Concrete was the foundation of the ancient Roman empire. It enabled Rome’s storied architectural revolution as well as the construction of buildings, bridges, and aqueducts, many of which are still used some 2,000 years after their creation. In 2023, MIT Associate Professor Admir Masic and his collaborators published a paper describing the manufacturing process that gave Roman concrete its longevity: Lime fragments were mixed with volcanic ash and other dry ingredients before the addition of water. Once water is added to this dry mix, heat is produced. As the concrete ...

Whether you’re reaching for a mug, a pencil or someone’s hand, you don’t need to consciously instruct each of your fingers on where they need to go to get a proper grip. The loss of that intrinsic ability is one of the many challenges people with prosthetic arms and hands face. Even with the most advanced robotic prostheses, these everyday activities come with an added cognitive burden as users purposefully open and close their fingers around a target. Researchers at the University of Utah are now using artificial intelligence to solve this problem. By integrating proximity and pressure sensors into a commercial bionic hand, and then training ...

About The Study: This study found short-term, transient risks of low back pain flares associated with some activities but no associations with functional limitations at 1-year follow-up. These findings suggest that people with low back pain who engage in more of these activities do not have better or worse long-term outcomes. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Pradeep Suri, MD, MSc, email pradeep.suri@va.gov. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.47915) Editor’s ...

About The Study: This cohort study of older traditional Medicare beneficiaries who were diagnosed with common metastatic cancers found a mean of 40 to 62 health care contact days in the year after diagnosis. Health care contact days increased from 2008 to 2019, suggesting that treatment advancements and/or care inefficiencies may have imposed additional burdens on beneficiaries. The results of this study suggest that oncology teams should discuss expected contact days and related burdens when ...

NEW YORK, New York, USA, 2 December 2025 -- In a revealing Genomic Press Interview published today in Brain Medicine, Dr. Eric J. Nestler offers a rare glimpse into how curiosity about brain chemistry spawned an international movement in psychiatric research. The Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai describes nearly forty years spent uncovering the molecular secrets of why drugs and stress alter human behavior, research that has fundamentally reshaped how scientists across six continents approach mental illness. What began ...

Background and objectives Preclinical studies of the serotonin 2A (5-HT2A) antagonist deramciclane suggested an anxiolytic profile, which has not been unequivocally established in the clinic. The same receptor profile also indicated that the compound may exhibit antidepressant potential. However, evidence for these effects remains inconclusive. The present study examined the effect of the drug in two preclinical tests with predictive validity for antidepressant activity. Methods The antidepressant-like activity ...

PITTSBURGH, – Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh discovered a promising new biomarker of “complicated” mild- to severe-pediatric traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Unlike a concussion—which usually resolves within weeks—complicated TBI requires at least an overnight hospital stay, signaling a more serious injury. Published today in the Journal of Neurotrauma, this study is first to identify a signature of potentially ...

McGill University researchers have identified a brain function that helps explain why childhood stress raises metabolic health risks for some women later in life. A new study found that variations in the brain’s insulin receptor network affect how women respond to early-life adversity. This effect has a lesser impact in men, suggesting there is a sex-specific process at play. The findings, published in Communications Biology (Nature Portfolio), point to the brain’s insulin receptor network as a promising avenue for earlier detection and future prevention strategies for metabolic syndrome, a major driver of cardiovascular ...

SAN ANTONIO — December 9, 2025 — A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) links quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs) in solar flares to dynamic oscillations in magnetic reconnection, a phenomenon that can drive space weather and affect technology on Earth. This research could help refine traditional solar flare models and provide new insights into the mechanisms driving them. Magnetic reconnection occurs when magnetic field lines in plasma break and reconnect, releasing immense energy into the surrounding atmosphere ...

New York, NY —The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and Hevolution Foundation are pleased to announce the third cohort of the Hevolution/AFAR New Investigator Awardees in Aging Biology and Geroscience Research. This grant program enables junior investigators with labs in the US and Canada, and with at least three years of independent research, to advance research projects in basic biology of aging, as well as geroscience projects that translate advances in basic research on aging biology from the laboratory to the clinic, paving ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  EMBARGOED UNTIL DECEMBER 9, 2025  GeoFlame VISION: Using AI and Satellite Imagery to Predict Future Wildfire Risk  A new computer model produces a dynamic wildfire risk map,  starting with the state of California  Washington, D.C., December 9, 2025 – Wildfires pose a significant threat across the southwestern United States, due to the region’s unique topography and weather conditions. Accurately identifying locations at the highest risk of a severe wildfire is critical ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  EMBARGOED UNTIL DECEMBER 9, 2025  Nationwide Study Suggests that Water Treatment Methods May Impact the Risk of Legionnaires’ Disease  Higher rates of disease are seen in zip codes served by water treatment plants that use chlorine as the primary disinfectant  Washington, D.C., December 9, 2025 – Preliminary results of a nationwide study suggest that the disinfectant used to treat water before it is distributed through pipes may impact the incidence of Legionnaire’s disease in certain parts of the country. The findings will be presented Dec. 9 at the annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis in Washington, D.C.   Waterborne ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  EMBARGOED UNTIL DECEMBER 9, 2025  Oyster Larvae on Drugs Move Slowly and Are Stressed  Study finds that exposure to addictive drugs like fentanyl and ketamine affect the behavior and survival rates of oyster larvae   Washington, D.C., December 9, 2025 – The discharge and prevalence of psychoactive drugs in surface waters has raised concerns about potential risks to ecosystems and public health. Yet there is limited information on the ecotoxicity of these compounds in marine environments and aquaculture.  A study presented on Dec. 9 at the annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis in ...

