PHILADELPHIA (February 5, 2026) — For many Americans, a routine surgical procedure serves as their first introduction to opioid pain medication. While most stop using these drugs as they heal, a considerable number of "opioid-naïve" patients transition into New Persistent Opioid Use (NPOU)—continuing use long after the typical recovery period. A new systematic review and meta-analysis led by Penn Nursing researchers, published in Pain Medicine, has identified the specific patient-related risk factors that most accurately predict which individuals are at the highest risk for this dangerous transition. The ...

Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, polluted water, and increasingly strict environmental regulations are driving the search for materials that can efficiently trap pollutants at the molecular level. For more than two decades, this challenge has drawn scientific attention to metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) – highly advanced porous materials widely regarded as one of the most promising tools for tackling climate change and environmental pollution. The importance of this research field was recognised in 2025, when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the scientists who developed MOFs. Despite this recognition and their ...

Antonia Seligowski, PhD, of the Neurocardiac Effects of Stress & Trauma Laboratory within the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham, is the senior author of a paper published in JAMA Network Open, “Hormonal contraceptive use, stress disorders, and cardiovascular and thrombotic risk in women.”   Q: What challenges or unmet needs make this study important? Over 400,000 women in the United States die each year from cardiovascular disease (CVD), the nation’s leading cause of death. Stress is a major risk factor for CVD, and stress‑related psychiatric disorders like anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder ...

BATON ROUGE, La. – Dr. Catherine Prater, postdoctoral researcher at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, has received a two-year fellowship from the American Heart Association. The fellowship includes a grant of more than $150,000 that will support research focused on weight gain markers. Her research project, “Examination of Metabolic Characteristics in the Predisposition for Weight Gain,” will reexamine existing clinical trial data with the goal of improving prediction ...

In a typical online meeting, humans don't always wait politely for their turn to speak. They interrupt to express strong agreement, stay silent when they are unsure, and let their personalities shape the flow of the discussion. Yet, when Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents are programmed to debate or collaborate, they are usually forced into a rigid, round-robin structure that stifles this natural dynamic. Researchers from The University of Electro-Communications and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have demonstrated that allowing AI agents to break these rules can actually make them smarter. Their new ...

About The Study: Among patients with non–large vessel occlusion acute ischemic stroke and salvageable brain tissue, intravenous tenecteplase, a modified human tissue plasminogen activator, administered 4.5 to 24 hours after onset resulted in a greater likelihood of an excellent functional outcome at 90 days than standard care but had an increased risk of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Junwei Hao, MD, PhD, email haojunwei@vip.163.com. To ...

Predicting tumour progression is one of the major challenges in oncology. Scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research have discovered that neutrophils, a type of immune cell, undergo reprogramming when they come into contact with the tumour ecosystem and contribute to its progression. They then produce a molecule — the chemokine CCL3 — which promotes cancer growth rather than fighting it. This mechanism appears to be a major variable in tumour biology and could serve ...

The Pauli exclusion principle is a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics and is essential for the structure and stability of matter. Now an international collaboration of physicists has carried out one of the most stringent experimental tests to date of this foundational rule of quantum physics and has found no evidence of its violation. Using the VIP-2 experiment, the team has set the strongest limits so far for possible violations involving electrons in atomic systems, significantly constraining a range of speculative theories beyond the Standard Model, including those that suggest electrons have internal structure, and so-called ‘Quon models.’ Their ...

Pharmaceutical products are essential for health, and they play and will continue to play a key role in disease prevention and treatment. However, they are exerting a major impact on the environment by affecting ecosystems and human health, and contributing to biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance and climate change. The main ingredients of medicines designed to achieve the desired health effect, together with their excipients (inert substances mixed with medicines to provide them with consistency, shape, taste, etc.) and packaging materials, are polluting the air, soil and water worldwide. This leads to problems in ecosystems, which then translate into an impact ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- We’ve all heard the best approach to solve a problem is to “sleep on it.” It turns out there may be more truth to this adage than previously thought. While stories abound of eureka moments surfacing from dreams, scientific evidence has remained elusive, due to the challenge of systematically manipulating dreams. A new study by neuroscientists at Northwestern University validates the possibility of influencing dreams and offers a crucial step to support the theory that dreams in REM sleep — the rapid ...

The mean stress level of fans of the football club Arminia Bielefeld was 41% higher on the day of the German Football Association’s (DFB-Pokal) 2025 Cup final compared to non-match days, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that this reaction, known as ‘football fever’, may be driven by the intensity of fans’ emotions towards their ...

All life on Earth shares a common ancestor that lived roughly four billion years ago. This so-called “last universal common ancestor” represents the most ancient organism that researchers can study. Previous research on the last universal common ancestor has found that all the characteristics we see in organisms today, like having a cell membrane and a DNA genome, were already present by the time of this ancestor. So, if we want to understand how these foundational characteristics of life first emerged, then we need to be able to study evolutionary history prior to the last universal common ancestor. In a new article ...

About The Study: This cohort study found that individuals diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and 2021 experienced worse short-term survival than those diagnosed between 2015 and 2019, suggesting substantial harms associated with cancer care disruptions during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Todd Burus, PhD, email tburus@uky.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2025.6332) Editor’s Note: Please ...

