Melbourne, Australia [18 March 2026] – For 15 years, the Gilead Australia Medical Fellowships have supported Australian led clinical research focused on generating evidence to support improved patient outcomes in real world healthcare settings. Since its inception, the program has awarded more than $4 million* to Australian led research initiatives,  focusing on strengthening models of care, addressing unmet medical needs, and reducing barriers to diagnosis and treatment across communities throughout Australia. The Fellowships support research projects across priority disease areas including HIV, chronic viral hepatitis, ...

Fashion insiders and beauty magazines have long cited the “20-year-rule” — the idea that clothing trends often resurface every two decades.  According to Northwestern University scientists, that observation isn’t just anecdotal. It’s a mathematical reality. In a new study, the Northwestern team developed a new mathematical model showing that fashion trends tend to cycle roughly every 20 years. By analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women’s clothing spanning from 1869 to today, the team found that styles rise in popularity, fall out of favor and then eventually experience renewal. Along with supporting common ...

The combined Mediterranean and blood pressure lowering diet (MIND) may slow the structural changes related to brain ageing, finds research published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.    This diet is associated with less tissue loss over time, especially grey matter—the brain’s information processing hub, with a key role in memory, learning, and decision-making—and less ventricular enlargement, which reflects brain atrophy, where tissue loss is accompanied ...

Detection of a bowel cancer marker (CDH1) in wastewater may offer a new community level early warning system for the disease, suggests a proof of concept study published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.   Wastewater surveillance could complement traditional screening methods and could help target areas for cost-effective, practical community screening, particularly amid rising rates of the disease among young people, say the researchers.   In the USA alone, there are an estimated 154,000+ new cases of bowel cancer every year, making this the third most common cancer and the second leading cause of ...

Green investors often boast that they can support sustainability without sacrificing returns. But new research from Texas McCombs suggests otherwise. It also offers governments opportunities to raise more money from those investors for sustainable projects. In Germany’s sovereign bond market, buyers are quietly paying a premium for green bonds — by accepting lower yields on them. So finds Aaron Pancost, assistant professor of finance, who calls the difference a “greenium.” Pancost’s central ...

A new study from the University of British Columbia has found that artificial turf fields across Metro Vancouver leach 6PPD-quinone, a chemical known to kill coho salmon, into municipal stormwater systems—and the contamination persists long after the fields are installed. Researchers traced the pollution to crumb rubber infill made from recycled tires, a material widely used on synthetic turf fields. The team found it consistently released 6PPD-quinone and other contaminants across fields of different ages. “An average turf field contains about 125 tonnes of crumb rubber, roughly 20,000 tires,” said Katie Moloney, a PhD student ...

A new study has introduced a more accurate way to evaluate how biochar interacts with water, offering important insights for agriculture, soil management, and environmental sustainability. Biochar, a carbon-rich material produced from biomass, is widely used to improve soil quality and water retention. However, understanding how biochar affects soil water behavior has long been challenging due to limitations in existing measurement methods. Researchers have now developed a new approach called the dynamic contact angle method, which provides ...

A new study has found that biochar made from agricultural waste such as chestnut shells and vine prunings could help deliver beneficial compounds more effectively in animal feed, offering a promising alternative to antibiotics in livestock production. The research, published in Biochar, explores how biochar can act as a carrier for lysozyme, a natural antimicrobial enzyme commonly found in egg whites. Scientists developed a simple and environmentally friendly method to attach lysozyme onto biochar particles and tested how well the system works under conditions ...

Health promotion, education, and behavior assistant professor Leila Larson conducts her nutrition-focused maternal and child health research all over the world, and South Carolinians will soon benefit from her expertise. With funding from the USC Collaborative for Health Equity Research (CHEER), an equity-driven pilot project program recently established by the USC Office of the Provost, Larson has launched a new study focused on pica (i.e., the craving and consumption of non-food items, like ice, and sometimes earth, like clay or soil). “Pica impacts pregnant women across the globe, including ...

A two-drug combination frequently used in anti-aging research causes brain damage in mice, University of Connecticut researchers report in the March 16 issue of PNAS. The findings should make doctors cautious about prescribing the drug combo prophylactically, but also suggest new ways to understand multiple sclerosis. “When you administer this cocktail to an animal, young or old, the myelin is damaged, which makes it disappear. Even worse in the young animals” than in the aged ones, says UConn School of Medicine immunologist ...

Exercise science assistant professor Elizabeth Adams is using her expertise in healthy dietary patterns among children and families to lead a five-year study focused on improving nutrition through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). With support from a $3.2 million National Institutes of Health grant, Adams is working to increase SNAP recipients’ use of fruit and vegetable incentive programs to improve long-term wellness and reduce health care costs. Across the United States, more than 34 million individuals (nine million of them children) experience food insecurity, ...

First study linking fructose metabolism by brain immune cells to glioblastoma growth Blocking a key fructose transporter activated tumor-killing immune cells in mice Findings suggest a promising new drug target to improve brain cancer treatments CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered that specialized immune cells within the glioblastoma tumor metabolize fructose to suppress immune responses and promote tumor growth, reports a study published on March 17 in the Proceedings of the National ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Shoulder replacement is the third most common joint-replacement surgery in the U.S. and is likely to become more common as the population ages, according to Penn State researchers. Though most patients go home on the same day as their surgery, those with greater health risks or serious injuries are admitted to the hospital for shoulder replacement. Patients who experience complications like infection or sepsis sometimes need to be readmitted to the hospital for treatment at a later date.   In a study published in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery ...

