is currently the case. The GP should be able to simply identify patients during a consultation with an algorithm created by researchers at Amsterdam UMC based on the data of more than half a million patients. The results of the study were published today in the British Journal of General Practice. [doi-link: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2023.0489]  The algorithm looks at all medical information from general ...

Toronto, ON, April 22, 2025 – Research from ICES and Unity Health Toronto shows that safer opioid supply programs and methadone both reduce opioid overdoses, healthcare utilization, and costs.  Safer opioid supply (SOS) programs provide pharmaceutical-grade opioids such as hydromorphone to people struggling with opioid use disorder. Prescribed opioid medications are a safer alternative to drugs found in the unregulated drug supply due to the potency and unpredictability of that supply.  “This is the first population-based study to compare SOS programs with opioid agonist treatment, and to explore ...

Research Highlights A small study found that fatty buildup in the blood vessels of the neck (carotid arteries) may contain 50 times or more micronanoplastics — minuscule bits of plastic — compared to arteries free of plaque buildup. Plaque, the fatty deposits that can narrow the carotid artery, may cause a stroke.    People unknowingly eat and drink micronanoplastics from plastic waste broken down and collected in the soil and water supply. Researchers say there is currently no effective way to prevent exposure to micronanoplastics. Note: The study featured in this news release is a research abstract. Abstracts presented at the American ...

ROCKVILLE, MD-Advances in evidence-based obesity medications and treatment options are critical for the millions of individuals living with the chronic disease. The Obesity Society is encouraged by the development of new options that are effective, safe, and convenient for consumers.  Last week, results released for the ACHIEVE-1 Phase 3 clinical trial suggest that a new medication, Orforglipron, an oral small molecule glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, taken once daily led to an average weight loss of 7.9% in individuals with diabetes and ...

Researchers at Tulane University have identified a potential new way to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a deadly and currently incurable lung disease that affects more than 3 million people worldwide. IPF is rapidly progressive and causes scarring in the lungs, making it difficult to breathe. Approximately 50% of patients die within three years of diagnosis, and current treatments can only slow the disease — not stop or reverse it.  In a study published in the Journal ...

Researchers at UCLA Health are launching the first clinical trial to test whether a wearable device that delivers gentle nerve stimulation during sleep could ease ADHD symptoms in children with prenatal alcohol exposure. Children exposed to alcohol in the womb have a heightened risk of developing ADHD-like symptoms including hyperactivity, impulsivity and executive function deficits such as difficulty paying attention, remembering, and organizing their behavior. Prenatal alcohol exposure affects about 5% of children in the U.S. with the majority developing these symptoms. ...

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and collaborating institutions reveal in Nature Cell Biology a strategy that helps medulloblastoma, the most prevalent malignant brain tumor in children, spread and grow on the leptomeninges, the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. They discovered a novel line of communication between metastatic medulloblastoma and leptomeningeal fibroblasts that mediates recruitment and reprogramming of the latter to support tumor growth. The findings suggest that disrupting this communication offers a potential opportunity to treat this devastating ...

“Our results add another chapter to the emerging field of skyrmion research,” proclaims Prof. Harald Giessen, head of the Fourth Physics Institute at the University of Stuttgart, whose group achieved this breakthrough. The team demonstrated the existence of “skyrmion bags” of light on the surface of a metal layer. A better understanding of physical phenomena Skyrmions are a mathematical description of vortex-like structures that help researchers better understand fundamental physical relationships. In recent years, this theoretical ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — One of the challenges of fighting pancreatic cancer is finding ways to penetrate the organ’s dense tissue to define the margins between malignant and normal tissue. A new study uses DNA origami structures to selectively deliver fluorescent imaging agents to pancreatic cancer cells without affecting normal cells. The study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mechanical science and engineering professor Bumsoo Han and professor Jong Hyun Choi at Purdue University, found that specially engineered DNA origami structures carrying imaging dye packets can specifically target human KRAS mutant ...

This tool is specifically designed to assess how well your initiative aligns with the EU Mission: A Soil Deal for Europe (Mission Soil) criteria for Soil Living Labs and Lighthouses, as further defined by the PREPSOIL taxonomy.  Should your initiative meet the necessary criteria, you will be invited to participate in a more detailed assessment developed by the SOILL-Startup project. This next phase will provide an opportunity to join a network of 100 Soil Living Labs and ...

Political and social crisis in Lebanon has forced parents to seek unregulated “shadow” education for their children, a new study shows. The government’s ongoing neglect of public education is intensifying social inequality, experts have warned. The current sectarian power-sharing arrangement has led to a diminished focus on schools, fostering privatization. The study shows how upheavals in Lebanon have exacerbated educational challenges for families across all socioeconomic groups, leading to an increasing reliance on the unregulated shadow education sector, particularly private ...

