Research announcements from universities, hospitals and scientific institutions. Explore the stories, people and discoveries behind the headlines.
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A new review in the Chinese Journal of Catalysis synthesizes recent advances in single-atom catalysts for selective hydrogenation, showing how isolated metal sites on supports achieve nearly 100% atomic utilization and precise selectivity - with implications for pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, and green chemistry.
Read the releaseFluorescence polarization experiments show that amyloid beta binds to microtubules with affinity comparable to tau, and competitive binding assays confirm they share overlapping binding sites - suggesting that amyloid beta displaces tau from neuronal scaffolding, potentially driving Alzheimer's pathology.
Read the releaseAmong 6,814 US adults tracked over years, those eating 9+ daily servings of ultra-processed foods were 67% more likely to suffer a major cardiac event than those eating about one serving - with a 6.1% per-serving risk increase among Black Americans versus 3.2% among non-Black participants.
Read the releaseResearchers found that pulse pressure-heart rate index and estimated pulse wave velocity - both calculable from routine blood pressure and heart rate readings - independently predicted dementia risk in adults over 50, with each unit increase in one metric linked to 76% higher risk before age 65.
Read the releaseAmong 246,822 US adults with atherosclerotic heart disease, those who received the shingles vaccine had 46% fewer major adverse cardiac events and 66% lower all-cause mortality over one year compared with unvaccinated individuals, according to a study presented at ACC.26.
Read the releaseResearchers describe Phylloscopus tokaraensis, the Tokara Leaf Warbler - a new bird species from Japan's volcanic Tokara Islands that is visually identical to Ijima's Leaf Warbler 1,000 km away but genetically diverged 2.8-3.2 million years ago, with no contemporary gene flow.
Read the releaseDartmouth researchers analyzed 2.2 million statements from the 118th US Congress and found that personal attacks boost media visibility but show no association with increased fundraising, electoral margins, or legislative output - suggesting some legislators pursue celebrity over policy.
Read the releaseAnalysis of 136 radiocarbon-dated organic weapons shows the bow and arrow appeared across all of western North America roughly 1,400 years ago, instantly replacing the atlatl south of northern British Columbia while coexisting with it for over 1,000 years in the Arctic and subarctic.
Read the releaseA new knowledge-guided machine learning model from the University of Minnesota combines hydrology physics with AI pattern recognition to predict floods with greater accuracy than either approach alone, eliminating the labor-intensive manual adjustments that current forecasting systems require.
Read the releaseResearchers discovered that skin cells produce a metabolic intermediate called FPP during infection, which activates the TRPV3 calcium channel to drive systemic antibody production. Plant-derived compounds carvacrol and camphor activate the same channel, boosting vaccine responses in mice without toxicity.
Read the releaseBiochar produced from chemical-enhanced sewage sludge leaches heavy metals at high pyrolysis temperatures above 800C, but at 550C both chemical and conventional sludge biochars show long-term metal stability - a finding that could guide safer adoption of cost-effective sewage treatment worldwide.
Read the releaseObese mice treated with the HIF-activating drug Roxadustat gained less weight, showed improved glucose tolerance, preserved bone marrow vasculature, and healed fractures better than untreated obese animals - suggesting a single pathway could address metabolic and skeletal damage together.
Read the releaseA new expert consensus validates ultrasound-derived fat fraction (UDFF) as a reliable, noninvasive tool for measuring liver fat, with pooled sensitivity of 90.4% and specificity of 83.8%, establishing diagnostic thresholds that could replace costly MRI in routine clinical screening.
Read the releaseA Frontiers in Science study argues that zero-detection food safety policies waste edible food, increase costs, and divert resources from higher-risk hazards - proposing a shift from hazard-based to risk-based approaches that weigh public health against sustainability.
Read the releaseUniversity of Pennsylvania researchers engineered a new ionizable lipid called C12-2aN that reprograms dendritic cell metabolism, delivering mRNA to lymph nodes three times more efficiently than FDA-approved formulations while reducing fever and inflammation in preclinical tests.
Read the releaseThe V-Dem Institute's 2026 Democracy Report documents a 24% decline in the US Liberal Democracy Index score in one year - the fastest deterioration of any democracy in modern times - while nearly a quarter of all nations worldwide are now experiencing democratic backsliding.
Read the releaseResearchers at SickKids have mapped the 3D structure of EtfD, a protein that Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses to extract energy from fats inside the lungs, and built the first assay to measure its activity - giving drug hunters a new target against the world's deadliest infectious disease.
Read the releaseAnalysis of charcoal deposits across four continents reveals that tropical peatland fire activity declined for over a millennium before spiking dramatically in the 20th century, driven by agricultural drainage and deforestation in Southeast Asia and Australasia - while less-disturbed peatlands in South America and Africa showed no such increase.
Read the releaseThe LHCb collaboration at CERN has discovered the Xi-cc-plus particle - a heavy proton-like baryon containing two charm quarks and one down quark - in 915 events from 2024 proton-proton collisions, resolving a two-decade-old disputed observation and marking the first discovery from the upgraded LHCb detector.
Read the releaseScientists at VIB-KU Leuven and the Francis Crick Institute found that breast cancer lung metastases recruit healthy alveolar type II cells and reprogram them to overproduce lipids - which cancer cells then use as signaling molecules to modify proteins and accelerate growth, suggesting a new therapeutic target in the lung's own cells rather than the tumor itself.
Read the releaseThe AlphaFold Database has added 1.7 million high-confidence protein complex predictions through a collaboration between EMBL-EBI, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, and Seoul National University - the largest dataset of protein complex structures currently available, focusing on species relevant to human health and WHO bacterial priority pathogens.
Read the releaseResearchers in Taiwan built a life-sized oviraptor model with resin eggs and ran heat transfer experiments showing that these bird-like dinosaurs likely relied on solar co-incubation rather than body heat alone, achieving lower hatching efficiency than modern birds but using a strategy adapted to their open-nest, multi-ring egg arrangement.
Read the releaseDr. Christian Cazares, a UCSD postdoctoral fellow who grew up in Calexico, California, is developing portable EEG-based biomarkers for neurodevelopmental disorders while simultaneously dismantling barriers to science access - co-founding a nonprofit, removing the GRE from graduate admissions, and building bilingual neuroscience education programs along the US-Mexico border.
Read the releaseComputer scientists at NYU's Courant Institute developed a bird-flocking-inspired algorithm that preprocesses long documents before feeding them to AI models, clustering sentences by thematic relevance to reduce noise, repetition, and hallucination in generated summaries.
Read the releaseDr. Gabriella Gobbi, incoming president of the CINP and Canada Research Chair in Therapeutics for Mental Health, challenges the drug development pipeline in a new profile, arguing that promising psychiatric treatments fail to reach patients because private investment prioritizes profit margins over medical need.
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