In the Middle Ages, a plague killed a third of Europe’s population. Fleas carried the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, transmitting the Black Death from infected rats to millions of people.  Another, earlier strain of Y. pestis emerged 5,000 years ago in the Bronze Age. It infected people throughout Eurasia for 2,000 years and then vanished. Unlike the Middle Age plague bacterium, this earlier Bronze Age strain could not be transmitted by fleas. How the plague circulated for so long across a vast area has long been a mystery.  Now, ...

December 8, 2025 — Millions of people already chat about their mental health with large language models (LLMs), the conversational form of artificial intelligence. Some providers have integrated LLM-based mental healthcare tools into routine workflows. John Torous, MD, MBI and colleagues, of the Division of Digital Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, urge clinicians to take immediate action to ensure these tools are safe and helpful, not wait for ideal evaluation methodology to be developed. In the November issue ...

A good night’s sleep is more than a luxury: New research from Oregon Health & Science University suggests that insufficient sleep may shorten your life. The study published today in the journal SLEEP Advances. Researchers tapped a vast, nationwide database looking for survey trends associated with average life expectancy county by county. They compared county-level data about average life expectancy with comprehensive survey data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2019 and 2025. As a behavioral driver for life expectancy, sleep stood ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Intellicule, a software company whose solutions determine the 3D structures of biomolecules imaged with cryogenic-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), has received a $217,941 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant from the National Institutes of Health. Daisuke Kihara, who leads Intellicule, said the grant will be used to develop software technology that could impact precision medicine. “It will have the potential to accelerate the development of novel drugs by offering precise structural information that can guide the design of molecules with improved ...

New York, NY (December 8, 2025) – A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has uncovered why children with the same leukemia-causing gene mutation can have dramatically different outcomes: it depends on when in development the mutation first occurs. The study, led by Elvin Wagenblast, PhD, Assistant Professor of Oncological Sciences, and Pediatrics, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was published this week in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. It shows that leukemia ...

Potsdam/Leipzig. The Reinhard Süring Foundation's 2025 Research Award goes to Leipzig-based atmospheric researcher Dr. Cristofer Jiménez for his contributions to a remote sensing technology that makes it possible to study the interactions between particles and clouds much better than ever before. The so-called dual-field-of-view polarisation lidar is based on two different aperture angles, which are used to observe and compare the reflections of laser beams in the atmosphere. Every three years, the Reinhard Süring Foundation Research Prize honours young scientists for outstanding work in a subfield of meteorology. In 2025, the prize was awarded for "New ...

TORONTO, Dec. 8 2025 — While targeted radiation can be an effective treatment for brain tumours, subsequent potential necrosis of the treated areas can be hard to distinguish from the tumours on a standard MRI. A new study published today led by a York University professor in the Lassonde School of Engineering found that a novel AI-based method is better able to distinguish between the two types of lesions on advanced MRI than the human eye alone, a discovery that could help clinicians more accurately identify and treat the issues.   “The study shows, for the first time, that novel attention-guided ...

Abstinent smokers experience increased pain sensitivity during withdrawal, to the point that they often require more pain relief after surgery. Why? New from JNeurosci, Zhijie Lu, from Fudan University Minhang Hospital, and Kai Wei, from Shanghai Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital, led a team of researchers to explore brain activity linking nicotine withdrawal and pain sensitivity.  The researchers found that 30 abstinent ...

UC San Diego Health has appointed Alexander Khalessi, MD, MBA, as the new chief innovation officer. Additionally, he will serve as interim assistant vice chancellor for Health Sciences Innovation and AI at UC San Diego. In this dual role, Khalessi will shape UC San Diego Health innovation strategy and lead the integration of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), across the health system and academic enterprise. His appointment reflects UC San Diego Health’s commitment to accelerating innovations that support clinicians, strengthen ...

Public-key encryption is essential for secure communications, eliminating the need for pre-shared keys. In the information age, our digital lives, from online payments to private communications, depend on a powerful technology known as the "public-key cryptosystem." This can be envisioned as a "digital safe" with two distinct keys: a public key for anyone to encrypt information, and a private key, held only by the recipient, for decryption. The security of algorithms like RSA is based on classical mathematical problems, such as factoring a large integer ...

A new study reveals that the human brain processes spoken language in a sequence that closely mirrors the layered architecture of advanced AI language models. Using electrocorticography data from participants listening to a narrative, the research shows that deeper AI layers align with later brain responses in key language regions such as Broca’s area. The findings challenge traditional rule-based theories of language comprehension and introduce a publicly available neural dataset that sets a new benchmark for studying how the brain constructs meaning. In a study published in Nature Communications, ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  Embargoed For Release Until December 8, 2025  Missed Signals: Virginia’s Septic Strategies Overlook Critical Timing, Study Warns  Washington, D.C., December 8, 2025 – A new study from the University of Maryland’s Jerin Tasnim, reveals that Virginia's current approach to managing septic system failures misses a critical factor: the time-varying relationship between hydrological stressors and septic system performance. This gap limits the state's ability to proactively identify and intervene in high-risk areas before failures occur—and before ...