Bethesda, MD (April 22, 2025) — The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) is proud to announce the selection of 74 recipients to receive $2.4 million in research funding through the annual AGA Research Foundation Awards Program. AGA also announces today the addition of 10 pilot grants, totaling $400,000 in funding, to the 2026 awards portfolio to ensure that scientific discovery continues despite federal funding cuts. “Since we established the AGA Research Foundation in 1984, AGA has been unwavering in the commitment to supporting ...

LA JOLLA, CA—A preclinical study from scientists at Scripps Research finds that a drug already FDA-approved for treating inflammatory conditions may help reduce both alcohol intake and pain sensitivity—two issues that commonly co-occur with alcohol use disorder (AUD). The results, published in JCI Insight on April 22, 2025, suggest that the drug apremilast—a phosphodiesterase-4 (PDE4) inhibitor, or a compound that blocks an enzyme involved in inflammation—could be repurposed as a dual-acting therapy for AUD, particularly in individuals who have pain during and after alcohol use. AUD ...

Researchers led by Keigo Morita and Shinya Kuroda of the University of Tokyo have revealed a temporal disruption in the metabolism of obese mice when adapting to starvation despite no significant structural disruptions in the molecular network. This is a breakthrough discovery as research including the temporal dimension in biology has been notoriously laborious and extracting systematic insight from big data has been difficult. Thus, this study paves the way for further research into more general metabolic processes, such as food intake and disease progression. The findings were published in the journal Science Signaling. Living beings need to continuously extract energy from “food” ...

Expecting feedback from an avatar compared to a real human facilitates risk-taking behavior in a gambling task, and a brain region called the amygdala is central to this facilitation, according to a study published April 22nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Toshiko Tanaka and Masahiko Haruno from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan. In virtual-reality environments, individuals can adopt various forms of avatars, projecting their behaviors into a virtual realm where their interaction partners also appear as avatars. With this shift in ...

Highlights - Humans take more risks when interacting with facial expressions shown on avatars rather than real human faces. - This shift in risk-taking behavior is linked to activity in the amygdala. - The findings offer new insights into both the advantages and the cautionary aspects of communication via avatars.   Abstract A research team led by Dr. TANAKA Toshiko and Dr. HARUNO Masahiko at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki Ph.D.), investigated how avatar-mediated communication affects human decision-making. They ...

Monday May 26, 2025, key stakeholders from across Europe will gather in Brussels at the Committee of the Regions for the PREPSOIL Final Event, marking a major step in advancing soil  health policies and practices. The event will bring together policy-makers, researchers, and civil society representatives to discuss how the objectives of the Mission Soil and the proposed Soil  Monitoring Law may be supported and implemented at regional and local scale across EU Member States and the role that regional and local actors can play in promoting ...

Can agriculture and solar energy work together instead of competing? A study led by Maddalena Curioni, Nikolas Galli, Giampaolo Manzolini and Maria Cristina Rulli, researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Energy at the Politecnico di Milano, sheds new light on the potential of agrivoltaics. Published in the prestigious journal Earth’s Future, the paper analyses how the coexistence of photovoltaic panels and agricultural crops can help solve the global conflict over land use. With the growing demand for renewable energy and the need to produce increasing amounts of food, the pressure on arable land is intensifying. ...

In face-to-face conversations, speakers use hand movements to signal meaning. But do listeners actually use these gestures to predict what someone might say next? In a study using virtual avatars, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen show that listeners used the avatar’s gestures to predict upcoming speech. Both behavioural and EEG data indicated that hand gestures facilitate language processing, illustrating the multimodal nature of human communication. People might wiggle their fingers when they talk about typing, depicting a ‘typing’ movement. Seeing meaningful hand movements—also called iconic gestures—helps ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A powerful clinical artificial intelligence tool developed by University at Buffalo biomedical informatics researchers has demonstrated remarkable accuracy on all three parts of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (Step exams), according to a paper published today (April 22) in JAMA Network Open. Achieving higher scores on the USMLE than most physicians and all other AI tools so far, Semantic Clinical Artificial Intelligence (SCAI, pronounced “Sky”) has the potential to become a critical partner for ...

Adolescents who sleep for longer – and from an earlier bedtime – than their peers tend to have improved brain function and perform better at cognitive tests, researchers from the UK and China have shown. But the study of adolescents in the US also showed that even those with better sleeping habits were not reaching the amount of sleep recommended for their age group. Sleep plays an important role in helping our bodies function. It is thought that while we are asleep, toxins that have built up in our brains are cleared out, and brain connections are consolidated and pruned, enhancing memory, learning, and problem-solving skills. Sleep has also been shown to boost our immune ...