Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA) is an inherited retinal disease leading to severe vision impairment from early infancy, affecting 2-3 out of every 100,000 newborns. LCA is caused by variants in certain genes from which proteins essential for retinal cell function and survival are made. Mutations in over 20 different genes can cause LCA and in each of those genes, hundreds of different changes, known as genetic variants, can occur.  Importantly, while some of these genetic variants are benign and do not compromise function, other variants cause dysfunction or complete loss of function. Further, for some of these variants, which are called variants ...

A new perspective published in Biocontaminant outlines an urgent scientific roadmap for understanding how common chemicals interact with microbial communities to accelerate the global crisis of antimicrobial resistance. The work, led by Ji Lu from the University of Queensland, highlights why traditional single chemical experiments fail to capture the real drivers of resistance in natural and clinical environments. “Chemicals rarely occur alone in the real world. They mix, react, and interact with diverse microbiomes in ways that can either amplify or suppress antimicrobial resistance,” said Dr ...

Heavy metals in soil are often measured in bulk, but those totals can badly overestimate the real risk to crops, ecosystems and human health, according to a new scientific review. The article, published in Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes, explains that only a fraction of the metal present in soil is actually accessible to plants, microbes and people – a concept known as bioavailability. “Metal pollution in soil is a genuine global concern, but decisions about food safety, clean‑up and land reuse need to be based on ...

A rare and life-threatening kidney disease in children finally has an effective therapy, thanks in large part to pioneering research and clinical leadership from University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital.    The disease, known as C3 glomerulopathy (C3G), is an ultra-rare condition that primarily affects children and young adults. Only around 5,000 Americans have C3G, which causes progressive kidney damage, with more than half of patients reaching end-stage kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis.   Unlike previous treatments for C3G that aimed to alleviate ...

A research team from NIMS, Tohoku University and AIST has developed a new technique for controlling the nanostructures and magnetic domain structures of iron-based soft amorphous ribbons, achieving more than a 50% reduction in core loss compared with the initial amorphous material. The developed material exhibits particularly high performance in the high-frequency range of several tens of kilohertz—required for next-generation, high-frequency transformers and EV drive power supply circuits. This breakthrough is expected to contribute to the advancement of these technologies, development of more energy-efficient electric machines and progress ...

Thulium fiber lasers, operating at a wavelength of 2 micrometers, are valued for applications in medicine, materials processing, and defense. Their longer wavelength makes stray light less damaging compared to the more common ytterbium lasers at 1 micrometer. Yet, despite this advantage, thulium lasers have been stuck at around 1 kilowatt of output power for more than a decade, limited by nonlinear effects and heat buildup. One promising route to break this barrier is inband pumping—switching from diode pumping ...

A new international study led by the Nanobiosystems group at CIC nanoGUNE, is developing miniature, non-invasive, precise robotic catheters for use in reproductive medicine and gynaecological health. This research, which was recently published in the prestigious journal Advanced Materials, has the potential to improve infertility treatments, for example, and enable the highly localised release of drugs and cells. Minimally invasive therapies require precise navigation through complex and delicate anatomical pathways, necessitating medical tools that are small, flexible and highly maneuverable. This study presents a high-yield fabrication method for producing magnetic ...

MINNEAPOLIS — People with impaired kidney function have higher levels of Alzheimer’s biomarkers in their blood, but not an increased risk of dementia, according to a study published December 3, 2025, in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that poor kidney function causes higher levels of Alzheimer’s biomarkers in the blood, it only shows an association. Kidneys remove waste and toxins from the blood, which are then excreted in urine. “Our study found that when the kidneys are not functioning properly, there may be higher levels of Alzheimer’s biomarkers in the blood,” ...

HONOLULU, Dec. 3, 2025 — Have you ever tried yelling underwater? Not only is it difficult to make the noise, but it is rarely audible to those outside of the water. Sound travels differently in mediums of different densities, and that causes a high acoustic impedance ratio between air and water, meaning that sound waves have a tough time breaking the air-water barrier, and most of the sound waves reflect off the barrier rather than penetrating it. To help sound travel between these two mediums, Rutgers University doctoral student Hesam Bakhtiary Yekta simulated a metamaterial that will sit at the air-water interface and improve sound transmission. Bakhtiary Yekta will present his ...

HONOLULU, Dec. 3, 2025 — Many modern buildings are “green buildings,” adhering to a complex set of standards to ensure they are environmentally friendly and sustainably designed, with minimal impact on nature and the humans that inhabit them. These standards can govern everything from energy efficiency to construction materials used for acoustic privacy between rooms. The sheer number of factors to consider when designing such a building can make even veteran architects stumble. Even deciding which construction material to use requires accounting for cost, lifetime carbon emissions, and acoustic performance. Acoustic consultant George Edgar will present ...

A fossil site in Bolivia preserves thousands of traces of dinosaurs who walked, ran, and swam along an ancient coastline, according to a study published December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Raúl Esperante of the Geoscience Research Institute, California, U.S., and colleagues. Bolivia is well known for its abundance of fossil sites preserving dinosaur footprints. These sites provide unique details into the behaviors of ancient species, but most such sites remain unpublished. In this study, Esperante and colleagues report an unprecedented variety of dinosaur tracks at the Carreras Pampas tracksite ...

Dolphins produce a range of vocalizations used for echolocation and communication. These vocalizations vary with social context, environmental conditions, external stimuli, and communication, reflecting their cognitive and behavioral complexity. A study published in PLOS One on December 3, 2025 by Francesco Di Nardo at Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy and colleagues suggests that the frequency and duration of captive dolphin vocalizations may indicate engagement with structured activities. Captive dolphins require ...