Research Highlights: Excess fat stored around the waist (belly weight or visceral fat), indicated by measuring waist size, was more strongly associated with heart failure risk than body mass index (BMI). Systemic inflammation played a key role in the relationship between extra weight stored around the waist, or central obesity, and heart failure. About one-quarter to one-third of the link between abdominal fat and heart failure appeared to be explained by inflammation. The mediating role of inflammation in the association between central obesity and heart failure suggests that reducing inflammation ...

Research Highlights: Adults with prediabetes by their early 30s who had high fasting glucose levels, in addition to other risk factors such as obesity, high cholesterol or high blood pressure, had the highest risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Individuals who had high fasting glucose levels (100-125 mg/dL) and who met the criteria for treatment with a GLP-1RA medication were more likely to progress from prediabetes to Type 2 diabetes within five years. Using blood test results and risk factors to identify which young adults with prediabetes had the highest risk of progressing to Type 2 diabetes may help accelerate treatment ...

March 17, 2026-- Postpartum uninsurance declined among Black women in non-expansion states during the COVID-19 continuous Medicaid coverage policy, but racial gaps persisted, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The research is the first to explicitly examine how the policy affected racial equity in postpartum insurance coverage while also considering states’ Medicaid expansion status under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The study is published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Extending ...

Going to the grocery store these days can be a painful experience, with record-high price hikes biting into Canadian food budgets. However, as many societies around the world already know, a cheap, plentiful source of protein is literally at our feet: insects, especially crickets, grasshoppers, ants and beetles. While entomophagy — the eating of insects — has lagged in the U.S. and Canada, a new study by Concordia researchers found that there is some interest in the dietary practice, with some demographic groups showing more ...

DETROIT – A research team led by Wayne State University was awarded a $473,566, three-year grant from the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) for a major collaborative initiative focused on enhanced phosphorus removal at the nation’s largest single-site wastewater treatment facility. The GLWA Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF) serves 77 communities — including Detroit — and manages flows from a nearly 1,000‑square‑mile sewer shed. The project aims to protect the Rouge River and Lake Erie by improving phosphorus removal efficiency and ...

Every year, millions of people are diagnosed with cancer globally; however, current treatments are limited by disease complexity. A study published March 17th in the open-access journal in PLOS Biology by Tianyu Jiang at Shandong University, Qingdao, China and colleagues suggests that Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 (EcN) may be engineered with anticancer agents to treat cancerous tumors in mice. Bacteria inhabit and interact with the human body, playing a major role in both health and disease. However, the therapeutic efficacy of engineered bacteria-based cancer therapies has ...

In a study involving data from thousands of people, the risk of a new coronary heart disease diagnosis was statistically associated with bloodstream levels of nine specific molecules that are produced by gut microbes. Danxia Yu of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, U.S., and colleagues present these findings on March 17th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine. The human digestive tract naturally contains a large population of microbes. Different people have different proportions of different species of gut microbes, which produce different molecules during their normal, metabolic ...

WASHINGTON — Scientists at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered a new dual function for a well-known cancer-related protein called ezrin. This finding could potentially open the door to new treatments for osteosarcoma, the most common bone cancer in children and young adults, as well as other cancers that are ezrin-dependent. The finding appeared March 17, 2026, in the journal Science Signaling. For decades researchers believed that ezrin was only active in its open form at the cell membrane. ...

A robot that can locate lost items on command – this is the latest development at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). It combines knowledge from the internet with a spatial map of its surroundings to efficiently find the objects being sought. The new robot from Prof. Angela Schoellig’s TUM Learning Systems and Robotics Lab looks like a broomstick on wheels with a camera mounted at the top. It is one of the first robots that not only integrates image understanding but also applies it to a clearly defined task. To find a pair of glasses misplaced in the kitchen, for example, the robot has to look around and ...

An international team of researchers, including physicists from HSE MIEM, has demonstrated that nonmagnetic impurities can help more accurately reveal Majorana zero modes—quantum states considered promising building blocks for quantum computing. The researchers found that these impurities shift the energy levels that typically obscure the Majorana signal, while leaving the mode itself largely unaffected, thereby making its spectral peak more distinct. The study has been published in Research. Majorana ...

Scientists at HSE University have identified a molecular mechanism underlying aggressive breast cancer. They found that the signals supporting tumour growth originate not from the tumour itself but from its microenvironment. The researchers also demonstrated that reduced levels of the IGFBP6 protein in the tumour microenvironment lead to the accumulation of macrophages—immune cells associated with a higher risk of cancer recurrence. These findings already make it possible to assess patient risk more accurately and may, in the future, enable the development of drugs that target cells of the ...

Heart disease is the leading cause of adult death worldwide, making cardiovascular disease diagnosis and management a global health priority. An echocardiogram, or cardiac ultrasound, is one of the most commonly used imaging tools employed by physicians to diagnose a variety of heart diseases and conditions.   Most standard echocardiograms provide two-dimensional visual images (2D) of the three-dimensional (3D) cardiac anatomy. These echocardiograms often capture hundreds of 2D slices or views of a beating heart that can enable physicians to make clinical assessments ...