The problem might not be brain damage after all. New research tracking the same group of Navy Seabees over two decades suggests that Gulf War illness stems from a persistent energy crisis inside brain cells rather than irreversible neural destruction. In a study published in Scientific Reports this month, researchers led by Sergey Cheshkov and Robert W. Haley at UT Southwestern Medical Center used advanced brain imaging to show that veterans with Gulf War illness have mitochondria stuck in a state of chronic dysfunction.

The biological defenses that protect the brain from toxins also lock out most cancer drugs, making glioblastoma one of the hardest tumors to treat. But researchers have found a way to bypass those barricades entirely: a nasal spray that hijacks facial nerves to carry cancer-killing nanoparticles directly to the tumor. In a study published this month in PNAS, a team from Washington University School of Medicine in St.

Four and a half billion years ago, a neighboring world slammed into the young Earth and changed everything. Now, precise chemical sleuthing suggests that this lost planet, Theia, did not come from some distant corner of the Solar System but from right beside us, likely even closer to the Sun than Earth. In a new experimental study published in Science…

Creativity has never been a numbers game, and a new Australian analysis offers a stark reminder of just how far generative AI sits from human imagination. In a study grounded in mathematics, researchers show that today’s large language models hit a ceiling long before they reach the ingenuity of society’s most inventive thinkers. The paper, ... Read more The post Why Machines Can’t Match Our Wildest Ideas appeared first on NeuroEdge.

Deep in the African night, it turns out that lions are not just roaring, they are speaking in two different roaring voices that computers can now tell apart with remarkable precision. In a new observational study published in Ecology and Evolution, researchers led by the University of Exeter used machine learning to show that African ... Read more The post Lions Have A Secret Roar That Could Help Save Them appeared first on Wild Science.

At mealtimes, rabbit sized Australian bettongs turn into nut cracking powerhouses that can splinter seeds tougher than popcorn kernels. In new imaging analysis led by Flinders University and published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, researchers used 3D scans and geometric morphometrics of 161 skulls from all four living bettong species to uncover ... Read more The post Tiny Bettongs Have Mighty Jaws That Shatter Super Tough Seeds appeared first on Wild Science.

In mice already losing memories to Alzheimer’s, scientists have uncovered a way to turn the brain’s star shaped support cells into sweeping cleaners that slow cognitive decline. By boosting a single protein called Sox9 inside astrocytes, a Baylor College of Medicine team found that the cells engulfed existing amyloid plaques and kept memory from worsening over months of testing. The work, an experimental mouse study published in Nature Neuroscience by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, centers on astrocytes and their shifting roles in aging and disease.

A familiar dietary amino acid is quietly doing something radical in the lab, easing some of the core brain changes that define Alzheimer’s disease. In new experiments from Kindai University, oral arginine blunted sticky amyloid buildup and brain inflammation in animals engineered to develop Alzheimer’s like pathology, while also improving their behavior. In work published online on October 30, 2025, in Neurochemistry International, researchers led by graduate student Kanako Fujii and Professor Yoshitaka Nagai at Kindai University’s Faculty of Medicine tested arginine, a clinically approved amino acid, in a series of in vitro assays, fruit fly models, and AppNL-G-F knock in mice.

When the air around them turns desert dry, Madagascar hissing cockroaches do something surprisingly tender: they press their bodies together and ride out the stress as a crowd. In a new piece of research from Binghamton University, biologists show that these big, familiar classroom insects change how tightly they pack together depending on humidity, using ... Read more The post When The Air Dries Out, Cockroaches Cuddle To Stay Alive appeared first on Wild Science.

Canadian engineers have built a device that captures airborne disease particles before they circulate through meeting rooms, clinics, and offices. The system works by steering exhaled breath into a compact cleaning zone, removing up to 94% of pathogens without blowing uncomfortable jets of air at people's faces. The prototype dramatically outperformed standard ventilation systems in computer simulations tracking 540,000 particles over 30 minutes, according to research from the University of British Columbia Okanagan published in Building and Environment.

Far beneath our feet, two gigantic blobs of strange rock and splashes of molten material near Earth’s core may help explain why this planet, and not its rocky neighbors, ended up with oceans, a breathable atmosphere, and life. New research argues that these mysterious deep-mantle structures are fossil traces of Earth’s molten youth and quiet conduits linking the planet’s core, mantle, volcanoes, and long-term habitability.

In a quiet physics lab, paint arced through the air and spattered onto paper, revealing something unexpected about how children move, balance, and create. New research from the University of Oregon shows that when kids try Jackson Pollock’s famous pour painting technique, the hidden structures in their splashes look uncannily close to the artist’s own. The experimental study, published in Frontiers in Physics by a US based team, compared pour paintings from 18 children aged four to six and 34 adults aged 18 to 25 using fractal and lacunarity analysis, two mathematical tools for describing complex patterns.

