In the hunt for new therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases, lasso peptides prove to be a catch. Their knot-like structures afford these molecules high stability and diverse biological activities, making them a promising avenue for new therapeutics. To better unleash their clinical potential, a team from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology developed LassoESM, a new large language model for predicting lasso peptide properties. The collaborative study was recently published in Nature Communications. Lasso peptides are natural products made by bacteria. To produce these peptides, bacteria use ribosomes to build chains of amino acids that are then folded by biosynthetic ...

A new study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis provides some answers. Published Sept. 15 in Nature Mental Health, it mined an enormous set of data collected from pre-teens and teens across the U.S. and found that social conflicts — particularly family fighting and reputational damage or bullying from peers — were the strongest predictors of near- and long-term mental health issues. The research also revealed sex differences in how boys and girls experience stress from ...

Key Takeaways An evaluation of 50 surgical QI projects found that only one scored above 70% on criteria for a well-conducted effort, with major deficits in the critical early "front-end" planning stage. The new EPoSSI framework provides a structured, nine-step guide and checklist to help clinicians systematically plan projects before launch. In testing, using the full EPoSSI tool (diagram and guidance table) led to an increase in planning comprehensiveness, with participants meeting 100% of scoring criteria compared to just 24% without the framework. CHICAGO ...

Political attitudes and opinions can and do shift, sometimes drastically. Recent psychological research from Washington University in St. Louis offers insight into how emotional responses to threats contribute to shifts in political attitudes. One striking example of how emotions drive political shifts is that people tend to become more supportive of conservative views during times of external, or foreign, threat. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, for example, national polls showed that support for President George W. Bush — a moderately conservative Republican — soared by 39 points to a record-breaking ...

Dr. Lauren Henderson, a physician-scientist whose research focuses on children with difficult-to-treat juvenile idiopathic arthritis and other autoimmune disorders, has been awarded the 10th annual Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research, Weill Cornell Medicine announced today.            The Drukier Prize honors an early-career pediatrician whose research promises to make important contributions toward improving the health of children and adolescents. Dr. Henderson is an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric rheumatologist ...

The University of North Florida has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to advance laser-based measurement technology to find more accurate and reliable chemical measurements across diverse scientific fields.  Dr. Willis Jones, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will lead the study that will pursue groundbreaking advances in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), a powerful but often limited analytical technique.   LIBS uses a high-powered laser to create a small plasma that reveals the elemental compositions of solids, liquids and gases with minimal preparation. While powerful, the method is hindered by ...

EMBARGO: THIS CONTENT IS UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 2 P.M. U.S. EASTERN STANDARD TIME ON OCT. 16, 2025. INTERESTED MEDIA MAY RECIVE A PREVIEW COPY OF THE JOURNAL ARTICLE IN ADVANCE OF THAT DATE OR CONDUCT INTERVIEWS, BUT THE INFORMATION MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, OR POSTED ONLINE UNTIL AFTER THE RELEASE WINDOW. A global research effort led by Colorado State University shows that extreme, prolonged drought conditions in grasslands and shrublands would greatly limit the long-term health of crucial ecosystems that cover nearly half the planet. ...

Non-hibernating pikas' protein restriction tweaks their gut microbiome to help them survive the winter, when winter-active herbivores often struggle to find dietary protein In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/4nI13TV Article title: Increased urea nitrogen salvaging by a remodeled gut microbiota helps nonhibernating pikas maintain protein homeostasis during winter Author countries: China, Israel Funding: see manuscript END ...

Like us humans, insects possess sensory organs responsible for vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. For vision, insects primarily rely on compound eyes. But what about hearing? For example, crickets develop tympanal organs on their forelegs, which function like a human’s eardrum to detect sound. They use these “ears on the legs” to listen to courtship songs and sense approaching enemies.   The tympanal organs have evolved in insects repeatedly. For example, cicadas, grasshoppers, moths and mantises have tympanal ears on their abdomen or thorax. Uniquely, stinkbugs of the family Dinidoridae, encompassing around 100 species representing ...

Sleep-like slow-wave patterns persist for years in surgically disconnected neural tissue of awake epilepsy patients, according to a study published October 16th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Marcello Massimini from Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy, and colleagues. The presence of slow waves in the isolated hemisphere impairs consciousness, however, whether they serve any functional or plastic role, remains unclear. Hemispherotomy is a surgical procedure used to treat severe cases of epilepsy in children. The ...

In a Policy Forum, David Victor and colleagues outline a framework for incentivizing meaningful investments into high-risk, transformative clean technologies in the aviation industry. While massive reductions in global emissions are needed to combat climate change, most current clean investments focus on low-risk, mature technologies such as renewable energy, batteries, and electric vehicles. However, many sectors, including aviation, which accounts for about 3% of global emissions, face steep technological and economic barriers to decarbonization, making ...

What looked like a hearing organ on a tiny stinkbug’s leg turned out to be something far stranger: a fungal nursery that mother bugs use to coat their newly laid eggs in protective symbiotic hyphae, shielding their offspring from parasitic wasps. Tympanal organs have repeatedly evolved in many insect species and are often considered to be used for sensing sound. Previous studies have reported a conspicuously enlarged structure on the real legs of adult female dinidorid stinkbugs, which has long been interpreted as a tympanal ...

