A database, collecting and classifying tile-like patterns in biology, aims to be a resource and research catalyst. The human eye is drawn to the rhythmic beauty of tiled patterns, which occur abundantly in nature. Jana Ciecierska-Holmes, John Nyakatura and Mason Dean led a project with colleagues, offering a classification of biological tilings—repeated patterns of geometric discrete elements found in nature. Tilings are found across the tree of life, in a wide variety of taxa and at many spatial scales from ...

In an editorial, Editor-in-Chief Yannis C. Yortsos looks back at the journal’s first few years and considers the aptness of W. Brian Arthur’s 2009 definition of technology, “leveraging phenomena for useful purposes,” exploring how it might be applied across all scientific endeavors in the age of artificial intelligence, the acceleration of which has coincided with the launch of PNAS Nexus. Created to serve as a platform for scientific and technological ideas, enlightenment, and solutions, PNAS ...

A new University of California San Diego study offers compelling evidence that glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists — the class of drugs behind Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, for example — may do more than regulate blood sugar and weight. In an analysis of more than 6,800 colon cancer patients across all University of California Health sites, researchers found that those taking GLP-1 medications were less than half as likely to die within five years compared to those who weren’t on the drugs (15.5% versus 37.1%). The study, led by Raphael Cuomo, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Anesthesiology ...

Virtual reality (VR) gaming has gained significant attention in recent years, with an increasing number of users integrating VR and immersive headsets into their daily lives. These devices provide highly immersive visuals, creating a strong sense of presence and disconnection from the real world. However, concerns have been raised about the effects of prolonged VR use—especially at short viewing distances—on eye health and its potential link to dry eye disease, an ocular condition characterized by tear film instability. The tear film is a dynamic, multilayered system composed of lipid ...

Stroke is one of the leading causes of non-traumatic disability worldwide, affecting more than 15 million people each year, with about three-quarters experiencing long-term functional impairments. This makes it crucial to develop long-term rehabilitation programs that can promote motor relearning, enhance neural plasticity, and restore daily motor function. Robot-assisted rehabilitation, which combines neuroscience, biomechanics, and advanced control systems, is emerging as a highly promising approach. In recent years, exoskeleton-type rehabilitation robots that enable distributed ...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a fascinating non-invasive technique that measures and records the brain’s electrical activity. It detects small electrical signals produced when neurons in the brain communicate with each other, using electrodes placed at specific locations on the scalp that correspond to different regions of the brain. EEG has applications in various fields, from cognitive science and neurological disease diagnosis to robotic prosthetics development and brain-computer interfaces (BCI).   Different brain activities produce unique EEG signal patterns. One important example is motor imagery (MI)—a ...

Researchers have long established that hormones significantly affect the brain, creating changes in emotion, energy levels, and decision-making. However, the intricacies of these processes are not well understood.  A new study by a team of scientists focusing on the female hormone estrogen further illuminates the nature of these processes. In a series of experiments with laboratory rats, it finds that the neurological mechanisms underlying learning and decision-making naturally fluctuate over the ...

Earth scientists have discovered how continents are slowly peeled from beneath, fuelling volcanic activity in an unexpected place: the oceans. The research, led by the University of Southampton, shows how slivers of continents are slowly stripped from below and swept into the oceanic mantle – the hot, mostly solid layer beneath the ocean floor that slowly flows. Here, the continental material fuels volcanic activity for tens of millions of years. The discovery solves a long-standing geological mystery: why many ocean islands far from plate tectonic ...

Many oceanic islands far from active plate tectonic boundaries contain materials that clearly originate from continents, even though they are located in the middle of an oceanic plate. Where do the continental remnants come from? Are they sediments that are recycled when oceanic plates subduct into the mantle? Or do they originate from the depths of the Earth's mantle and are carried upward by hot currents, known as mantle plumes? Both explanations are being discussed, but they fall short. This is because some volcanic regions show little evidence of crustal recycling, while others are too cool to be driven by mantle plumes. Researchers at the University of Southampton and the GFZ Helmholtz ...

The discovery of a new mechanism of resistance to common antibiotics could pave the way for improved treatments for harmful bacterial infections, a study suggests. Targeting this defence mechanism could aid efforts to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR), one of the world’s most urgent health challenges, researchers say. Findings from the study reveal how a repair system inside some bacteria plays a pivotal role in helping them survive commonly-used antibiotics. Many of these drugs work by targeting the production of proteins essential for bacterial growth and survival. Now, researchers from the University of Edinburgh have identified ...

Reversed sex roles: In seahorses, it is the males who carry offspring to term. The females lay their eggs into a special brood pouch on the bellies of the males where they are fertilized by the male’s sperm. In the brood pouches, embryos are provided with nutrients and oxygen from the males' bodies until the males give live birth to small seahorses (viviparity). But how does this work? A German-Chinese research team led by evolutionary biologist Axel Meyer from the University of Konstanz and working in collaboration with Liu Yali and Lin Qiang from the South China Sea ...

Pore-forming proteins are found throughout nature. In humans, they play key roles in immune defense, while in bacteria they often act as toxins that punch holes in cell membranes. These biological pores allow ions and molecules to pass through membranes. Their unique ability to control molecular transport has also made them powerful nanopore tools in biotechnology, for example in DNA sequencing and molecular sensing. Despite their importance and impact on biotechnology, biological nanopores can also ...