ORLANDO – Serious side effects, including neurotoxicity and intestinal inflammation, that appear weeks or months after patients receive CAR T cell therapy for multiple myeloma share a common immune root cause, are associated with high rates of death unrelated to cancer relapse—primarily infection—and may be avoidable. The new research findings were presented today at the 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition (Abstracts 14221 and 12231) by scientists from the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC) of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn’s Perelman ...

Rising sea levels along coastlines not only threaten populations, but also pose a danger to agricultural crops, which may be damaged by surging amounts of saltwater. Researchers have, in response, sought to improve salt-tolerance in plants. In a newly published paper, an international team of scientists reports the identification of cell traits that are critical to tolerating saltwater inundation—a finding that potentially offers new pathways for creating plants that can survive in harsh environments. The research, which appears in the journal Current Biology, focuses ...

DECEMBER 8, 2025—(BRONX, NY)—Adults with chronic pain who participated in New York State's (NYS) Medical Cannabis Program were significantly less likely to require prescription opioids, according to a new study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine and led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System. “Chronic pain and opioid addiction are two of the most pressing health challenges in the United States,” said Deepika E. Slawek, M.D., M.S., the study’s lead author, ...

Immunotherapy for sepsis is effective when doctors tailor the treatment precisely to the patient’s immune system condition. While earlier research showed little benefit of immunotherapy in sepsis, a new study demonstrates that a targeted approach of immunotherapy does improve clinical outcomes. This is reported by a consortium of 33 hospitals in JAMA, led by Radboud university medical center and the Hellenic Institute for the Study of Sepsis. In sepsis, the immune system responds incorrectly to an infection, which can lead to life-threatening organ ...

About The Study: This cohort study of adults ages 45 or older with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection found a significant excess risk of cardiovascular events over 1 year, comparable in magnitude to influenza infection. These findings underscore the importance of RSV as a potential risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and highlight the need for vaccination to mitigate this burden.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Anders Hviid, MSC, DrMedSci, email aii@ssi.dk. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For ...

About The Study: This economic evaluation found that insurance premiums have increased at 3 times the rate of workers’ earnings since 1999, accompanied by escalating hospital prices. Health insurance prices increased at rates close to hospital prices during the COVID-19 pandemic but have since stabilized. This volatility reflects both pandemic-era shifts in health care utilization (e.g., limited clinician visits) and higher retained earnings for insurers. Corresponding Author: To ...

About The Study: In this cohort study, participation in New York State’s medical cannabis program was associated with reduced prescription opioid receipt during 18 months of prospective follow-up, accounting for unregulated cannabis use.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Deepika E. Slawek, MD, MPH, MS, email dslawek@montefiore.org. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.6496) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions ...

Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is a devastating neurological disorder that often leads to permanent neural dysfunction. Current treatments fail to address the core challenges of insufficient intrinsic axonal regeneration, lack of directional guidance, and an inhibitory pathological microenvironment. There is an urgent need for synergistic therapeutic strategies that integrate structural support, molecular regulation, and microenvironment optimization to achieve effective neural function recovery. Now, a joint research team from Zhejiang University and Fuzhou University has developed a collaborative ...

Cancer remains one of the most critical global public health challenges, exerting profound social, economic, and clinical burdens while limiting gains in human life expectancy. Despite advances in surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy, treatment failure and cancer recurrence are frequently driven by a subset of resistant tumor cells that evade conventional programmed cell death pathways. The scientific community has thus been actively exploring strategies to engage alternative intracellular “death switches” within malignant cells. In recent years, ...

Introduction Trace liquid analysis is crucial in fields such as biomedical diagnosis, environmental monitoring, and chemical process control. Traditional detection technologies often face bottlenecks including insufficient sensitivity, bulky equipment, and complex operations. Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) technology has emerged as a powerful tool for trace detection due to its molecular fingerprint identification capability. However, conventional SERS suffers from limitations such as low signal collection efficiency and intricate ...

Osaka, Japan – Individuals with type 2 diabetes often have a higher incidence of tooth decay, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Recent evidence indicates that hyperglycemia could lead to the overwhelming presence of sugars not only in urine but also in saliva, yet its contribution to the development, or pathogenesis, of tooth decay is still unknown. Researchers have now been able to demonstrate that this is directly influenced by blood sugar migration to saliva, changing the bacterial populations in the mouth to promote cavity development. In a study recently published in Microbiome, ...

During the year-end holiday season, the suicide rate declines, U.S. health statistics show. The month of December typically has the year’s lowest average daily suicide rate. And yet each year at this time, some news publications repeat the persistent but incorrect belief that suicides rise around the holidays. The Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania has been tracking this phenomenon for more than two decades, since the 1999-2000 holiday season. Last year, during the 2024-25 holiday season, December was ...

Astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have helped uncover new clues about the longest-lasting cosmic explosion ever observed, a gamma-ray burst that lasted nearly seven hours. The event, known as GRB 250702B, challenges decades of understanding about how and why these bursts occur.  Gamma-ray bursts are intense flashes of high-energy light produced by catastrophic cosmic events, usually lasting just a few seconds or minutes. But GRB 250702B broke all known records. After its initial detection by space-based observatories, researchers used some of the world’s largest ground-based telescopes ...