About The Study: In this cohort study, infants from vegan households had growth patterns similar to those from omnivorous households, with a higher odds of early underweight that decreased by age 24 months. In the context of developed countries, these findings seem reassuring. Further research should examine vegan diet quality and the impact of nutritional counseling during pregnancy and infancy in supporting optimal infant development. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Kerem Avital, MPH, email kerema@post.bgu.ac.il. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link ...

Korea University College of Medicine recently hosted a special lecture by Professor Adelheid Wöhrer from the Institute of Neuropathology and Neuro-Molecular Pathology at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria.   The event was conducted as part of the Research Nexus Program, which seeks to expand global research networks and promote international collaboration. Under the theme Establishing a Model for the Development and Evolution of Refractory Gliomas through Korea–Austria Research Cooperation, researchers from both countries discussed strategies for joint research to better understand the complex developmental and evolutionary mechanisms of treatment-resistant ...

“The patient’s symptoms resolved after permanently stopping 5-FU and administering lactulose and intravenous fluids, therefore supporting the diagnosis of hyperammonemic encephalopathy due to 5-FU.” BUFFALO, NY — February 5, 2026 — A new case report was published in Volume 12 of Oncoscience on December 23, 2025, titled “Silent toxicity: A rare case of 5-fluorouracil-induced hyperammonemic encephalopathy.” In this report, Areti Kalfoutzou from the National ...

(Toronto, February 5, 2026) JMIR Publications, a leader in open access scholarly publishing, today announced the launch of the new Karma Reviewer Rewards Program. This initiative introduces a specialized, merit-based framework designed to elevate and reward the critical role of peer reviewers in the scientific process. The evolved Karma program marks a strategic shift toward a quality-focused reward model. Moving away from traditional volume-based incentives, the new system ensures that rewards ...

More than 50 skuas in Antarctica died from the high pathogenicity avian influenza virus H5N1 in the summers of 2023 and 2024, marking the first documented die-off of wildlife from the virus on the continent. That is confirmed for the first time in a study led by Erasmus MC in The Netherlands and the University of California, Davis. It published this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. A relative of gulls, skuas are predatory, large brown birds living mostly in polar and subpolar environments. Similar ...

New research suggests the liver plays a previously unrecognized role in bone health, but only in males. A McGill University-led study published in Matrix Biology found that a protein made in the liver helps regulate bone growth in male mice, but not in females. The findings may help explain why men with liver disease are more likely to experience bone loss. The protein, known as plasma fibronectin, is naturally present in blood at higher levels in men than in women, declines when the liver is damaged and builds up in bone to modulate bone formation. This suggests men rely more heavily on the protein to maintain bone strength than do women. “About ...

Next month, thousands of scientists from around the world will convene to share new research results from across physics at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. The conference will be held in Denver and online everywhere March 15-20.   Press registration News media with valid APS press credentials may register for the meeting at no cost. To request press credentials, visit APS’ online newsroom. Registration will remain open throughout the meeting.    Housing information Discounted hotel rates are available for in-person attendees at select hotels near the Colorado ...

Tooling up to diagnose ocean health Field-deployable CRISPR-based biosensing platform could enable facile, real-time monitoring of marine barometer species and ecosystems By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Oceanic ecosystems are increasingly threatened by global warming which causes coral bleaching, species migration and, through the loss of habitats and biodiversity, food web disruptions on major scales. Also, pollutants such as plastics and other marine debris, wastewater, as well as chemical runoffs, including oil spills, cause major ecosystem disruptions. Importantly, given the interconnectedness of all life on the planet, the deteriorating health of our ...

FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla., February 3, 2026 — To kick off Super Bowl LX week and American Heart Month, the Family Heart Foundation, a leading research and advocacy organization, is teaming up with three-time Pro Bowler and former Seattle NFL quarterback Matt Hasselbeck to launch a national campaign focused on raising awareness of high cholesterol as a key risk factor for heart attack and stroke. The campaign, “Tackle Cholesterol: Get into the LDL Safe Zone,” reinforces the importance of early ...

A peer reviewed, randomized controlled study with 199 women living in poverty in the city slums of Uganda was published today in Health Care for Women International. This study was conducted following two extended country-wide lockdowns in Uganda during the Covid 19 pandemic. Researchers found that the Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) technique reduced perceived stress, anger, and fatigue; increased self-efficacy; and improved sleep quality. TM helped these women to improve their mental and physical health and positively impacted their ability to cope in this crisis. “The Covid lockdowns in Uganda, which resulted in food shortages, lack of employment, ...

For decades, gynecological tests have relied on a simplified view of the vaginal microbiome, categorizing bacteria as either “good” or “bad.” New research from University of Maryland School of Medicine scientists challenges that assumption, revealing that bacteria of the same species can behave in fundamentally different ways, with important implications for women’s health. Today, gynecological tests largely focus on detecting two groups of bacteria in the vaginal microbiome: Lactobacillus, generally associated with health, and Gardnerella, which has been linked to Bacterial Vaginosis (BV), increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases, ...

CLEVELAND— More than 30 million people with HIV must take antiretroviral therapy (ART) medications daily to keep the virus under control, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The drugs are effective but don’t eliminate the virus; HIV remains hidden in “reservoirs” throughout the body, ready to reactivate if treatment stops. But researchers at Case Western Reserve University, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, have made a significant breakthrough in HIV treatment. They’ve ...