Amyloid beta and tau proteins compete for the same binding sites on microtubules in neurons, suggesting that displacement of tau by amyloid beta, rather than aggregation of either protein, may be the primary driver of Alzheimer's disease pathology. Ryan R. Julian and colleagues used fluorescence polarization to measure the binding affinities of fluorescently labeled amyloid beta 1-40 and 1-42 to both individual tubulin proteins and microtubules. The authors found binding affinities comparable to those reported for tau. Sequence homology analysis across three alignment algorithms confirmed structural similarity between amyloid beta and the microtubule-binding domains of tau. Competitive ...

People who consumed over nine servings of ultra-processed foods per day on average were 67% more likely to suffer a major cardiac event than people consuming about one serving of such foods per day, in a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session (ACC.26). Ultra-processed foods include many packaged and convenience foods, such as chips, crackers, frozen meals, processed meats, sugary drinks, breakfast cereals and breads. With each additional daily serving, the risk of adverse events such as heart attacks, strokes and death from coronary ...

Measures of blood vessel health derived from routine blood pressure readings may help identify adults at increased risk for dementia, according to research being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session (ACC.26). The findings from two studies that tracked patterns of arterial stiffness over time align with growing evidence that uncontrolled hypertension contributes to the development of dementia by accelerating the aging and stiffening of blood vessels. Rates of dementia and ...

People with heart disease who received a shingles vaccine had nearly half the rate of serious cardiac events a year later compared with those who did not get the vaccine, according to a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session (ACC.26). The study analyzed over 246,822 U.S. adults with atherosclerotic heart disease, a condition caused by plaque buildup in arteries. Its findings add to mounting evidence that the shingles vaccine not only protects against shingles, but may also reduce the risk of other health issues such as heart problems and dementia. “This ...

An island bird species discovered in Japan looks just like a similar species from 1,000 km away, but has been genetically isolated for millions of years. Takema Saitoh, Per Alström, and colleagues report the existence of the Tokara Leaf Warbler, a small insectivorous songbird with an olive-green back and a silvery gray breast from the Tokara Islands in Japan. The Tokara Leaf Warbler is a cryptic species that looks identical to Ijima’s Leaf Warbler (Phylloscopus ijimae) from the Izu Islands. However, genetic analysis reveals that the lineages diverged around 2.8–3.2 ...

American politics is increasingly characterized by high levels of polarization and divisive rhetoric, despite stated preferences among voters for civility and substantive debate. Sean J. Westwood and colleagues sought to understand what might incentivize a politician to use divisive rhetoric by analyzing 2.2 million public statements from the 118th US Congress. Using a large language model, the authors broke floor speeches, press releases, newsletters, and posts on X into roughly two-sentence chunks and classified a chunk as a personal attack if it targeted a specific individual or group and criticized personal characteristics, motivations, or integrity rather ...

A study clarifies the date of an important technological milestone: the adoption of the bow and arrow in western North America. The replacement of older weapons by bows and arrows occurred independently in several prehistoric cultures. Briggs Buchanan and colleagues explore this transition in western North America, where the bow replaced the atlatl and dart as the primary hunting technology. The authors focused on 136 radiocarbon-dated, well-preserved organic weapons, which provide evidence of when and where the weapons ...

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/17/2026) — New paired studies from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities show that machine-learning can improve the prediction of floods. The studies, published in Water Resources Research and the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, demonstrate how "knowledge-guided" artificial intelligence can assist forecasters in saving lives and protecting infrastructure as the frequency of extreme weather increases.  The research was a collaboration among the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and ...

The skin is far more than a simple physical barrier. These two researches address a fundamental question in immunology: How does a localized skin infection or injury generate a powerful, systematic antibody response to protect against pathogen spread? The teams, including collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Institute of Dermatology and Tsinghua's School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, provide a compelling answer centered on the keratinocyte. In the first study, published on March 5, 2026, Beijing time, in the journal Nature, the researchers demonstrate that upon skin infection or ultraviolet exposure, ...

To handle increasing wastewater loads, sewage treatment plants are adopting more advanced treatment processes. However, many of these approaches require additional space and energy, highlighting the need for more efficient alternatives. Chemical-enhanced primary treatment (CEPT), which uses chemicals, instead of microorganisms, to promote flocculation and coagulation of sewage, has attracted significant attention for reducing energy consumption and operation costs in sewage treatment plants. The sewage sludge produced during treatment can be further processed through pyrolysis, a high-temperature process that can reduce sludge volume, degrade pollutants, and produce value-added materials. ...

Obesity is widely known for increasing the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, but its damaging effects on the skeleton are often overlooked. Excess body fat can disrupt bone metabolism, weaken bone quality, and impair fracture repair. In individuals with metabolic disorders, bone marrow can accumulate fat cells that interfere with the activity of bone-forming cells and damage the vascular networks that support skeletal tissue. These changes increase fracture risk and reduce the body’s ...

