A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego is making it easier for researchers from a broad range of backgrounds to understand how different species are evolutionarily related, and support the transformative biological and medical applications that rely on these species trees. The researchers developed a scalable, automated and user-friendly tool called ROADIES that allows scientists to infer species trees directly from raw genome data, with less reliance on the domain expertise and computational resources currently required. Species trees are critical ...

While text-to-video artificial intelligence models like OpenAI’s Sora are rapidly metamorphosing in front of our eyes, they have struggled to produce metamorphic videos. Simulating a tree sprouting or a flower blooming is harder for AI systems than generating other types of videos because it requires the knowledge of the physical world and can vary widely. But now, these models have taken an evolutionary step. Computer scientists at the University of Rochester, Peking University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and National University of Singapore ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 5 May 2025    Follow @Annalsofim on X, Facebook, Instagram, threads, and Linkedin         Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on ...

Discovering new, powerful electrolytes is one of the major bottlenecks for designing next-generation batteries for electric vehicles, phones, laptops and grid-scale energy storage. The most stable electrolytes are not always the most conductive. The most efficient batteries are not always the most stable. And so on. “The electrodes have to satisfy very different properties at the same time. They always conflict with each other,” said Ritesh Kumar, an Eric and Wendy Schimdt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Amanchukwu Lab at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of ...

TAMPA, Fla. (May 5, 2025) — People living with HIV are less likely to receive potentially lifesaving cancer treatment if they live in communities with lower income levels and educational attainment, according to a new national study led by researchers from Moffitt Cancer Center. In the study, published in Cancer, researchers looked at cancer treatment records for more than 31,000 adults with HIV who were diagnosed with one of 14 common cancers between 2004 and 2020. They found that 16.5% of them did not receive the recommended first line curative treatment for ...

The Min protein system prevents abnormal cell division in bacteria by forming oscillating patterns between the ends of a cell (“poles”). Despite decades of theoretical work, predicting the protein concentrations at which oscillations start and whether cells can maintain them under different conditions has been a challenge. Understanding these thresholds is important because they reveal how efficient this self-organizing system is in guiding division to the right place. UC San Diego researchers have engineered ...

Protons are the basis of bioenergetics. We know them, in our everyday life, from the pH values we see on various soaps and lotions. But the ability to move them through biological systems is essential for life. A new study shows for the first time that proton transfer is directly influenced by the spin of electrons, when measured in chiral biological environments such as proteins. In other words, proton movement in living systems is not purely chemical; it is also a quantum process involving electron spin and molecular chirality. The quantum process directly affects ...

Friendship comes with complex pros and cons – possibly explaining why some individuals are less sociable, according to a new study of gorillas. Scientists examined over 20 years of data on 164 wild mountain gorillas, to see how their social lives affected their health. Costs and benefits changed depending on the size of gorilla groups, and differed for males and females. For example, friendly females in small groups didn’t get ill very often but had fewer offspring – while those in large groups got ill more but had higher birth rates. Meanwhile, males with strong social bonds tended to get ill more – ...

Two thousand years before the Inca empire dominated the Andes, a lesser-known society known as the Chavín Phenomenon shared common art, architecture, and materials throughout modern-day Peru. Through agricultural innovations, craft production, and trade, Chavín shaped a growing social order and laid the foundations for hierarchical society among the high peaks. But one of their most powerful tools wasn’t farming. It was access to altered states of consciousness. That’s according to a new study that uncovered the earliest-known direct evidence of the use of psychoactive plants in the Peruvian Andes. A team ...

Muscle cells contain their own circadian clocks and disrupting them with shift work can have a profound impact on ageing, according to new research. A study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) contributes to the growing evidence of the damage shift work has on health. The King’s College London team revealed how muscle cells have an intrinsic timekeeping mechanism that regulates protein turnover, modulating muscle growth and function. At night, the muscle clock activates the breakdown of defective proteins, replenishing muscles while the body rests. Altering this intrinsic ...

Whether designing a window in an airliner or a cable conduit for an engine, manufacturers devote a lot of effort to reinforcing openings for structural integrity. But the reinforcement is rarely perfect and often creates structural weaknesses elsewhere. Now, engineers at Princeton and Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a technique that can maintain structural integrity by essentially hiding the opening from the surrounding forces. Rather than reinforcing the opening to protect against a few select forces, the new approach reorganizes nearly any set of forces that could affect the surrounding material to avoid the opening. In a May 5 article in the ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease, is estimated to infect around 10 million people each year, and kills more than 1 million annually. Once established in the lungs, the bacteria’s thick cell wall helps it to fight off the host immune system. Much of that cell wall is made from complex sugar molecules known as glycans, but it’s not well-understood how those glycans help to defend the bacteria. One reason for that is that there hasn’t been an easy way to label them inside cells.  MIT chemists have now overcome that obstacle, demonstrating that they can label a ...

Some reef fish have the unexpected ability to move their jaws from side to side, biologists at the University of California, Davis have discovered. This ability – which is rare among vertebrate animals – allows these fish to feed rapidly and efficiently on algae growing on rocks. The work is published May 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Being able to move your jaw from side to side might not seem surprising from a human point of view, but if you look across all vertebrate ...

