EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2026 In former college athletes, more concussions associated with worse brain health Athletes assessed within five years of college graduation Highlights: Former college athletes with three or more concussions had slightly worse physical, mental, behavioral and cognitive health five years after graduation compared to those with no concussions. The study included 3,910 former college athletes from 20 sports, nearly half of whom were women. A majority competed at NCAA Division 1 schools. Athletes were evaluated at the start of their college sports careers and again within five years of graduation. ...

In a new analysis, racial and ethnic disparities in fatal shootings of U.S. residents by police varied widely between states. Roland Neil of the RAND Corporation in California, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on March 11, 2026. In the U.S., police officers fatally shoot about 1,000 people every year. Overall, Black U.S. residents are about twice as likely to die by police shooting than Hispanic U.S. residents, and about three times as likely to die by police shooting than White U.S. residents. However, few studies have examined the extent to which these racial/ethnic disparities differ between different ...

Gender differences in poverty rates in the United States may be associated with women’s differing circumstances — particularly the burden of dependent children — rather than inherent to gender itself, according to a new study published March 11, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Patti Fisher of Virginia Tech, U.S. Women in the United States face higher rates of poverty than men, and their access to economic resources and opportunities is more limited. While factors such as employment, education, and health status are known to influence poverty risk, it has been unclear whether men and women are affected differently by these factors, ...

3D-printed robotic rattlesnake triggers an avoidance response in zoo animals, especially species which share their distribution with rattlers in nature Article URL: https://plos.io/4bdJMhx Article title: The multimodal display of rattlesnakes is a deterring signal that works best with sympatric species Author countries: U.S. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, best known as the delivery vehicle for the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines received by billions of people, are now at the center of a much larger medical revolution. Researchers are racing to use them to ferry therapeutic mRNA into cells for cancer therapies and treatments for inflammatory diseases, as well as delivering CRISPR constructs that can correct disease-causing gene mutations. But a stubborn problem has slowed progress on all of these fronts. For LNPs to work therapeutically, they must transfer their cargo into cells by fusing with cell membranes, and they ...

**EMBARGOED UNTIL MARCH 11 AT 2 P.M. ET** Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have developed a simplified version of biodegradable nanoparticles that can “educate” the immune system to find and destroy disease-causing cells throughout the body. The study, they say, advances the field of engineering immune cells within a patient’s own body to combat cancers and autoimmune diseases including lupus, among other conditions. Engineered immune cells have been successfully used to treat an array of blood cancers, using CAR-T cells, or chimeric antigen receptor T cells. The treatment ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Early pregnancy depends on a remarkable act of coordination. Before the placenta can nourish a growing fetus, the embryo must securely “land” and connect with the mother’s blood supply — a process guided by a specialized group of immune cells called uterine natural killer cells, or uNK cells. A new peer-reviewed study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, supported by the National Institutes of Health and published today in Science Translational Medicine, has uncovered a critical role in successful pregnancies for an immune switch ...

Google Earth’ for human organs made available online An international team of scientists and clinicians has announced, in Science Advances, the launch of a new open-access 3D portal that allows users to explore intact human organs in unprecedented detail — from the whole organ down to individual cells locally. The Human Organ Atlas, created using a powerful synchrotron imaging method, brings together some of the most detailed 3D images of human organs ever produced. It enables scientists, doctors, educators, students and the wider public to interactively “fly through” organs ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Artificial intelligence-powered writing tools such as autocomplete suggestions can definitely change the way people express themselves, but can they also change how they think? Cornell Tech researchers think so. In two large-scale experiments, participants were exposed to a biased AI writing assistant that provided autocomplete suggestions as they wrote about societal issues like whether the death penalty should be abolished or whether fracking should be allowed. Using pre- and post-experiment surveys, the researchers found that participants ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In April 2019, a marine heat wave struck a coral reef on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia, killing much of the coral and the beneficial algae that colonized it. This “bleaching” event reduced live coral populations on the reef from about 75% beforehand to less than 17% a year later and led to a series of unexpected changes that have thwarted the reef’s recovery. A long-term study of the area is challenging scientists’ understanding of the cycles of destruction and repair that can occur on a coral ...

EL PASO, Texas (March 11, 2026) – A team of researchers from The University of Texas at El Paso has uncovered new evidence explaining why the rattlesnake’s rattle – one of nature’s most iconic warning signals – has persisted and proven so effective across millions of years. The study, which was published in the journal PLOS One, shows that rattling serves as a potent deterrent for a wide range of animals and is especially effective among species that naturally coexist with rattlesnakes. Led by Océane Da Cunha, Ph.D., lecturer and graduate student coordinator in UTEP’s College of Science, the research team engineered ...

Chimpanzees have a reputation for being aggressive, while bonobos are often seen as their peaceful counterparts. This contrast has frequently been used to explain different sides of human nature. However, a new study by Utrecht University behavioural biologists Emile Bryon, Edwin van Leeuwen, Tom Roth and international colleagues shows that, in zoos, chimpanzees are not more aggressive than bonobos. The study was published today in the scientific journal Science Advances. The team of researchers compared the occurrence ...

An enigmatic type of circulating tumor cell called a dual-positive (DP) cell is associated with shorter survival time in patients with advanced breast cancer, according to a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. The findings highlight the potential importance of these under-studied cells in breast cancer progression. Circulating tumors cells are breakaway tumor cells that can seed secondary tumors (metastases) and are commonly detected in the blood of patients with cancer. Dual-positive ...

