Loneliness is common and is a strong and independent predictor of depression and poor health outcomes, according to a new study published July 9, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Dr. Oluwasegun Akinyemi, a Senior Research Fellow at the Howard University College of Medicine, Washington DC, U.S. Loneliness has emerged as a significant public health concern in the United States, with profound implications for mental and physical health. In the new study, researchers analyzed Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data collected via phone surveys between 2016 and 2023. The study population included 47,318 non-institutionalized adults living in the U.S., predominantly ...

Excitons – bound pairs of electrons and electron hole – are quasiparticles that can arise in solids. While so-called “bright” excitons emit light and are therefore accessible, dark excitons are optically inactive. As a result, they have a significantly longer lifetime – which makes them ideal for storing and controlling quantum states and using them for advanced methods to generate entanglement. Gregor Weihs and his team from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, together with researchers in Dortmund, ...

An international study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has identified a promising strategy to enhance the safety of nanomedicines, advanced therapies often used in cancer and vaccine treatments, by using drugs already approved by the FDA for unrelated conditions. The study was published today in Science Advances. Their research suggests that repurposing existing medications can reduce harmful immune responses associated with nanoparticles. These ultra-small particles are designed ...

Despite widespread human impacts to wildlife diversity worldwide, many fish communities on the seafloor have maintained their uniqueness, reports a new study led by Zoë Kitchel, formerly of Rutgers University, and colleagues, published July 9 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate.  Around the world, humans have transformed ecosystems through development, hunting and fishing, invasive species and climate change. On land and in freshwater ecosystems, these changes have typically led to a process called homogenization, where the types ...

Somali women describe a complex and shifting tradition of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in Somalia, according to a study published July 9, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Zamzam I.A. Ali from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK and the Mayo Clinic, US, and colleagues.  Female genital mutilation/cutting, which increases the risks of immediate and long-term psychological, obstetric, genitourinary and sexual and reproductive health complications, has no health benefits. It continues to be a human rights issue globally, with the UN and the Human Rights Council calling for a complete end to the practice. ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As summer kicks into full gear and people are spending more time outside, there’s one thing on many people’s minds — ticks. Tick season is starting earlier and lasting longer, and ticks are popping up in areas they haven’t been found before, expanding the risk of tick-borne viruses. One emerging tick-borne virus in North America — including in Pennsylvania — is the Powassan virus (POWV), which can cause encephalitis, seizures, paralysis and ...

As waiting rooms fill up, doctors get increasingly burnt out, and surgeries take longer to schedule and more get cancelled, humanoid surgical robots offer a solution. That’s the argument that UC San Diego robotics expert Michael Yip makes in a perspective piece out July 9 in Science Robotics.  Why? Today’s surgical robots are costly pieces of equipment designed for specialized tasks and can only be operated by highly trained physicians. However, this model doesn’t scale. Despite the drastic improvements in artificial intelligence and autonomy for industrial and humanoid robots in the past year, these improvements haven’t ...

An estimated 4 million children undergo surgical procedures in hospitals across the United States each year. Although postoperative complications, such as infections, can pose significant health risks to kids, timely detection following hospital discharge can prove challenging.   A new study published in Science Advances — and led by researchers at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and University of Alabama at Birmingham — is the first to use consumer wearables to quickly and precisely predict postoperative complications in children and shows potential for facilitating faster treatment ...

New York, NY — July 9, 2025 — A study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai shows that exposure to lead during pregnancy and early childhood may accelerate the rate at which children forget information—a critical marker of memory impairment that may have implications for learning and development. Using delayed matching-to-sample task (DMTS)—a cognitive task that can be used to evaluate underlying neurobehavioral functions, such as attention and working memory, and has been demonstrated to be sensitive to metal neurotoxicants—the study examined how both prenatal ...

Imagine a physician attempting to reach a cancerous nodule deep within a patient's lung – a target the size of a pea, hidden behind a maze of critical blood vessels and airways that shift with every breath. Straying one millimeter off course could puncture a major artery, and falling short could mean missing the cancer entirely, allowing it to spread untreated.  This is the high-stakes reality physicians face in thousands of procedures daily, where accuracy is critical and the task is complicated by anatomical obstacles that are non-penetrable or sensitive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) and robots help address these challenges and ...

Strengthening school students’ resilience to disinformation requires more than isolated interventions on source criticism. A new study from Uppsala University shows that short teaching interventions on disinformation have no long-term effect on upper secondary school students’ ability to distinguish between credible and misleading news. The results are now published in the scholarly journal PLOS One and are based on a study of 459 Swedish upper secondary school students. The study, supported by the Swedish Institute ...

Andy Jagoda, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai, has received the prestigious Edward W. Gilmore Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). He was presented with this honor Wednesday, July 9, at the New York ACEP Scientific Assembly in Bolton Landing, New York. This award honors Dr. Jagoda for his significant contributions to the field through education, leadership, mentoring, and advancing the quality of emergency care. It recognizes Dr. Jagoda’s lifelong commitment to, and lasting impact on, the specialty of emergency medicine ...

The drugs, sutezolid and delpazolid, have demonstrated strong antimicrobial activity and a notably better safety profile compared to linezolid, with potential to replace this current cornerstone in the treatment of drug-resistant TB. The findings were published on July 8, 2025, in two peer-reviewed articles in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, one of the world’s leading journals in the field of infectious disease medicine. Research partners in Germany included the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), Munich, ...

