Beta-2-microglobulin and cystatin C, both already on standard lab menus, tracked future disability in adults over 85 across Japanese and Italian cohorts, pointing to kidney strain and inflammation years before independence slips.
Tracking 75 patients recovering from psychosis, researchers found the inflated expectation of an unstable world eased as delusions lifted, and clung to persecutory beliefs above all, hinting at a treatment target dopamine drugs miss.
At CERN, physicists smashed oxygen and neon nuclei together at nearly the speed of light. The way the wreckage spread out differed between the two, and the difference tracks the shapes the nuclei are thought to hold inside: a tetrahedron for oxygen, a bowling pin for neon.
An injection primes the immune system, then nanoparticles applied vaginally pull immune defenders to where herpes enters. In mice, 80 percent showed no disease for six months, versus 40 percent with the shot alone. Human trials remain distant.
A gel-coupled transducer, no incision and no drug, revved the drainage plumbing of a stroke-injured rodent brain, routing red-cell residue to neck lymph nodes and lifting survival to five in six from half.
A wave-powered robot heard dolphins whistle near shore and click more often where sound-producing fish were present. The pattern could help identify social and foraging habitat, but the recordings cannot show which dolphin species were involved or prove what either animal was hearing.
A rocket-propelled semitrailer carrying mock nuclear-weapon cargo has smashed into a barrier in New Mexico, completing Sandia National Laboratories’ full-scale crash-test series for a new secure transporter. The decisive evidence is now in the data, which have not been publicly released.
A pale, eyeless earthworm eel pumped from farmland borewells in Bihar is the first fish ever recorded from the aquifer beneath the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and a genus wholly new to science.
Tracking 56 barred owls in northwestern California, researchers found each bird claiming large territories in the tallest, oldest forest, with nearly two-thirds of an average home range overlapping spotted owl habitat. Removing resident owls reopened habitat, but only where control is sustained.
In mice lacking an autism-linked gene, inhibitory neurons in the hippocampus no longer remodeled themselves after social experience. Boosting a single plasticity gene in those cells, in adult animals, rebalanced the circuit, improved memory, sharpened brain rhythms, and cut seizures from ten of fourteen mice to three of twelve.
Gaia observations of 110 Milky Way star clusters challenge the assumption that stars everywhere are born in the same proportions. A telltale bend in their stellar mass distributions varies with cluster age, evidence that the stellar initial mass function depends on the conditions in which stars form.
An MIT plasma physicist and a financial economist have built a ten-parameter test, modeled on fusion’s famous Lawson criterion, that asks the question the industry tends to dodge: can a fusion power plant bring in more money than it consumes?