Aging is the major risk factor for many central nervous system (CNS) pathological conditions and diseases, such as Alzheimer’s Disease and stroke. In the aging brain, a dysfunctional or “leaky” blood-brain barrier (BBB) is considered a key trigger for neurodegeneration. Within the neurovascular unit, the functional BBB comprises cell-cell interactions between endothelium, astrocytes, pericytes, and the vascular basement membrane and matrix. Astrocytes lie in close contact with endothelial cells through their endfeet and participate in BBB maintenance ...

In 2013, the US Department of Justice quietly launched a program called Operation Choke Point. Its aim was to pressure some banks into cutting ties with businesses that, while legal, were deemed risky from a social or reputational standpoint. Included in the operation were payday lenders, firearm and ammunition dealers, tobacco vendors, online gambling sites, and even escort services. The strategy was simple: If targeted banks refused to lend to these controversial companies, their access to capital would dry up, eventually squeezing ...

Scientists digging through data collected by the Cassini spacecraft have found new complex organic molecules spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This is a clear sign that complex chemical reactions are taking place within its underground ocean. Some of these reactions could be part of chains that lead to even more complex, potentially biologically relevant molecules. Published today in Nature Astronomy, this discovery further strengthens the case for a dedicated European Space Agency (ESA) mission to orbit and land on Enceladus. In 2005, ...

Scientists have, for the first time, directly visualised and quantified the protein clusters believed to trigger Parkinson’s, marking a major advance in the study of the world’s fastest-growing neurological disease. These tiny clusters, called alpha-synuclein oligomers, have long been considered the likely culprits for Parkinson’s disease to start developing in the brain, but until now, they have evaded direct detection in human brain tissue. Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge, UCL, the Francis Crick Institute ...

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, which uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer, has emerged as a powerful way to treat lymphoma and other blood cancers. But researchers have struggled to adapt the treatment for solid tumors—including prostate, breast, lung and ovarian cancer—which make up about 90% of all cancer cases. Now, a research team from the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, in collaboration with City of Hope, a national cancer research and treatment organization, ...

New research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution sheds light on the timelines and pathways of evolution of fungi, finding evidence of their influence on ancient terrestrial ecosystems. The study, led by researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and collaborators, indicates the diversification of fungi hundreds of millions of years before the emergence of land plants. The five paths to a complex world Professor Gergely J. Szöllősi, author on this study and head of the Model-Based Evolutionary ...

PHOTOS: https://sandiegozoo.box.com/s/h8ne3q1md09rpor6ewp7070qvzv9k7nh SAN DIEGO (Oct. 1, 2025) – Recent studies led by an international consortium of researchers, including scientists from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and the Museo de Historia Natural de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, unveiled groundbreaking findings in biodiversity conservation through in situ DNA barcoding in the Peruvian Amazon.  Measuring the earth’s biological richness in one of its most remote and biodiverse regions is no small task. The Peruvian Amazon is in imminent danger of losing species to wildfires and habitat ...

New York, NY [October 1, 2025]—Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, Boston Medical Center, and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, have developed a software platform to help scientists more easily analyze the molecular structure of tissue in both healthy and disease states. Details on the platform, called Giotto Suite, were reported in the October 1 online issue of Nature Methods [DOI: 10.1038/s41592-025-02817-w]. In recent years, new technologies have made it possible to capture detailed maps of RNA and proteins within intact tissues—a field known as spatial omics. These ...

Even the United Nations International Year of Glaciers' Preservation has seen further massive melting of glaciers in Switzerland. A winter with little snow was followed by heat waves in June 2025 that saw glaciers nearing the record levels of losses of 2022. Snow reserves from the winter were already depleted in the first half of July, and the ice masses began to melt earlier than had rarely ever been recorded. The cool weather in July provided some relief and prevented an even worse outcome. Nevertheless, almost a further three per cent of the ice volume was lost across Switzerland this year, ...

Researchers from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and CIBER-BBN, in collaboration with teams from the University of Barcelona (UB) and the Institute of Chemical Research – cicCartuja, University of Seville-CSIC, have discovered that long-distance charge transport between two key proteins in the mitochondrial respiratory chain — cytochrome c and respiratory complex III — is mediated by protons and superoxide ions, which are reactive oxygen species. The study was recently published in the journal Small ...

A newly described fossil reveals that leeches are at least 200 million years older than scientists previously thought, and that their earliest ancestors may have feasted not on blood, but on smaller marine creatures.  “This is the only body fossil we’ve ever found of this entire group,” said Karma Nanglu, a paleontologist with the University of California, Riverside. He collaborated with researchers from the University of Toronto, University of São Paulo, and Ohio State University on a paper describing the fossil, which is now published in PeerJ. Roughly ...

Rochester, MN, October 1, 2025 – A study evaluating how various shift work patterns contribute to kidney stone risk has revealed that shift workers have a 15% higher risk of developing kidney stones, especially younger workers and those with low levels of manual labor. Body mass index (BMI), fluid intake, and other lifestyle factors play key roles contributing to the occurrence of kidney stones. The findings of the novel study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, published by Elsevier, indicate that kidney stone prevention efforts should extend to shift workers. Long-term shift work, identified ...