For the first time, a fluorescent-guided nerve imaging agent shows promise for use in humans, according to a paper published in Nature Communications. The study sought to evaluate the safety of bevonescein, a synthetic peptide-dye conjugate thought to be applicable for intraoperative nerve-specific fluorescence imaging. Eben Rosenthal, MD, chair of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, served as the paper’s senior and corresponding author, and Sarah Rohde, MD, MMHC, division chief of Head and Neck Surgery, is ...

Koalas are a nationally endangered and iconic species in Australia, yet their populations are rapidly declining due to habitat loss, fragmentation, and disease, and very little is known about the fine-scale movements of koalas – especially when they’re on the ground. New research reveals that koalas only spend around 10 minutes per day on the ground, but this ground-time is associated with two-thirds of recorded koala deaths. “Koalas are mostly tree-dwelling, but due to extensive land clearing, they’re increasingly forced to travel on the ground, which puts them at serious risk of injury and death,” ...

The future of sustained space habitation depends on our ability to grow fresh food away from Earth. The revolutionary new collaborative Moon-Rice project is using cutting-edge experimental biology to create an ideal future food crop that can be grown in future deep-space outposts, as well as in extreme environments back on Earth. Modern space exploration relies heavily on resupplies of food from Earth, but this tends to be largely pre-prepared meals that rarely contain fresh ingredients. To counteract the negative effects that the space ...

A new study, published in Addiction, shines a light on how industries associated with health harms—such as tobacco, fossil fuels, and in this case, alcohol—can distort the evaluation of scientific research through industry-friendly commentary.  A team of researchers led by UVic’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR), analyzed 268 critiques of alcohol and health studies published online since 2010 by the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research, or ISFAR.  ISFAR describes themselves as an international group of “invited physicians and scientists who are specialists in their fields and committed ...

Plastic waste pollutes oceans across all regions of the world. Marine animals may become entangled in larger plastic debris such as nets and bags or mistake smaller pieces for food. Ingested plastic can block or injure the gastrointestinal tract. The smallest plastic particles in the micro and nano range are mostly excreted, but a small proportion can pass through the intestinal wall and enter the bloodstream. So how much nanoplastic is actually present in the oceans? Most scientific attention has so far been focussed ...

Wild relatives of cultivated plants are a vital source of genetic diversity for improving crops and provide a valuable reservoir of resistance against biotic and abiotic stressors. Although their value has been recognised for decades, technological obstacles have long hindered their exploration. Thanks to advances in high-throughput genomic research, the same tools can now be used in crops and their wild relatives. An international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute studied structural genome evolution in barley (Hordeum vulgare) and Hordeum bulbosum. For this study, Dr. Frank Blattner collected H. bulbosum ...

Scientists have produced the first detailed characterisation of the changes that weight loss causes in human fat tissue by analysing hundreds of thousands of cells. They found a range of positive effects, including clearing out of damaged, ageing cells, and increased metabolism of harmful fats. The researchers say the findings help to better understand how weight loss leads to health improvements at a molecular level, which in the future could help to inform the development of therapies for diseases such as type 2 diabetes. The study, published in the journal Nature, compared samples ...

A new study from the University of Pittsburgh shows for the first time how exercise improves cancer outcomes and enhances response to immunotherapy in mice by reshaping the gut microbiome. The research, published in the journal Cell, found that these benefits are driven by a specific compound called formate, which is produced by gut bacteria in exercised mice and was also associated with better outcomes in patients with melanoma. “We already knew that exercise increases the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapies, and we separately knew that exercise changes the microbiome in mice and humans,” said ...

About The Study: In this randomized clinical trial of antihypertensive chronotherapy, bedtime dosing provided better control of nocturnal blood pressure and improved the circadian rhythm, without reducing the efficacy on mean daytime or 24-hour blood pressure, or increasing the risk of nocturnal hypotension. These findings support the potential advantages of bedtime administration and offer new evidence to guide future research on antihypertensive chronotherapy.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Xiaoping Chen, MD, email xiaopingchen15@126.com. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.19354) Editor’s ...

About The Study: This cross-sectional study including 426,000 children in Denmark found that body mass index (BMI) outcomes of COVID-19 pandemic–related control policies and restrictions were not exclusively observed among children with obesity, which suggests that pandemic-related mitigation policies targeting children and adolescents in all BMI categories are warranted. The findings of this study highlight differences among children of varying ages and BMI classes.  Corresponding Author: To contact ...

Picture juicy red tomatoes on the vine. What do you see? Some tomato varieties have straight vines. Others are branched. The question is why. New research from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) provides the strongest evidence to date that the answer lies in what are called cryptic mutations. The findings have implications for agriculture and medicine, as they could help scientists fine-tune plant breeding techniques and clinical therapeutics. Cryptic mutations are differences in DNA that don’t affect physical traits unless certain other genetic changes occur at the same time. CSHL Professor & HHMI Investigator Zachary Lippman has ...

Enzymes catalyze chemical reactions in organisms - without which life would not be possible. Leveraging AlphaFold2 artificial intelligence, researchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have now succeeded in analyzing the laws of their evolution on a large scale. In the journal Nature*, they describe the parts of enzymes that change comparatively quickly and the parts that remain practically unchanged over time. These findings are relevant to the development of new antibiotics, for example. Enzymes resemble ...