As the global burden of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome continues to rise, fatty liver disease has become one of the most prevalent chronic liver conditions worldwide. Its progressive forms, including metabolic dysfunction‐associated steatohepatitis (MASH), cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma, now represent a major public health challenge. Within this expanding spectrum of MASLD, accurate quantification of hepatic steatosis is no longer an option but is important for diagnosis and monitoring therapeutic response. Traditionally, ...

These food safety measures and ultra-sensitive tests may drive edible food being thrown away, excessive packaging, and extra costs for consumers.  The international team of researchers make it clear that food safety is an important concern, as foodborne pathogens account for approximately 420,000 deaths and 600 million cases of illness each year. However, the authors argue that food systems will be more sustainable, while continuing to protect public health, if “zero-detection” expectations are replaced with evidence-based targets for “sufficiently ...

The most common side effects of mRNA vaccines like the COVID-19 shot are well known: soreness, mild fever and general malaise. Those symptoms, which typically resolve within days, are the natural result of the immune system activating. But what if they could be avoided? In Nature Materials, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania describe how they modified lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) — the delivery vehicle for the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines — to outperform leading, commercially available formulations while reducing common vaccine side effects in pre-clinical tests of human cells and mouse models.  By changing the structure of the ionizable ...

Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. “The fact that many populous and economically powerful countries are autocratizing is especially worrying. ...

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have uncovered how the bacteria that causes tuberculosis fuels itself during infection, providing new insights into one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.   The study, published in The EMBO Journal, provides the first detailed 3D structure of a protein called EtfD, which the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses to extract energy from lipids (fats), along with the first laboratory test capable of directly measuring its activity. Together, these advances are giving researchers tools to begin early-stage drug discovery ...

A new study reveals an unprecedented increase in wildfires in tropical peatlands during the 20th century.   Peatlands store vast quantities of carbon below the Earth’s surface – more than all the world’s forest biomass combined – but when they catch fire large amounts of the stored carbon is released into the atmosphere.   Wildfires in tropical regions have been on the rise in recent decades, but the history and characteristics of wildfires in tropical peatlands remain largely unknown.   Researchers therefore analysed charcoal ...

Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark. The result is the first particle discovery made using the upgraded LHCb detector, a major international project involving more than 1,000 scientists across 20 countries. The UK made the largest national contribution to the upgrade, with significant leadership ...

Leuven, 17 March, 2026 - Scientists from the VIB–KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology, in collaboration with the Francis Crick Institute, have discovered how cancer cells can exploit healthy lung cells to support metastatic tumor growth in the lungs. In two complementary studies published in Nature Cell Biology and Cancer Discovery, they show that tumors use lipids produced by lung cells as signals, and that decreasing the lipid production of ...

A new collaboration between EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, and Seoul National University has made millions of AI-predicted protein complex structures openly available through the AlphaFold Database. To maximise global health impact, the dataset prioritises proteins important for understanding human health and disease. This is the largest dataset of protein complex predictions currently available. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They interact to create protein complexes which fulfil biological ...

What do we really know about how oviraptors – bird-like but flightless dinosaurs – hatched their eggs? Did they use environmental heat, like crocodiles, or body heat from an adult, like birds? In a new Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution study, researchers in Taiwan examined the brooding behavior and hatching patterns of oviraptors. They also modelled heat transfer simulations of oviraptor clutches and compared hatching efficiency to modern birds. To do so, they experimented with a life-sized oviraptor incubator and eggs. “We show the difference ...

LA JOLLA, California, USA, 17 March 2026 — A first-generation college student who once needed research stipends to pay rent has spent the last decade building the infrastructure to ensure others do not face the same calculus. Dr. Christian Cazares, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, grew up in Calexico, California, a border town where more than eighty percent of his schoolmates qualified for the free lunch program. In a new interview published today in the Genomic Press journal Brain Medicine, Dr. ...

Among the primary concerns surrounding artificial intelligence is its tendency to yield erroneous information when summarizing long documents. These “hallucinations” are problematic not only because they convey falsehoods, but also because they reduce efficiency—sorting through content to search for mistakes of AI outputs is time-consuming. To help address this challenge, a team of computer scientists has created an algorithmic framework that draws from a natural phenomenon—bird flocking—by mimicking how birds efficiently self-organize. The framework serves as a preprocessing step for large language models ...

MONTREAL, Quebec, CANADA, 17 March 2026 – Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Therapeutics for Mental Health, Staff Psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC), and Senior Scientist, Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience Program at the Research Institute of the MUHC, and President-Elect of the Collegium Internationale of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP), has issued an unambiguous challenge to the global drug-development system, ...

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, USA, 17 March 2026 — The girl was maybe fourteen. In Nottingham, England, there was a state comprehensive school where egalitarianism was practiced the way religion is practiced in some households: fervently, and with suspicion toward anyone who broke ranks. In biology class, Mary Phillips stood up and said something that got her into trouble. She said the brain was superior to every other organ in the body. Her argument was precise: you could transplant a heart, a kidney, a liver. You could not transplant the brain. The teachers disapproved. Her classmates shifted ...