Kyoto, Japan -- As space programs evolve and we continue to mistreat our own planet, human dreams of space tourism and planetary colonization seem increasingly common. However, features of spaceflight such as gravitational changes and circadian rhythm disruption -- not to mention radiation -- take a toll on the body, including muscle wasting and decreased bone density. These may even affect our ability to produce healthy offspring. Studying the impact of spaceflight on germ cells -- egg and sperm precursor cells -- is particularly important because they ...

FastUKB is an innovative tool specifically developed to streamline and enhance research workflows utilizing the UK Biobank, effectively addressing key limitations of existing platforms such as the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (RAP). One of its most notable features is its breakthrough bulk data extraction functionality, which transforms traditionally complex coding tasks into intuitive click operations. This is made possible through a user-friendly interface equipped with dropdown menus and a hierarchical variable tree structure, allowing researchers to effortlessly navigate and select the data they need. Unlike RAP, which restricts ...

New York, NY (August 15, 2025) Mount Sinai is celebrating its 13th year as the official hospital and medical services provider of the US Open Tennis Championships, which begins with Fan Week from Monday, August 18, through Saturday, August 23, and continues with the Main Draw Sunday, August 24, through Sunday, September 7. It is also Mount Sinai’s 11th year in this role for the U.S. teams for the Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup events. Mount Sinai, one of the largest academic medical systems in New York, will continue to provide the highest level of health care in orthopedics, sports medicine, emergency medicine, musculoskeletal radiology, and more to ...

A multi-institutional team led by Weill Cornell Medicine has received a five-year, $14.9 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, to find ways to remove latent HIV from the cells of individuals with HIV. The team aims to use a personalized medicine approach to transform the management of HIV into effective cures. Over 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV, according to the World Health Organization. People with ...

Topological insulators (TIs) have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of materials by introducing robust boundary states arising from bulk topological invariants. Extending this paradigm, higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs), characterized by boundary states of dimension at least two lower than the bulk, have attracted significant attention. However, conventional HOTI realizations mainly rely on discrete, lattice-engineered tight-binding models, which constrain their experimental accessibility ...

A research team led by Dr. Juyeon Jung at the Bio-Nano Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB), has developed a nanobody-based technology that can precisely identify and attack only lung cancer cells, opening new possibilities for cancer therapy. This breakthrough addresses the limitations of conventional chemotherapy by reducing harmful side effects while maximizing cancer cell-killing efficiency. In particular, it shows remarkable therapeutic potential for lung adenocarcinoma, a subtype of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Lung cancer is one of the world’s deadliest diseases, claiming millions of lives each year. Among its types, ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Using artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training a machine-learning model to analyze thousands of existing delivery particles, the researchers used it to predict new materials that would work even better. The model also enabled the researchers to identify particles that would work well in different types of cells, and to discover ways to incorporate new types of ...

It has long been understood that experiencing two senses simultaneously, like seeing and hearing, can lead to improved responses relative to those seen when only one sensory input is experienced by itself. For example, a potential prey that gets visual and auditory clues that it is about to be attacked by a snake in the grass has a better chance of survival. Precisely how multiple senses are integrated or work together in the brain has been an area of fascination for neuroscientists for decades. New research ...

In the face of growing global pressures, a new report from Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), including University of Adelaide researchers, highlights the opportunity to strengthen and future-proof Antarctic governance by responding to emerging conservation threats with coordinated, proactive measures. With input from 131 experts in more than 40 countries, with backgrounds across science, policy and conservation, the report identified 10 emerging threats that could challenge Antarctic conservation efforts in the coming decade. Among the threats identified is the likelihood of more extreme precipitation events, ...

Physicists from the University of Copenhagen have begun using the gigantic magnetic fields of galaxy clusters to observe distant black holes in their search for an elusive particle that has stumped scientists for decades. It is a story of extremes that are hard to fathom. The heaviest structures in the universe, clusters of galaxies, are a quadrillion times more massive than the Sun. And axions, mysterious theoretical particles, are much, much lighter than even the lightest atom. The axion is a hypothetical elementary particle ...

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have built a cancer therapy that makes bacteria and viruses work as a team. In a study published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab shows how their system hides a virus inside a tumor-seeking bacterium, smuggles it past the immune system, and unleashes it inside cancerous tumors.  The new platform combines the bacteria’s tendency to find and attack tumors with the virus’s natural preference for infecting and killing cancerous cells. Tal Danino, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, ...

Pop-up screening for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk held at community pharmacies and large-scale sporting events can identify people with uncontrolled cardiovascular risk factors, according to a study published in JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology, and simultaneously presented at the 73rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand. ASCVD is the leading cause of death worldwide but is often preventable in many cases. Regular preventative screenings can identify modifiable risk factors like ...

What’s Happening From 16th August to 19th September 2025, the Norwegian research vessel R/V Kronprins Haakon will be sailing into the Arctic Ocean for an expedition organised and funded through the prestigious European Research Council Synergy Grant “i2B – Into The Blue”. The i2B Arctic Ocean Expedition team consisting of 25 scientists will collect new geological archives that will shed light on Arctic climate during past ‘warmer-than-present-day’ conditions (interglacial periods). These archives are crucial to understand the ...

