Medieval manuscripts, paintings and chess sets reveal that the so-called ‘game of kings’ defied social structures and racial attitudes by celebrating the intellectual prowess of winners irrespective of their skin colour.   A 13th-century Black chess player is about to defeat his white opponent. He looks relaxed – he has a bottle of red wine within reach and a glass filled to the brim. He sits on a finely decorated bench as an equal to his light-skinned opponent: a cleric. This friendly, intellectual scene appears in a lavish treatise on chess completed in Seville in 1283 CE for King Alfonso X of Castile. This image is a world away from contemporary depictions of ...

Cameras that photograph insects overnight and AI that identifies them are among a new generation of tools that could finally allow scientists to track whether the world's plan to save nature is working for its most overlooked creatures.  A global team of scientists have found that 23 biodiversity targets agreed by world governments to protect and restore nature by 2030 are well-designed and could, if met, help reverse falling insect numbers. However, the researchers highlight that dragonflies and damselflies are the only insect group to have been fully assessed for extinction risk globally, illustrating that very few measurements ...

 A large-scale genetic analysis of East Asian individuals led by Fuu-Jen Tsai of the China Medical University Hospital, finds that people with greater height face a higher risk of endometriosis and atrial fibrillation. They report these findings in the journal PLOS Genetics.  A person’s height is the result of a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors. The genetics underlying height have been linked to multiple health conditions, but these stature-related health risks have not been well explored, especially in East Asian populations.  Researchers performed two genome-wide association studies to find genetic factors linked to a person’s height or to a ...

A team led by La Trobe University has drawn inspiration from nature to develop a breakthrough sensor that can rapidly track tiny molecular changes in blood, paving the way to real-time, personalised medicine. The discovery overcomes one of the biggest barriers in blood testing: that blood quickly clogs most sensors, making accurate instant readings almost impossible over long periods of time. Working in collaboration with CSIRO, the team combined a natural protective coating called lubricin, fast-responding receptors and an ultra‑sensitive, light‑based detection method known as Surface‑Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) to mimic the way real ...

URBANA, Ill. – Hydrological models represent water movement in natural systems, and they are important for water resource planning and management. But the models depend on reliable input data for weather factors, and precipitation can be very difficult to measure and represent accurately. A new study from an international research team describes a novel method to better represent precipitation uncertainty in hydrological models, thereby improving their performance.  “Precipitation is very variable in space and time. There may be a single weather station collecting data in a large area, but turbulent ...

March 18, 2026--Worse financial well-being in midlife and older age —and especially declines over time—are associated with lower memory scores and faster cognitive decline, reports a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The population experiencing significant financial deterioration showed memory decline equivalent to roughly five additional months of aging per year. The study is among the first to examine the cognitive consequences of poor financial well-being. The findings are published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Lower average financial well-being ...

Why this matters: HPV-positive head and neck cancer cases have increased at epidemic rates in the United States over the past few decades.   The study solves a major mystery in cancer immunology by uncovering how HPV hides cancer cells from the immune system by using MARCHF8 to destroy MHC-I, which serves as a warning flag for the immune system.   The discovery opens a potential path to new cancer therapies, pointing to the development of drugs that block MARCHF8 to treat patients who currently have no effective ...

Highlights: Type 1 diabetes is associated with a higher risk of dementia. This study shows an association and does not prove that diabetes causes dementia.  Type 1 diabetes is rare, accounting for about 5% of diabetes cases. People with type 1 diabetes were nearly three times as likely to develop dementia as those without diabetes. People with type 2 diabetes were twice as likely to develop dementia as people without diabetes. MINNEAPOLIS — Having type 1 diabetes is associated with a higher risk of developing dementia, according to a study published March 18, 2026, in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Type 2 diabetes ...

Hoboken, NJ., March 18, 2026— In the iconic Star Wars series, captain Han Solo and humanoid droid C-3PO boast drastically contrasting personalities. Driven by emotions and swashbuckling confidence, Han Solo often ignores C-3PO’slogic-driven caution. That human-droid relationship is exemplified in Solo’s famous statement, "Never tell me the odds!” as he dismisses C-3PO’s advice against navigating an asteroid field with a 3,720-to-1 chances of survival, odds that had been painstakingly calculated by the ...

Michelle Ng Gong, M.D., M.S., has been appointed chair of the Montefiore Einstein Department of Medicine. Dr. Gong, who was selected after a national search, has served as interim chair since May 2025. “It’s a privilege to lead this department and its outstanding community of clinicians, researchers, educators, trainees, and staff,” said Dr. Gong, a professor of medicine and of epidemiology & health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “I look forward to advancing our exceptional clinical care, research discoveries, ...

As World Tuberculosis Day 2026 approaches, an international group of authors describe how ending tuberculosis requires a whole-of-society approach, more effectively engaging policymakers, funding bodies and affected communities along with doctors and researchers.   ### Article URL: https://plos.io/46U4Mrb Article Title: Pursuing policymakers, payors and public – expanding the beginning and end of the tuberculosis care cascade to reflect whole-of-society ambitions  Author Countries: India, Kenya, Nigeria, ...

A new study on ancient societies from around the world is rewriting what we thought we knew about democracy. A team of researchers analyzed archaeological and historical evidence from 31 ancient societies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas and found that shared, inclusive governance was far more common than was once believed. “People often assume that democratic practices started in Greece and Rome,” said Gary Feinman, the study’s lead author and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican ...