Wheat is a major source of calories, carbohydrates and protein worldwide, and its distinctive gluten proteins are what gives bread and pasta dough texture and elasticity. But it also can cause autoimmune reactions such as celiac disease, which is growing in prevalence worldwide. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have deleted a cluster of genes in wheat that generates gluten proteins that can trigger immune reactions without harming the breadmaking quality of this globally nutritious crop. The findings, published this month in the journal Theoretical and Applied Genetics, won’t ...

Researchers used precision medicine platform, Quadratic Phenotypic Optimisation Platform (QPOP), to predict treatment response and identify effective drug combinations for soft tissue sarcomas (STS). Results highlight a promising drug pairing of AZD5153 and pazopanib to treat STS. Findings support the potential of using data-driven, phenotypic screening in guiding personalised cancer therapies for STS.   SINGAPORE – A study conducted by researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and ...

People typically evaluate the preferences of both themselves and others before making decisions in moral dilemmas. Researchers have theorized how people face moral dilemmas, but experimental data is lacking. In a new JNeurosci paper, JuYoung Kim and Hackjin Kim at Korea University provide what they claim is the first experimental data to address the question of how people face moral dilemmas.   The researchers assessed study participants’ awareness of their own bodily signals and how closely they aligned with unknown group moral preferences in different scenarios. Awareness of internal states was measured using self-reports and self-evaluations ...

It’s notable when a scientific study reaches the decade mark, but when the topic is the healthy aging of people who have lived 10 times as long, it just means there’s still a lot more to learn. This month, researchers participating in the Cilento Initiative on Aging Outcomes or CIAO study will gather in Acciaroli (Pollica-Cilento) Salerno, Italy to review a decade of work and plan their next steps. Launched in 2016, the CIAO study seeks to identify key factors (biological, psychological and social) that promote healthy aging and extreme ...

AMHERST, Mass. — For the cautious – or simply curious – homeowner, an at-home water testing kit may seem reassuring. But there are high levels of variability between test kits’ abilities to detect potential contaminants in water, a new study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found. “People might be concerned about their drinking water, whether they’ve heard things in the news, or they notice it tastes different, or the color is different,” says Emily Kumpel, associate professor of civil and environmental ...

PULLMAN, Wash. – When it comes to closing a deal, salespeople may be losing customers before they ever say a word. New research from Washington State University suggests the location of sales interactions may be just as important as the sales pitch. The research, “Psychological Reactance Among B2C Sales Prospects,” published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, examines how the physical sales environment affects customer behavior in private and public settings. Researchers Bitty Balducci and Minjoo Kim, ...

In the Netflix hit-series Adolescence, young people's online lives and negative male role models are important themes. On the social media site Reddit, the series is being discussed extensively by ordinary streaming users, who not only relate to the show's artistic qualities and acting performances, but also the difficult themes. “The Adolescence discussions on Reddit are good examples of the types of discussion communities we see today on social media about TV series and films,” ...

In two randomized studies with around 1,500 participants, the researchers compared the impact of active remembrance work with the mere provision of information. The study focused on the #everynamecounts project, a digital crowdsourcing project run by the Arolsen Archives in which volunteers digitize historical documents related to the persecution of Nazi victim groups. Half of the participants actively took part in this project and digitized so-called prisoner registration cards from the Buchenwald concentration camp. The other group only received information about Nazi persecution and the archived documents ...

University of Edinburgh scientists have harnessed the power of AI in a new tool that promises to speed up analysis of data from gel electrophoresis experiments. The technique is widely used across biological sciences to separate and analyse biomolecules and routinely used to inform on many biomolecule activities such as genomic manipulation, DNA supercoiling or evaluating the success or failure of assembly of a bionanostructure or artificial conjugate. The core principle of gel electrophoresis is simple: biomolecules are suspended within inset wells in a gel matrix, a voltage is ...

Endemic to China’s Yangtze River, the Yangtze finless porpoise is known for its intelligence and charismatic appearance; it looks like it has a perpetual smile on its face. To track how this critically endangered porpoise’s habitat range has changed over time, a team of biodiversity and conservation experts compiled 724 ancient Chinese poems referencing the porpoise from historic collections across China. Publishing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 5, their results show that the porpoise’s range has decreased by at least 65% over the past 1,400 years, with the majority of this decline occurring in the past century. ...

Young people with a diagnosable mental health condition report differences in their experiences of social media compared to those without a condition, including greater dissatisfaction with online friend counts and more time spent on social media sites. This is according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge, which suggests that adolescents with “internalising” conditions such as anxiety and depression report feeling particularly affected by social media. Young people with these conditions are more likely to report comparing themselves to others on social media, feeling a lack of self-control ...

About The Study: In this study, the prevalence of depressive symptoms increased substantially among U.S. adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Worsening mental health trends were concentrated among younger adults.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Rishi K. Wadhera, MD, MPP, MPhil, email rwadhera@bidmc.harvard.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0993) Editor’s Note: Please see the article ...