Demand-responsive transport (DRT) is promoted as an inclusive solution to first- and last-mile mobility challenges, but little is known about the barriers to adoption among people with poor health. Dr. Haruka Kato, a junior associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University, examined the factors shaping this population's acceptance and use of DRT in Senboku New Town, Osaka. The study applied the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology-3 (UTAUT-3) to assess the opportunities and challenges for using DRT. The findings reveal that community involvement is a powerful driver of acceptance. The study showed that residents' ...

A research group led by Dr. Shinichi Furuya of the NeuroPiano Institute and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. announced research findings that for the first time scientifically clarified how pianists’ manipulations of keys alters piano timbre. Creativity in painting, music, and other arts is underpinned by the ability to create diverse perceptual experiences for audiences. However, whether timbre could actually be changed mid-instrumental performance, and what physical motor skills would be required to do so, remained unclear. The research group developed a unique sensor system that can measure piano key movements at ...

Bottom Line: In a retrospective study, the 313-SNP breast cancer polygenic risk score (PRS313) blood test could predict future incidents of breast cancer in women diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) or lobular carcinoma in situ (LCIS). Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarker & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Author: Jasmine Timbres, clinical information analyst at King’s College London and the study’s lead author, and Elinor J. Sawyer, PhD, the study’s senior author and professor of clinical oncology at King’s College London in the United Kingdom. Background: ...

  Studying a person’s genetic makeup can predict if they will go on to develop invasive breast cancer after abnormal cells have been found in their breast tissue. For the first time, researchers at King’s College London have shown the connection between a person’s genetic risk score and their risk of developing the disease after irregular cells have been detected. The research, published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention and funded by Breast Cancer Now, included over 2,000 women in the UK who had been tested for 313 genetic changes, known as a genetic risk score. These patients had already been diagnosed with either ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) ...

Even though many years have passed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of infection with SARS-CoV-2 are not completely understood. This is especially true for Long COVID, a chronic condition that can develop after COVID-19 that causes a variety of lasting symptoms. Among the most common and debilitating of these is cognitive impairment, often referred to as “brain fog,” which affects over 80% of people with Long COVID. Given the hundreds of millions of global cases, Long COVID represents a massive public health and socioeconomic challenge, as it severely ...

People who sleep poorly are more likely than others to have brains that appear older than they actually are. This is according to a comprehensive brain imaging study from Karolinska Institutet, published in the journal eBioMedicine. Increased inflammation in the body may partly explain the association. Poor sleep has been linked to dementia, but it is unclear whether unhealthy sleep habits contribute to the development of dementia or whether they are rather early symptoms of the disease. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the link between sleep characteristics and how old the brain appears in relation ...

A new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases involving over 460,000 children and adolescents across 40 paediatric hospitals in the USA suggests that children who were infected with COVID-19 for the second time during the Omicron wave had more than double the risk of developing long COVID.   Conducted by researchers under the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded RECOVER Initiative*, this is the largest study to date examining the long-term effects of COVID-19 reinfection in young people. The study analysed electronic ...

Children and adolescents were twice as likely to experience long COVID after catching COVID for the second time, compared to their peers with a single previous infection, according to a large study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in Lancet Infectious Diseases. These results run counter to the popular perceptions that COVID in children is "mild" and that reinfections with COVID do not carry the same risk of long COVID that initial infections do. Among the conditions ...

Previously, the primary endpoint results of the NRG-LU005 study assessing the addition of the immunotherapy drug atezolizumab to standard of care concurrent chemoradiation for limited-state small cell lung cancer was reported at the American Society for Radiation Oncology 2024 Annual Meeting. Those results showed that adding atezolizumab did not improve overall survival (OS) for this patient population.   At the same time, an exploratory analysis reported longer median OS among patients who received twice-a-day radiation, though RT schedule was ...

Previously, results from the photon cohort of the NRG-BN001, a signal seeking Phase II randomized trial, indicated that photon radiation dose intensification (75 Gy) did not demonstrate improvement in overall survival (OS) for patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma (GBM). The recent analysis of the proton cohort revealed improved survival for patients receiving proton therapy at 75 Gy. Because this data met the pre-defined survival improvement threshold, they could be used to design and conduct a definitive phase III randomized ...

As part of its strategy and ongoing commitment to open science, ECMWF (The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) has been opening its extensive data catalogue and making its science more widely open and accessible. The organisation holds one of the world’s largest meteorological archives, exceeding 1.3 exabytes of data. Starting with historical data and charts, and ECMWF is now moving to make real-time forecast data openly available. By making its data openly available, ECMWF is supporting the UN’s Early Warnings for All initiative and enabling societies ...

Life beneath the waves can be a game of cat and mouse. Seals pursue swimming fish by following the tell-tale wakes and spinning vortices they leave behind, sensing the faint swirls with their sensitive whiskers. But fish might have a trick up their sleeves. Yvonne Krüger from University of Rostock, Germany, explains that escaping fish produce three jets of different sizes they dart away, squirting in individual directions almost simultaneously – at least two of which form into vortex rings, like smoke rings – which could confuse a seal. But might seals be able to see through the ...

Vienna, Austria: People who have a cardiac arrest in their own homes have similar neurological outcomes regardless of socioeconomic background, according to research presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Wednesday) [1]. However, the study of 676 patients who received treatment in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna suggested that those who lived in lower-income areas may be less likely to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) from bystanders compared to people suffering a cardiac arrest (when the heart stops pumping blood around the body) in higher-income areas – a finding ...