PULLMAN, Wash. -- Washington State University researchers have discovered how a neural circuit – or a connection between two brain regions – drives relapse after opioid use, a finding that could lead to more effective treatments for opioid use disorders. In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers in the Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience at WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine used a preclinical model to model opioid use in humans and found that reducing the activity within a specific neuronal ...

(ORLANDO, Dec. 9, 2025) Patients with relapsed or refractory (R/R) multiple myeloma who received a combination of teclistamab, a bispecific monoclonal antibody, and daratumumab, a CD38-directed monoclonal antibody, were 83% more likely to be alive without disease progression compared with those who received standard second-line therapies at a median of nearly 35 months of follow-up, according to the results of a new trial presented at the 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition. The ...

PHILADELPHIA – More than half of patients in a Phase III clinical trial who received a limited course of the experimental monoclonal antibody ianalumab for primary immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), an autoimmune disorder that can cause life-threatening bleeding, were able to maintain safe platelet counts without serious bleeding episodes for at least one year. The results were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and presented by collaborators at the 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition Orlando, Florida (LBA-2). ITP is an autoimmune condition where ...

(ORLANDO, Dec. 9, 2025) –– When hospitals were randomly assigned to treat patients undergoing higher-risk non-cardiac surgery with tranexamic acid (TXA) or a placebo, patients who received TXA needed significantly fewer blood transfusions and saw no increase in potentially life-threatening blood clots (thrombosis) after 90 days of follow-up, according to research presented at the 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition. “Our findings confirm that TXA reduces the need for blood transfusion in patients ...

(ORLANDO, Dec. 9, 2025) Patients with immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) who received a first-in-class investigational drug in addition to standard therapy went longer without a bleeding episode that needed urgent treatment or needing another treatment for their ITP, compared with patients who received a placebo in addition to standard therapy. The study is the first to test a novel drug for ITP early in the disease course and was presented at the 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition. “In patients for whom first-line therapy had stopped working, treatment ...

(ORLANDO, Dec. 9, 2025) – In a new trial, the Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor pirtobrutinib increased the rate of survival without disease progression and was well tolerated with a more favorable safety profile when compared with bendamustine plus rituximab (BR) in patients with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL). The data were presented at the 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition. “We were able to prove that pirtobrutinib is an excellent drug both in terms of efficacy and tolerance,” ...

Researchers find that tracking pixels—small pieces of embedded code that can transmit user data to third parties—significantly increase data breach risk on hospital websites. Hilal Atasoy and colleagues analyzed 12 years of archived website data from 1,201 large US hospitals between 2012 and 2023, examining the adoption of pixel tracking and their relationship to data breaches. The authors found pixel tracking in 66% of hospital-year observations, despite stringent privacy regulations. Hospitals using third-party pixels experienced at least a 1.4 percentage point increase in breach probability, representing a 46% ...

Researchers develop a method to detect the destruction of buildings using freely available satellite radar imagery. Daniel Racek and colleagues’ algorithm analyzes publicly available Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar images from the European Space Agency to identify destroyed buildings in conflict zones. The method statistically assesses the visual similarity of locations over time, enabling detection of destruction from a single satellite image every 12 days, without requiring labeled training data or expensive proprietary imagery. Unlike optical ...

A modeling study shows how under some conditions, increasing numbers of households with rooftop solar panels can lead to higher rates for those without their own solar system. When utility customers cancel their accounts after switching to residential solar panels, the utility must spread their fixed costs around to a smaller number of remaining customers, which can lead to rate increases. Charles Sims and colleagues studied how this pecuniary externality affects different income groups using agent-based computational economic modeling of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an area with some of the highest poverty rates in the United States. The authors asked 2,307 TVA residential customers ...

CLEVELAND—Scientists working to enhance brain-computer interface (BCI) technology—which allows people to control devices with their thoughts—have found they can improve the performance of electrodes implanted in the brain by targeted delivery of anti-inflammatory drugs. Case Western Reserve University researchers, in collaboration with Haima Therapeutics, used a novel “platelet-inspired nanoparticle” to deliver an anti-inflammatory drug directly to where BCI electrodes were implanted. The drug doubled the effectiveness of ...

Supramolecular chemistry involves the study of self-assembly of discrete molecules that are used to build functional large structures. Often, these molecules are allowed to self-assemble into one-dimensional polymeric structures (supramolecular polymers or SPs) in a suitable environment, and the dynamic molecular interactions are noted for tweaking the environment and improving the features of the resulting SPs. They are being explored as the next-generation polymeric materials with applications in electronics, soft-robotics, ...

Liquid biopsy is increasingly recognized as a promising tool for cancer detection and treatment monitoring, yet its effectiveness is often limited by the extremely low levels of tumor-derived DNA circulating in the blood. To address this challenge, researchers led by Professor Junseok W Hur from Korea University College of Medicine, in collaboration with multiple partners, have developed MUTE-Seq, a highly sensitive CRISPR-based method designed to detect cancer mutations present at exceptionally low frequencies while simultaneously reducing sequencing costs and background error noise. The study was first made available ...