Pancreatic cancer kills quietly. By the time symptoms appear, the disease has usually spread beyond surgical reach. Researchers at Tokyo University of Science have now identified a gene whose early disappearance helps explain why some tumors turn lethal so fast. The gene, CTDNEP1, shows significantly reduced activity even in stage I tumors. That's unusual. Most pancreatic cancer biomarkers emerge late, when treatment options narrow.

Stroke patients grinding through repetitive arm exercises know the look: a therapist checking the clock, mentally calculating how many more patients need attention before shift end. That glance, however brief, changes the room. Healthcare systems worldwide are hemorrhaging staff faster than training programs can replace them, and researchers are asking whether machines might fill not ... Read more The post Artificial Empathy and the Future of Lonely Recovery appeared first on SciChi.

Families watching Alzheimer’s take hold have heard promises before. But what if the answer wasn’t a drug or surgery, but a sound—a low, steady drone at the pitch of a refrigerator hum? Inside a research lab in China, nine aged rhesus monkeys sat near speakers emitting 40-hertz tones for an hour each day. After just ... Read more The post A Persistent Hum Might Help Clear Alzheimer’s Plaques—For Weeks appeared first on SciChi.

People with type 2 diabetes who work near windows show steadier blood glucose levels than those under artificial lighting, according to research that tracked volunteers through identical daily routines under different light sources. The findings suggest something as mundane as office design could influence how well the body manages sugar. Scientists from the University of Geneva and Maastricht University measured metabolic outcomes in 13 older adults with type 2 diabetes across two 4.5-day sessions.

The next time someone hooks you up to a sleep study, those sensors tracking your brain waves and heartbeat may not just be looking for snoring problems. They could be capturing something far more revealing: a physiological signature that can forecast whether you’ll develop Parkinson’s disease, suffer a heart attack, or face dementia, sometimes years ... Read more The post One Night of Sleep Data Can Predict Your Disease Risk Years Ahead appeared first on NeuroEdge.

The developing mouse brain is a construction site where millions of neurons migrate to final positions, guided by molecular signals that act like cellular GPS. But when a mother's immune system flares or her gut bacteria get wiped out, that guidance system malfunctions, and it malfunctions differently in male versus female embryos. New spatial mapping reveals the exact locations where these sex-specific disruptions occur, pointing to a single pathway that may explain why neurodevelopmental conditions skew heavily male.

Watch a centimeter-long aquatic worm wiggle through a dish of scattered sand, and something peculiar happens. The grains gradually gather into compact piles. The mess disappears. It looks intentional, except the worm has no brain worth mentioning and cannot sense the particles it is moving. Physicists from the University of Amsterdam, Georgia Tech, and Sorbonne ... Read more The post Worms Organize Their World Without Thinking About It appeared first on Wild Science.

For years, the price of clean hydrogen has stubbornly remained three to five times higher than the carbon-heavy version made from natural gas. That gap has kept the hydrogen economy theoretical rather than practical. A new solar-powered system that replaces half the chemistry in water splitting has just closed that gap entirely, producing green hydrogen ... Read more The post Green Hydrogen Just Got Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels, Thanks to Sugar appeared first on SciChi.

Fusion plasmas have been hitting the same density wall for 40 years. Push the fuel concentration too high and the reactor fails within seconds, ending the shot in a cascade of instability. That empirical limit, known as the Greenwald density, has been one of fusion’s most frustrating constraints, because the denser the plasma, the more ... Read more The post China’s Fusion Reactor Breaks Density Ceiling That Has Limited Tokamaks for Decades appeared first on SciChi.

Forensic investigators examining unidentified remains face a stubborn problem: traditional age markers fade or mislead. Skeletal muscle, though, quietly archives its own history in chemical annotations that survive death and degradation. The first muscle-specific epigenetic clock designed for Asian populations emerged from autopsy tissue collected in South Korea: 103 pectoralis major samples from individuals aged 18 to 85. Published November 26 in…

About 20 percent of neurons in a learning brain seem to be doing something counterintuitive. When these cells become more active, mistakes follow. A new computational model of the brain, built to mirror real neural circuits rather than optimize performance, stumbled onto this pattern while learning a simple visual task. Only then did researchers realize ... Read more The post Brain Model Discovers Neurons That Reliably Predict Mistakes appeared first on NeuroEdge.

Electrical current flowing through a junction of vanadium and iron produces unusually loud static. That noise, orders of magnitude stronger than expected, reveals something remarkable: iron behaving like a superconductor even though it isn't one. The finding, published in Nature Communications, confirms decades-old theories about how superconductivity can leak across barriers and induce quantum behavior in unlikely materials. Researchers measured the electrical fluctuations, called shot noise, in devices made of vanadium separated from iron by a thin magnesium oxide layer.