A new compound tested at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH) in Spain shows promising effects in reducing alcohol consumption and motivation to drink in mice, with marked sex-dependent differences in efficacy. Although MCH11 is not yet available for human use, it could pave the way for personalized treatments of alcohol use disorder. The results, published in the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, stem from four years of work by a team from the Institute of Neurosciences (a joint UMH–CSIC centre), the Institute for Health and Biomedical ...

A new study published in Environmental Research Letters finds that continued growth in artificial intelligence (AI) use across the United States could add approximately 900,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually. This is not a small amount but equates to a relatively minor increase when viewed in the context of nationwide emissions. While AI adoption is expected to boost productivity and economic output, researchers note that its environmental footprint can be seen as relatively modest compared to other industrial activities. The study examined potential AI integration across various sectors, estimating ...

NEW YORK, New York, USA, 11 November 2025 -- Perhaps the most intriguing implication of recent breakthrough research lies in an unexpected connection: the most rigorous mechanistic dissection of rapid antidepressant action identifies adenosine as the critical mediator, yet adenosine receptors are the primary target of caffeine, the world's most widely consumed psychoactive substance. A commentary published today in Brain Medicine by Drs. Julio Licinio and Ma-Li Wong explores this striking convergence. Is this merely coincidence, or ...

Only around 1.1% of the world's population is vegan, but this percentage is growing. For example, in Germany the number of vegans approximately doubled between 2016 and 2020 to 2% of the population, while a 2.4-fold increase between 2023 and 2025 to 4.7% of the population has been reported in the UK. Many people cite health benefits as their reason to go vegan: moving from a typical Western diet to a vegan one can lower the risk of premature mortality from noncommunicable diseases by an estimated 18% to 21%. Another excellent reason is to reduce your ecological footprint. Now, a study in Frontiers in Nutrition has calculated precisely how ...

A group from Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, led by graduate student Tatsushi Oura and Dr. Hiroyuki Tatekawa, found that treatment using the drug lecanemab to remove amyloid plaques in the brain does not change the waste clearance function in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients in the short term. This suggests that even after treatment, the AD patients’ nerves are already damaged, and the waste clearance function does not recover in the short term. Their findings show the complexity of the disease and the need to address multiple disease-causing pathways simultaneously in the future. Their findings add to the complicated process of unraveling ...

A new setup for social games suggests that when people are given the freedom to tailor their actions to different people in their networks, they become significantly more cooperative, trusting and fair. The international study with Kobe University participation thus argues that many standard experimental setups of cooperation underestimate people’s prosocial potential. Games that are models of social interactions are used in sciences spanning from sociology and anthropology to psychology and economics, giving us very concrete data on how likely it is that people behave in a certain way in certain social contexts. For example, when modeling how people cooperate in social networks, ...

A research team including a scientist of Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, has identified a novel principle in biology that mathematically explains why the growth of organisms slows as nutrients become more abundant—a phenomenon known as “the law of diminishing returns.” Understanding how living organisms grow under various nutritional environments has long been a central question in biology. Across microbes, plants, and animals, growth is shaped by the availability of nutrients, energy, and cellular machinery. While extensive ...

Highlights - A new optical transmission record of 430 Tb/s, surpassing the previous record of 402 Tb/s. - The breakthrough leverages international-standard-compliant, cutoff-shifted optical fibers with a novel approach that triples the capacity of certain spectral regions using spatial-division multiplexing. - This innovation promises to enhance metropolitan networks and inter-datacenter links by offering high throughput with reduced complexity, while utilizing existing optical fiber infrastructure.   Abstract The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.), together with 11 international ...

Risk prediction tools might help identify patients at the highest risk of overdose and death after a “before medically advised” (BMA) hospital discharge according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.250492. Patients who leave hospital against the advice of a physician are about twice as likely to die and about 10 times more likely to experience an illicit drug overdose in the first 30 days after leaving hospital. Such BMA discharges are initiated ...

If you are among the 620 million people who lace up their running shoes on a regular basis, chances are that you’re an early riser. Hopefully, you will have got at least eight hours of good sleep the night before, otherwise your risk of injury skyrockets. That’s the finding from a new study led by Professor Jan de Jonge, a work and sports psychologist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia. In a survey of 425 recreational runners, Prof de Jonge and his team found that those reporting shorter sleep duration, lower sleep ...

More than half of calories consumed in the United States come from ultra-processed foods (UPFs), items like fast food and packaged snacks that are often high in sodium, sugar and unhealthy fats. In adults, research has clearly linked these foods to type 2 diabetes and other conditions, but few studies have explored their effects among youth. Now, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have completed one of the first studies to examine the link between UPF consumption and how the body processes glucose, which is ...

Research led by the University of Auckland has cast light on the evolutionary origins of one of nature’s first motors, which developed 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago to propel bacteria. Scientists have created the most comprehensive picture yet of the evolution of bacterial stators, proteins with roles similar to pistons in a car engine, says Dr Caroline Puente-Lelievre, of the School of Biological Sciences. Stator proteins sit in the bacterial cell wall, transforming charged particles (ions) into torque, creating propulsion for bacteria to swim. Stators likely evolved from ion transporter ...

The evolution of civil and hydraulic engineering spans across historical eras, deeply intertwined with societal, economic, and scientific advancement. Particularly, it mirrors the progress in science and technology. Emerging as the harmonious amalgamation of contemporary information technology and construction, intelligent construction emerges as the prime catalyst propelling the transformation and enhancement of the construction sector, steering it towards modernization. Centered around civil engineering, water management, and intelligent construction, this conference strives to bridge the latest scholarly accomplishments ...