New research could help engineer crops that recover after extreme weather events Plants pause their growth during stress, then press play when conditions improve, helping them recover and live on to produce food, according to a new study. Published today in New Phytologist UBC researchers have pinpointed the genes and pathways responsible for recovery from the environmental stress of cold snaps in winter or overloads of salt when coastal fields flood. “With a changing climate and extreme weather events becoming more frequent, the work could help create climate resilient crops, where genetically ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (3/11/2026) —In a new study published in NatureExternal link that opens in the same window, University of Minnesota researchers found that the Marburg virus, one of the world’s deadliest pathogens with an average 73% fatality rate, is unusually efficient at getting inside human cells. They also showed that the virus’s entry protein contains structural features that explain this efficiency and point to a strategy for blocking infection. The researchers designed a tightly controlled system that enables a fair comparison of the entry proteins of Marburg and its relative Ebola. Using ...

A number of autonomous ferries will be deployed on Norwegian routes, the first as early as this autumn. They are intended to be operated with minimal human intervention. At the same time, captains and mates on Norwegian ships are concerned about the technical safety of autonomous ships.  "Seafarers feel strongly that people should continue to work on board, maintaining oversight and control so that unforeseen events can be managed properly,” said PhD research fellow  Asbjørn Lein Aalberg. He is conducting research on seafarers' trust in autonomous vessels at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU's) Department of Industrial ...

“MYC amplification is associated with reduced tumor immunogenicity as assessed by the recovery of IR recombination reads from prostate cancer genomics files.” BUFFALO, NY — March 11, 2026 — A new research paper was published in Volume 13 of Oncoscience on February 7, 2026, titled “Reduced immunogenicity of MYC amplified, metastatic prostate cancer.” Led by Sunny Kahlon of the Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida — with corresponding author George Blanck (also affiliated ...

We become forgetful as we age. This is often seen as a universal truth, but in fact it is far from universal: some people remain incredibly sharp at 100 years old, while others experience memory loss starting in middle age.  While it seems logical that age-related cognitive decline would be blamed on brain aging and degeneration (which, like anything in the brain, is notoriously hard to treat), there’s some evidence that processes elsewhere in the body influence the brain’s ability to form memories. In particular, neuronal pathways that sense the status of other organs in the body can influence cognitive functions in the brain. Other studies ...

The sight of a delectable plate of lasagna or the aroma of a holiday ham are sure to get hungry bellies rumbling in anticipation of a feast to come. But although we’ve all experienced the sensation of “eating” with our eyes and noses before food meets mouth, much less is known about the information superhighway, known as the vagus nerve, that sends signals in the opposite direction — from your gut straight to your brain. These signals relay more than just what you’ve eaten ...

CINCINNATI—A multi-center study led by researchers at Cincinnati Children’s sheds surprising new light on why some newborns become severely ill from  Escherichia coli infection, but others do not. Turns out that most babies are immune because of germ-fighting antibodies they receive from their moms. The study, published March 11, 2026, in the prestigious journal Nature, dove into new depths to explore why only some babies develop severe infection to common bacteria. E. coli is a common bacteria that lives in the intestines of ...

How One Flu Virus Can Hamper the Immune Response to Another Prior exposure to one strain of influenza virus may weaken children’s ability to mount an effective antibody response against their subsequent exposure to a different flu strain, according to a study led by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. The analysis of the pediatric response to H3N2 and H1N1 influenza A viruses, two of the most common causes of flu, provides insight into the concept of “immune imprinting,” and supports ...

New research published today in Nature finds that tumor cells within supratentorial ependymomas (SE) – an aggressive childhood brain cancer – cluster into distinct tumor cell populations. Much like a neighborhood in your hometown, each cell subtype within these “communities” has a specific (and previously unappreciated) role to play. Understanding how SE tumor cells form neighborhoods and the function of each cell type could help better predict how these tumor cell subtypes will respond to treatment. The research team, led by Mariella Filbin, MD, PhD, Co-Director of the Brain Tumor Center at Dana Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer ...

Genome editing-based therapies typically aim to treat disease by correcting underlying genetic mutations in patient’s cells. However, most genetic disorders are caused by dozens or even thousands of unique mutations spread across a gene; this diversity results in challenges of scale when it comes to developing customized therapies for many individuals. A more universal strategy could involve the precise insertion of an entire copy of a healthy gene into a specific location in the genome, which could, in principle, provide a single, widely applicable treatment for all patients irrespective of their mutation ...

Astronomers have for the first time seen the birth of a magnetar — a highly magnetized, spinning neutron star — and confirmed that it’s the power source behind some of the brightest exploding stars in the cosmos. The finding corroborates a theory proposed by a UC Berkeley physicist 16 years ago and establishes a new phenomenon in exploding stars: supernovae with a “chirp” in their light curve that is caused by general relativity. A paper describing the phenomenon was published today ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Photonic chips use light to process data instead of electricity, enabling faster communication speeds and greater bandwidth. Most of that light typically stays on the chip, trapped in optical wires, and is difficult to transmit to the outside world in an efficient manner. If a lot of light could be rapidly and precisely beamed off the chip, free from the confines of the wiring, it could open the door to higher-resolution displays, smaller Lidar systems, more precise 3D printers, or larger-scale quantum computers. Now, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new class ...