A Medical University of South Carolina team reports in Frontiers in Immunology that it has engineered a new type of genetically modified immune cell that can precisely target and neutralize antibody-producing cells complicit in organ rejection. Similar strategies have been used to stimulate the immune system against certain cancers, but Ferreira’s team is the first to show its utility in tamping down immune responses that can lead to organ rejection. More than 50,000 organ transplants take place each year in the U.S. While often lifesaving, these procedures depend on a precise match between donor and recipient genes to avoid rejection. When the immune system detects foreign ...

As the world’s largest wheat producer, China’s annual wheat output reaches 136 million tons, and the stability of its production is directly related to global food security. However, in recent years, China’s wheat imports have continued to rise, reaching 9.96 million tons in 2022. Meanwhile, environmental problems caused by excessive fertilizer application have become increasingly prominent. How to ensure output while reducing resource consumption and environmental costs has become a core issue for sustainable agricultural development. Recently, ...

As a staple food for more than half of the global population, the high and stable yield of rice is directly related to food security. As the world’s largest rice producer, China has increased rice yield per unit through intensive fertilization and flood irrigation, but this model has also brought problems such as soil degradation, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. How to ensure food supply while breaking through resource and environmental constraints? Xusheng Meng and colleagues from Nanjing Agricultural University proposed a green, high-yield, and high-efficiency rice technology system in a review study, providing a solution to this problem. The ...

The North China Plain is an important “granary” in China, with its winter wheat and summer maize planting areas accounting for 73.6% and 30.6% of the national total for wheat and maize respectively. However, its agricultural production has long been trapped in the dilemma of “high input, low efficiency”—fertilizer usage has increased more than 4 times compared with 40 years ago, while grain output has only risen by 1.2 times. Problems such as over-exploitation of water resources and soil degradation have also become increasingly prominent. How to balance ...

A new generation of CRISPR technology developed at UNSW Sydney offers a safer path to treating genetic diseases like Sickle Cell, while also proving beyond doubt that chemical tags on DNA — often thought to be little more than genetic cobwebs — actively silence genes. For decades, scientists have debated whether methyl groups — small chemical clusters that accumulate on DNA — are simply detritus that accumulates in the genome where genes are turned off, or the actual cause of gene repression. But now researchers at UNSW, working with colleagues in the US at the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Memphis), have shown in a paper published recently ...

The number of people living with Parkinson's disease globally has doubled in the past 25 years. Yet the treatment and monitoring of the neurological disease seems many decades behind. Clinicians typically gauge the severity of the disease using subjective rating scales, and a shortage of doctors trained to treat Parkinson's means that people can go months — or years — between clinic visits. This leaves patients in a troubling spot, often unsure how quickly their disease is progressing and whether they are responding appropriately to medications. Now, ...

Australian researchers have found that households with solar panels could boost their returns by selling surplus power directly to their neighbours, known as peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing, helping to stabilise the electricity grid and negotiating a better price than retailers currently offer. Worldwide, around 25 million households already rely on solar panels, with forecasts predicting 100 million by 2030. In 2024, the world installed an estimated 597 GW of solar power, a 33% increase compared to 2023. Australia has one of the highest rates of solar panels ...

A striking photograph of two male saiga antelope sparring on the banks of a steppe lake is the winner of the 2025 BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology image competition. The annual competition spotlights the beauty, struggles, and survival strategies of remarkable life on earth, while celebrating the researchers striving to understand the natural world in the fields of ecology, evolutionary biology, palaeontology, and zoology. Along with the overall winning image, the judges selected winners and runners-up in four categories: Collective ...

Cancer Research UK-funded scientists have uncovered dementia-like behaviour in pancreas cells at risk of turning into cancer. The findings provide clues that could help in the treatment and prevention of pancreatic cancer, a difficult-to-treat disease linked to 6,900 deaths in the UK every year.* The research was published today (15 August) in the journal Developmental Cell**, and was funded by Cancer Research UK, with additional support from Wellcome, the Medical Research Council, and the Biotechnology ...

The medical pros of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) are being exaggerated while the risks are being downplayed, suggest the findings of a survey on the type of information patients and their relatives/friends recall having been given before the procedure, and published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Based on the responses, the researchers calculate that patients were nearly 4 times more likely to recall being told that resulting memory problems were temporary rather than long term. And they were 6 times more likely ...

SGLT-2 inhibitor and GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs should be used in all or almost all adults with type 2 diabetes at higher risk of cardiovascular and kidney complications, and in the majority of adults at moderate risk of complications, say a panel of international experts in The BMJ today. But for those at lower risk, they advise against routinely recommending these drugs, and suggest doctors discuss treatment options with their patients, noting that decisions are likely to be more contextual and based on what’s most important to the individual.  For ...

A large international study has found that spironolactone, a medication for high blood pressure and heart failure, does not reduce the risk of heart-related death or hospitalizations in people with kidney failure receiving dialysis, despite earlier smaller studies suggesting benefit. The findings were published on August 14 in The Lancet and presented at ERA Congress 2025. The study enrolled 2,538 participants from 143 dialysis centres across 12 countries, making it the largest trial to date on spironolactone ...