Long before pottery, before agriculture, when the first villages took shape, people in the Levant were already molding clay with their hands, carefully, deliberately, and sometimes playfully. Some of those hands belonged to children. Link to pictures:  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17O5vHUq6flnwqxNFzYejs0PqDB6JmBUz?usp=sharing An international team of archaeologist led by Laurent Davin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Leore Grosman, has uncovered the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia, revealing a forgotten chapter in the story of ...

After watching hundreds of mosquitoes buzzing around one of their colleagues and collecting 20 million data points, Georgia Tech and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have created a mathematical model that predicts how and where female mosquitoes will fly to feast on humans. The new study is the first to visualize mosquito flight patterns and provides hard data for improving capture and control strategies. In addition to being a nuisance, mosquitoes transmit diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and Zika, which cause more than 700,000 deaths every year. The researchers also designed an interactive, public website to show the paths and ...

A new University of Missouri study suggests mental health policies can play a significant role in how Americans choose political candidates. Past scholarly research has found that most Americans say they support mental health policies. Jake Haselswerdt, an associate professor of political science in Mizzou’s College of Arts and Science, wanted to take the topic a step further by asking whether mental health policies actually matter when people choose to vote for a political candidate. Drawing on a nationally representative sample ...

A mosquito finds its target with the help of certain cues in its environment, such as a person’s silhouette and the carbon dioxide they exhale.  Now researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech have found that these visual and chemical cues help determine the insects’ flight paths. The team has developed the first three-dimensional model of mosquito flight, based on experiments with mosquitoes flying in the presence of different sensory cues.  Their model, reported in the journal Science Advances, identifies three flight patterns that mosquitoes ...

A research group led by Professor Cecilia Sahlgren at Åbo Akademi University (Finland) and the InFLAMES Research Flagship has identified a new mechanism directing the adverse remodeling of tumor tissue during breast cancer progression. This discovery could offer new treatment opportunities against aggressive forms of breast cancer which currently lack targeted therapy options. Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide. Localized, early-stage breast cancer has a good prognosis, ...

Treatments that target a fragment of the mutant protein that causes Huntington's disease might be more effective than treatments, now in clinical trials, that target the whole protein but leave this fragment intact, a new study in mice suggests. "I hope we're wrong, but the science behind our findings is solid," said senior author Jeffrey Carroll, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. "To succeed, we may need to design new treatments that also target this specific region of ...

Seoul National University College of Engineering has announced that a research team led by Prof. Jeonghun Kwak of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with co-first authors Dr. Juhyung Park and Dr. Sun Hong Kim, has developed a flexible and thin “pseudo-transverse thermoelectric generator” capable of producing electricity from body heat.   The research findings were published on March 18 (ET) in Science Advances, a leading international journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).   Thermoelectric ...

Utilization of biomass as a chemical resource is a promising strategy for establishing a circular economy. Cellulose, a polymer composed of glucose units, is the most abundant form of biomass, and glucose is a versatile feedstock for chemicals. However, cellulose is a highly recalcitrant material due to its extensive hydrogen-bond (H-bond) network. Kobayashi, Nishimura, and their colleagues discovered that simply dipping cellulose in an aqueous NaOH solution below −28 ℃ makes it more reactive. Thereby, the efficiency of saccharification (the process of breaking down cellulose into sugars) ...

Rising temperatures in a Southcentral Alaska river have led to a hungrier population of invasive northern pike, a trend that could imperil native salmon and other fish species. A University of Alaska Fairbanks-led research team analyzed the stomach contents of northern pike caught by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Deshka River during the summers of 2021 and 2022. The team compared the contents to samples from pike collected a decade earlier. Pike of every age class ate more fish as temperatures increased, including a huge 63 percent rise among year-old pike. The study was published in the journal Biological Invasions. “We ...

Groundbreaking research, led by teams at Trinity College Dublin and the FutureNeuro Research Ireland Centre, has pinpointed the mechanism linking some sports injuries to poor brain health in retired athletes.  The research, published today in leading international journal Science Translational Medicine, has identified a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier (BBB) as the key link between repetitive head injuries (RHIs) and long-term brain health issues in this cohort.  The BBB acts as a “security gate”, letting in essential nutrients while ...

Paris – March 18, 2026 — In a special ceremony at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris to mark World Water Day, Professor Kaveh Madani, Research Professor of the City College of New York (CCNY) and Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), was named the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize recipient, to be officially presented by H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in August 2026, during World Water Week in Stockholm. The Stockholm Water Prize is the ultimate global recognition for extraordinary achievements in water-related activities. Often described ...

UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, 18 March 2026 — Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), has been named the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate. The announcement was made at the World Water Day ceremony at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. The prize will be formally presented by H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden during World Water Week in Stockholm in August 2026.  Often described as the ‘Nobel Prize of Water’, the Stockholm Water Prize is the most prestigious water award and honours outstanding contributions ...

With the prevalence of infectious diseases, the rapid assessment of population-specific immune protection has become important for public health. A study published in Analytical Chemistry and led by Prof. TAN Xiaotian's team from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a new platform, known as Tip Optofluidic Immunoassay Interferon-Gamma Release Assay (TOI-IGRA), which could revolutionize how people monitor their immune health. Evaluating T-cell responses is vital to understanding cellular immunity against intracellular threats such ...