An eye-tracking study from Waseda University and MIT reveals that the brain actively predicts sentence structure in real time rather than waiting for all the words. Japanese speakers learning English adopt English-like prediction patterns instead of transferring their native strategy — a finding with implications for language teaching and AI.

An analysis of 88.8 million deaths across 653 European regions reveals that the poorest communities face twice the mortality risk from air pollution as wealthy ones, even as renewable energy cuts particulate matter by up to 54%.

A groundbreaking liquid biopsy developed by Oxford and Tanzanian researchers slashes Burkitt lymphoma diagnosis from 47 days to just 6.5, offering hope for children battling a cancer that is over 90% curable when caught early but kills more than half its victims due to delayed detection.

California lost $1.1 billion to drought in a single year. Now a massive single-cell study of nearly one million plant cells has identified FRO6, a gene that could help crops survive water scarcity without sacrificing growth — a breakthrough for climate-stressed agriculture worldwide.

Research reveals that the transition from milk to solid food triggers a one-time epigenetic event that programs lifelong gut immunity. Antibiotics during this critical window may cause lasting damage, offering new insight into rising rates of IBD and colorectal cancer in young adults.

A turkey-sized baby dinosaur from a Korean island is the peninsula's first new species in 15 years and its first with skull bones. Named after cartoon character Dooly, the thescelosaurid was revealed only after micro-CT scanning exposed bones hidden inside rock.

Researchers traced a single molecule, TGF-β1, as the key driver of fibrotic scarring after spinal cord injury. Newborn mice lacking this signal recover fully, while adults form dense scars. Blocking TGF-β1 in adult mice reduced scarring and restored movement.

A new algorithm called NTAC classifies neuron types using only synaptic connectivity data, outperforming traditional morphology-based methods and requiring just a fraction of labeled training data. The approach could reshape how we map the brain.

Recent technological advances facilitate the reconstruction of complete brain connectomes in small organisms and partial connectomes in mammals, involving the mapping of the network of neurons and synaptic connections. Accurate cell typing of these connectomes aids in interpreting circuit functions and comparing brain organization across species. Traditionally, cell typing relied on manual morphological classification by experts—a slow process that required detailed anatomical information. However, morphology can be deceptive or inadequate in many brain regions, especially in circuits ...

People often seem to understand language before they have actually heard enough words to determine its structure. In everyday conversation, listeners react immediately, anticipate what others will say, and rarely wait for a sentence to finish. This raises the question of how the brain is able to keep up with such rapid communication. In a new study, an international team of researchers, led by Associate Professor Chie Nakamura from the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Japan, investigated how listeners interpret structurally ambiguous sentences in ...

Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is a standard treatment for significant coronary artery disease. Cardiologists use a catheter to place a stent that opens up the blockage and restores blood flow to the heart. However, dense, calcified atherosclerotic plaque can prevent proper placement or unfolding of stents, resulting in reduced blood flow to the heart even after PCI. Rotational atherectomy (RA) is a specialized technique used to modify heavily calcified plaque before stent placement. A conical burr ablates the calcified plaque, creating ...

Spinal cord injury (SCI) often leads to long-term loss of motor and sensory function, with limited available treatment options to restore the lost function. A major challenge in recovery is the formation of scar tissue at the injury site that prevents damaged nerve fibers from regenerating. Glial scarring has been thoroughly investigated, while fibrotic scar formation has been less studied. Transforming growth factor -β1 (TGF-β1), a signaling molecule that regulates inflammation and tissue repair, has been known to play a critical role in fibrosis in many tissues. Understanding how fibrotic scars form could aid in the ...

Cute, green, and sporting two sprigs of hair on his head, a mischievous baby dinosaur named Dooly is one of the most beloved cartoon characters in South Korea.   So, when researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and the Korean Dinosaur Research Center discovered a new species of baby dinosaur from Korea’s Aphae Island, they knew exactly what to call it: Doolysaurus. “Dooly is one of the very famous, iconic dinosaur characters in Korea. Every generation in Korea knows this character,” said ...

Stanford and CU Boulder researchers identified pTOS, a gut-bacteria metabolite that surges 1,000-fold in pythons after feeding. Given to obese mice, it cut appetite and drove 9% weight loss in 28 days through a mechanism entirely distinct from GLP-1 drugs.

Pythons don’t nibble. They chomp, squeeze and swallow their prey whole in a meal that can approach 100% of their body weight. But even as they slither stealthily around the forest, months or even a year may pass between massive mouthfuls. This pattern of extreme feasting and fasting taxes their metabolism far beyond what humans experience on a day-to-day basis. Now researchers at Stanford Medicine and the University of Colorado, Boulder, have found that a metabolite that spikes a thousandfold in pythons after a large meal causes obese laboratory mice to shun their food pellets and lose ...