Most treatments for diabetic kidney disease aim to slow decline. Improvement is rare. Patients take their pills, track their numbers, and watch their kidney function gradually worsen despite therapy. The goal is damage control, not restoration. A randomized clinical trial in China suggests that calculation may need updating. Researchers testing a traditional multi-herb formulation found ... Read more The post This Herbal Formula Did What Most Kidney Drugs Don’t: Reverse Damage appeared first on SciChi.

Since 1964, the Big Bang has been the context for interpreting all of astronomy. The theory has been troubled since 1997 by observations that don’t fit the model. That was the year that accelerating expansion was documented. The most recent observation is that All of Creation is rotating. We don’t even know how to calculate such a thing. The blame for our 60-year universal flight from reality is not in the physics, but in a philosophic idea that goes back to Copernicus.

Some of the greatest health problems in America are traceable to our 80-year-old bioweapons research program. These include, HIV, Lyme Disease, COVID-19, and the steady rise in cancer incidence. The US has by far the largest bioweapons program of any country in the world. We should all be screaming at our elected officials to END ALL BIOWEAPON RESEARCH. The source for most of the information below is a…

EU-funded researchers are developing AI-powered surveillance tools to protect the vast network of subsea cables and pipelines that keep the continent’s energy and data flowing. By Michael Allen Thousands of kilometres of cables and pipelines criss-cross Europe’s sea floors, carrying the gas, electricity and data that keep modern life running. Yet these critical links lie ... Read more The post Guarding Europe’s hidden lifelines: how AI could protect subsea infrastructure appeared first on Horizon Magazine Blog.

EU-funded researchers are turning to nature’s very own clean-up crew to tackle toxic industrial soil pollution. By Ali Jones Outside the mountain town of Sabiñánigo in northern Spain, an abandoned chemical factory stands on land still scarred by decades of Lindane production – a pesticide now banned worldwide – which left behind thousands of tonnes ... Read more The post Microbes on a mission to clean up Europe’s toxic soils appeared first on Horizon Magazine Blog.

Goldenberries taste like a tropical vacation, which is great. The problem? They grow like weeds, which is decidedly not great if you're trying to run a commercial farm. The small fruit, wrapped in its signature papery husk, has been cultivated in the Andes for centuries. But unlike its famous nightshade relatives (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants), goldenberry never quite made the leap to industrial agriculture.

Bones don't just grow longer. They build their own plumbing as they go, which is wild when you think about it. A new study out of China has tracked down the specific cells responsible for this hidden coordination act, and the answer involves cartilage doing a lot more than anyone suspected. The work centers on hypertrophic chondrocytes, a type of late-stage cartilage cell that's been known to contribute to bone formation.

On paper, American cities look dense, dynamic, and interconnected. But where people actually go each day tells a more fractured story. A new study from University College London researchers finds that every major U.S. city is shaped by hidden patterns of separation that divide residents by income, race, and geography. Using anonymized mobile phone data from millions of people across 383 cities, the team discovered a recurring structure: rings of isolation in affluent suburbs and pockets of segregation closer to urban cores.

For most polar bears, the future looks grim. More than two-thirds face extinction by 2050 as sea ice vanishes beneath their paws. But in southeast Greenland, a small population is living through what might be a preview of survival, adapting to conditions that resemble the devastating climate predicted for the rest of the Arctic by century's end. New research published in Mobile DNA reveals these bears are doing something remarkable at the molecular level: they appear to be rapidly rewriting sections of their own genetic code in response to rising temperatures.

A single dark tooth, nearly as long as your thumb, sat in a brown mudstone bed in North Dakota for 66 million years. When paleontologists finally pulled it from the Hell Creek Formation in 2022, they realized they were holding something that shouldn't exist: proof that mosasaurs, the ocean's apex predators, were also patrolling inland rivers. The discovery, published in…

Microdosing psychedelics delivers a measurable lift in mood and focus, but only on the day you take it. By the next morning, the benefits have evaporated. That's the core finding from a new international study tracking more than 1,400 people who microdose LSD or psilocybin. Researchers at the University of British Columbia Okanagan analyzed daily self-reports from participants across 49 countries, all logging their mental state each morning through the Microdose.me project.

Gonorrhoea is no longer a simple problem. It infects more than 82 million people globally each year, and the bacteria that cause the infection have been rapidly developing resistance to our existing drugs. This relentless evolution has created a quiet, but massive, public health crisis. The current standard treatment is a complicated two-step process, and doctors need a simpler, more effective weapon that can bypass the existing resistance.

Imagine a computer so powerful its essential control components take up an entire warehouse. Not just one room, but a massive space filled with dozens of optical tables. That's the reality for one of the most promising types of quantum machines right now. To scale up quantum computing from a few experimental bits to a practical machine with millions of qubits, scientists must first figure out how to shrink that warehouse down to the size of a postage stamp.