Although many ecosystems can weather several years of moderate drought, consecutive years of extreme dryness push them past a tipping point, resulting in dramatic declines in plant growth, researchers report. The findings – borne from a global experiment spanning six continents – reveal threats to Earth’s grasslands and shrublands as climate extremes intensify. Although most droughts are brief and moderate, the most ecologically and economically damaging events are both prolonged and extreme. Evidence suggests such extreme events are becoming more frequent with ongoing climate change. However, the effects of multi-year ...

Cutting planet-warming pollution to near-zero will take more than inventing new clean technologies—it will require changing how the world invests in them. That’s especially true for industries like aviation, where developing and adopting greener solutions is risky and expensive, according to a University of California San Diego commentary piece in Science.  The paper calls for smarter ways of managing investment risk could help speed up the shift toward cleaner air travel and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.   “The aviation sector—a ...

A research team led by Prof. BI Guo-Qiang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with several domestic and international institutions, has resolved a 50-year-old controversy in neuroscience. By employing a self-developed, time-resolved cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) technique, the team has delineated the intricate choreography of synaptic vesicle (SV) release and rapid recycling, the cornerstone of neural communication. Their findings, which introduce a new biophysical mechanism termed the “Kiss-Shrink-Run”, ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Large changes in global sea level, fueled by fluctuations in ice sheet growth and decay, occurred throughout the last ice age, rather than just toward the end of that period, a study publishing this week in the journal Science has found. The findings represent a significant change in researchers’ understanding of how the Pleistocene – the geological period from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago and commonly known as the last ice age – developed, said Peter Clark, a paleoclimatologist at Oregon State University ...

Researchers uncovered a previously unknown way for microbes within tumors to contribute to treatment resistance in certain cancers  Study finds these microbes push cancer cells into a reversible resting state, allowing them to become resistant to certain chemotherapies  Scientists hope understanding the microbe-tumor relationship will enhance future cancer treatment  HOUSTON, OCTOBER 16, 2025 – Researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that explains how bacteria can drive treatment resistance in patients with oral and colorectal cancer. The study was published today in ...

In recent years, Americans have gotten used to logging on to a patient portal through their smartphone or computer to have telehealth appointments with their doctors and health care teams, see their prescriptions and lab test results, send messages to their providers, and much more. But a new study suggests that the integration of this technology into many aspects of patient care may have created an unintended barrier to healthcare access for the more than 25 million patients with limited English proficiency. The study finds that the patient portal login page for many hospitals is not accessible ...

Infrared vibrational spectroscopy at BESSY II can be used to create high-resolution maps of molecules inside live cells and cell organelles in native aqueous environment, according to a new study by a team from HZB and Humboldt University in Berlin. Nano-IR spectroscopy with s-SNOM at the IRIS beamline is now suitable for examining tiny biological samples in liquid medium in the nanometre range and generating infrared images of molecular vibrations with nanometre resolution. It is even possible to obtain 3D information. ...

As our hairs go gray and our muscles weaken with age, our immune system also changes. In particular, the stem cells that become blood or immune cells can develop mutations, potentially leading to cancers or other dysfunctions. Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered an important cellular mechanism that drives this aging: the lack of a protein called platelet factor 4, whose levels decrease with age, they report in the journal Blood. What’s more, adding this protein to old blood cells reversed these signs of aging, which points to a promising therapeutic target for preventing ...

Palm oil isn’t inherently bad, and olive oil isn’t inherently good, conservation scientists say in an opinion paper publishing October 16 in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports Sustainability. They argue that the vegetable oil industry is haunted by narratives and myths about different types of oil crops, but the reality is much more nuanced. Almost all oils—including soybean, olive, coconut, and sesame oil—are associated with biodiversity and human rights issues in some contexts, depending on crop management and supply chains. The researchers call ...

With the advent of commercial spaceflight, an increasing number of people may be heading into space in the coming years.  Some will even get a chance to fly to the Moon or live on Mars.  One of the major health risks associated with spaceflight involves the immune system, which normally fights off viruses and cancer. It’s already established that spaceflight weakens immunity; current and past astronauts report clinical issues such as respiratory illnesses and skin rashes. These issues may become even more serious on longer-terms ...

Johns Hopkins researchers may have identified what could be a compelling clue in the ongoing hunt to prove the existence of dark matter.  A mysterious diffuse glow of gamma rays near the center of the Milky Way has stumped researchers for decades, as they’ve tried to discern whether the light comes from colliding particles of dark matter or quickly spinning neutron stars.  It turns out that both theories are equally likely, according to new research published today in the journal Physical ...

About The Study: This study identified 5.05% of individuals carrying pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants, suggesting a higher-than-expected prevalence of key cancer susceptibility genes in a large, unselected population. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Joshua Arbesman, MD, email Arbesmj@ccf.org. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2025.16372) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. #  ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study of U.S. medical students, Asian, Black, and Hispanic female medical students with disability (MSWD) were more likely to report general and race-based discrimination, whereas white and Asian female MSWD were more likely to report gender-based discrimination during medical school. These findings highlight the need to address intersecting forms of discrimination for medical students with disabilities.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Mytien Nguyen, MS, email mytien.nguyen@yale.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this ...