According to a team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Tongji University and collaborating institutions, weaning or switching from milk to solid food in early life doesn’t just change what babies eat, it helps reprogram the gut’s immune defenses to mount faster and stronger responses that can last into adulthood. The researchers report in Nature Microbiology that weaning reshaped the gut microbiome – the vast community of gut microorganisms – in mice, which in turn ‘trained’ intestinal stem cells to respond better to microbes later in life ...

LA JOLLA (March 19, 2026)—The United States and Mexico have been in a historic megadrought since the turn of the century. For more than 25 years, the American Southwest has faced the severe social and economic consequences of this megadrought—including a $1.1 billion agricultural loss in California in 2021 alone. With these conditions persisting, how can we help crops withstand drought while minimizing yield loss? Salk Institute scientists profiled nearly a million cells from the leaves of Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant that serves as a laboratory stand-in for important ...

University of Colorado Boulder researchers have discovered an appetite-suppressing compound in python blood that helps the snakes consume enormous meals and go months without eating yet remain metabolically healthy. The research, a collaboration with scientists at Stanford and Baylor universities, could inform new weight loss therapies that promote satiety without the nausea and muscle loss that can come with existing drugs. The findings appear in the journal Natural Metabolism on March 19. “This is ...

Barcelona, March 19, 2026 (EMBARGOED) -. Socioeconomic factors are widely recognized as potential modifiers of the relationship between air pollution and mortality, but the available evidence remains limited. In this context, a new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center–Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), analysed how socioeconomic ...

University of Oxford press release UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 19 March 2026 at 10:00 (London time), 19 March 2026 at 06:00 (US Eastern Time).. Burkitt lymphoma is an aggressive cancer affecting children in sub-Saharan Africa If treated early, over 90% survive but currently, slow diagnosis results in fewer than 50% of children surviving A new, highly accurate blood test has been shown to cut diagnosis time from 46.8 days (using current methods) to 6.5 days and increases detection rate from 40% to 93.3% This approach could help ensure that children with Burkitt lymphoma begin ...

Nearly a third of Americans over age 50 provide regular care to an adult relative or friend with a health issue or disability, a new poll finds. But many of them don’t know about, or use, local resources that could help them with caregiving. And about 20% of these caregivers are like highwire acrobats working without a net, the poll reveals. They’re taking care of someone else with health needs, but without close friends or family members to pitch in if they needed help with their own health concerns. The new findings from the University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging could inform caregiver-related policy discussions at state and ...

Baby rattlesnake bites are less dangerous than bites from adult rattlesnakes, according to a new study from Loma Linda University that summarizes the origin, transmission, and prevalence of the longstanding myth that baby rattlesnake bites are more dangerous. The myth that baby rattlesnakes can’t control the release of their venom and therefore release it all when biting is refuted by the study. This incorrect belief has led “to negative consequences, including misinformed risk‐taking by those encountering snakes, unwarranted fear among snakebite victims, ...

Sudden drop in milk production, thickened milk, and cows under movment restrictions. Since 2024, American farmers have had bitter experiences with the feared bird flu (H5N1), which in several cases has been introduced to cattle – and then spread rapidly among cattle herds. In some instances, humans have been infected as well. The contagious virus is increasingly being transmitted from wild birds to mammals –such as cattle. The outbreaks in the U.S. raise the question of whether Denmark is sufficiently prepared should the infection spread to Danish cattle. But now there is good news for ...

What has long been interpreted as permanent and irreversible vascular damage may not be exclusively so. In people with Down syndrome—one of the most robust populations for studying Alzheimer’s disease due to the near-universal presence of the characteristic proteinopathies of this dementia from the age of 40—some lesions visible on magnetic resonance imaging do not follow a linear course. A longitudinal study from the Institut de Recerca Sant Pau (IR Sant Pau), published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, shows that these alterations can fluctuate and even decrease over time in the Down syndrome population. This is especially true once the clinical symptoms ...

Researchers at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) have developed a novel virtual reality (VR) system that could make the treatment of arachnophobia, also known as spider phobia, more targeted and personalised in the future. The “VRSpi” system is a prototype which analyses the EEG data and heart rate of the participants during a confrontation with spiders in a VR environment. Based on this objective measurement data, it adjusts the intensity of the stimuli in real time to the person’s current level of anxiety. This avoids over- or under-stimulation and optimises ...