Participants in a study who self-reported a stronger desire to have children showed a weaker preference for younger faces compared to those with a weaker desire to have children, according to a study published December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Jingheng Li and colleagues from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, U.K. The preference was unrelated to the potential partners’ perceived wealth or parental prowess. Researchers have long excavated the foundations of attractiveness — the intangible “it” factor that tempts voters, procures job offers and allures romantic partners. Men tend to associate attractiveness with youthful features, presumably ...

Authoritative parenting styles are associated with better mental health and self-esteem among adolescents, while authoritarian parenting styles are associated with depression and lower self-esteem and permissive parenting styles are associated with stress, according to Nepalese study of 583 adolescents Article URL: https://plos.io/44lRwtW Article title: Relationship of parenting styles on depression, anxiety, stress and self-esteem of adolescents Author countries: Nepal Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

A rose by any other name? Not necessarily—how words sound aesthetically correlates with their memorability, study finds Article URL: https://plos.io/4a5P0f8 Article title: Phonemic composition influences words’ aesthetic appeal and memorability Author countries: Austria Funding: This work was supported by a Disruptive Innovation Grant from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Science Fund (grant number: DI_2023-108_MATZINGER_BEALP) awarded to Theresa Matzinger. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...

The odds of iron deficiency in adolescent girls are almost 14 times higher among those who experience heavy menstruation and follow a meat-restricted diet, compared to girls with normal menstruation who eat an omnivorous diet Article URL: https://plos.io/4883ZTd Article title: Exploring the effect of menstrual loss and dietary habits on iron deficiency in teenagers: A cross-sectional study Author countries: Canada, Sweden. Funding: Open access funding provided by Karolinska Institutet. This study was funded by the Southern Health ...

Male infertility is a major issue worldwide and its causes remain unclear. Now, an international team of researchers led by Hiroki Shibuya at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR) in Japan has discovered a key structure in the germ cells of male mice that, when disturbed, leads to deformations in sperm flagellum—the tail that allows sperm to swim. Made possible by the first observation of the mouse flagellar base structure using ultrastructure expansion microscopy, this finding could explain some forms of infertility in human men. The study was published in the scientific journal Science ...

Bumblebees respond to physical disturbance of their nest with a sequence of defensive behaviors that lasts up to 10 minutes, according to a study by Sajedeh Sarlak at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and colleagues, publishing December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One. Although we often think of bumblebees as docile, friendly garden visitors, they will fiercely defend their nest if needed. Bumblebees are important pollinators for both wild plants and crops, and they are often kept in commercial greenhouses, so understanding their defensive behavior is important for both conservation and ...

Cedars-Sinai scientists have developed an experimental drug that repairs DNA and serves as a prototype for a new class of medications that fix tissue damage caused by heart attack, inflammatory disease or other conditions. Investigators describe the workings of the drug, called TY1, in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine. “By probing the mechanisms of stem cell therapy, we discovered a way to heal the body without using stem cells,” said Eduardo Marbán, MD, PhD, executive director of the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai and the study’s senior author. “TY1 ...

Tackling a common childhood virus could open the door to preventing bladder cancer, according to new research funded by Kidney Research UK and York Against Cancer. The study, published in Science Advances by Dr Simon Baker and colleagues at the University of York, suggests that a virus most people pick up in childhood can trigger the type of DNA damage that can lead to bladder cancer later in life. In laboratory studies using the human tissue that lines the urinary tract (urothelium), the team observed DNA damage patterns caused by the cell’s antiviral defences after controlled exposure to BK virus- the childhood infection identified ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Since the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was identified in 1983, roughly 91.4 million people around the world have contracted the virus and an additional 44.1 million have died from related causes. Currently, nearly 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV-1, the version of the virus that causes more than 95% of infections. While significant progress has been made in HIV vaccine research, according to Penn State Professor Dipanjan Pan, there is currently no approved vaccine for HIV. Research is ongoing, though, he ...

In one of the largest African hunter-gatherer ancient-DNA studies to date, population geneticists from Uppsala University in Sweden, and a cognitive archaeologist from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, analysed the DNA of 28 people who lived in southern Africa between 1200 and just a few hundred years ago. It contributes further evidence that southern African hunter-gatherers were some of the earliest human groups with a unique Homo sapiens genetic ancestry tracing back to about 300 000 years ago. This could be done by peering behind the veil of recent migrations, providing a direct window into the region’s ...

In nearly 60 years, heart transplantation has transformed from a daring vision to an established surgical procedure. Since the first adult heart transplant in the United States was performed at Stanford Hospital in 1968, the field has made significant strides. However, challenges remain, including a shortage of donor organs and socioeconomic disparities. A recent review, led by researchers from the Stanford Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery in collaboration with Germany's Helios Hospital, examines the current state, challenges, and future directions of adult heart transplantation in ...

As the scientific community embraces open science principles, the American Physical Society is launching a new open access journal designed to meet the moment. With submissions opening in late February 2026, APS Open Science will publish a diverse range of research outputs while upholding the trusted, rigorous review processes that define APS standards. “Researchers need high-quality options for sharing reliable findings across every stage of the scientific process,” said Jessica Thomas, executive editor at APS. “APS ...

It’s no surprise that dogs benefit people’s mental health. In a paper publishing in the Cell Press journal iScience on December 3, researchers point to a reason as to why: dogs prompt changes in the collection of microbes that live in and on our bodies, resulting in an increase in mental health.  “Raising dogs has beneficial effects, especially for adolescents, and these effects may be mediated ...