For at least 45 million years, global shark and ray diversity has been sliding downhill, not climbing, and today’s crisis looks less like a blip than a long, slow collapse. In a new fossil analysis published in the journal Scientific Reports, an international team led by Manuel A. Staggl at the University of Vienna assembled ... Read more The post Sharks And Rays Are In Quiet Freefall appeared first on Wild Science.

The May 2024 Gannon superstorm squeezed Earth’s plasmasphere to a fraction of its usual size, a planetary contraction so violent it rippled through satellites, GPS signals, and the upper atmosphere. New measurements from Japan’s Arase spacecraft reveal just how dramatically Earth’s protective plasma cocoon collapsed and why it struggled to recover. In a peer reviewed study published in Earth, Planets and Space…

A daily pill is offering people with obesity and Type 2 diabetes a simpler path to meaningful weight loss and better blood sugar control. In a large international trial, an oral GLP-1 medication called orforglipron delivered clinically significant benefits without the needles, refrigeration, or complexity that accompany today’s injectable drugs. The ATTAIN-2 trial, a 72-week phase 3 study published in The Lancet and led by UTHealth Houston, tested orforglipron, a once-daily small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist, in 1,613 adults across 136 sites in ten countries.

Cleveland’s legendary armored predator has been hiding a secret in its skull for nearly a century, and the truth is stranger than the myth. A new anatomical reconstruction of Dunkleosteus terrelli reveals a creature built from unexpected combinations of cartilage, bone, and muscle, a marine giant that broke almost every rule of its own armored fish family. The research, published in The Anatomical Record by scientists from Case Western Reserve University and international collaborators, delivers the first modern reevaluation of Dunkleosteus jaw anatomy since 1932.

A sweeping genomic effort in Taiwan has revealed something that global precision medicine has long overlooked, that the best way to predict disease is to study the people who will be living with its consequences. Researchers at Academia Sinica have now shown that building genetic risk tools tailored to Han Chinese populations can transform how ... Read more The post How Taiwan’s Giant Genomics Project Is Rewriting the Future of Disease Prediction appeared first on SciChi.

Hope can be fragile in Type 1 diabetes research, yet this experiment lands with unusual force, showing what happens when the immune system is quietly rebuilt instead of suppressed. In a Stanford Medicine study, mice either on the brink of autoimmune diabetes or living with long-standing disease were cured without insulin or chronic immune-suppressive drugs. The research, published November 18, 2025 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, tested an experimental combination of blood stem cell and pancreatic islet transplantation performed across a donor mismatch, a setup that normally sparks dangerous immune conflict.

In a Stuttgart lab, physicists have “beamed” quantum information from one particle of light to another born in a completely different crystal, a key capability for building a future quantum internet that can resist even the most sophisticated hacks. The teleportation worked at telecommunication wavelengths that can travel through standard fiber networks, and it relied on semiconductor devices that can, in principle, be mass produced.

Tiny plastic fragments in our food and water may be quietly hardening male arteries long before a heart attack ever strikes. In new research from the University of California, Riverside, scientists report that everyday level microplastic exposure sharply worsened artery clogging in male mice while leaving females largely untouched, raising urgent questions about how plastic pollution collides with cardiovascular risk.

Problematic pornography use can begin quietly, then tighten its grip through small, repeatable habits that reshape how people chase sexual novelty online. A new analysis of more than two thousand male pornography consumers maps those habits, revealing the behavioral loops most strongly linked to loss of control. The research, published in Addictive Behaviors by teams from Monash University, the D'Or Institute for Research and Education, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, used psychological network analysis to identify how specific online behaviors connect to problematic pornography use.

If you think "just a few cigarettes" is a harmless compromise, new research says your heart is not fooled. In an analysis of more than 300,000 adults followed for up to 20 years, people who smoked as little as 2 to 5 cigarettes per day had roughly 50 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease and 60 percent higher risk of death than people who never smoked, and that elevated risk lingered for decades after quitting.

Artificial intelligence can diagnose disease, write essays, and generate art. But it often refuses to admit when it’s wrong. Now, a University of Arizona astronomer has found a way to change that. In a preprint posted to arXiv, Peter Behroozi introduces a new method for reducing hallucinations in large-scale AI models by making them aware ... Read more The post He Taught AI to Say “I Don’t Know” appeared first on NeuroEdge.

People who smoke cannabis may end up drinking less alcohol—but the reasons and risks remain complex. In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, researchers at Brown University found that THC reduced alcohol consumption in the lab, lending empirical support to the "California sober" approach gaining cultural traction. Published November 19, 2025, in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the randomized, placebo-controlled crossover trial was led by Dr.

A supermassive black hole spotted just 570 million years after the Big Bang is growing faster than its host galaxy can keep up, defying astronomers’ expectations about how the early universe assembled itself. The discovery, made using the James Webb Space Telescope, reveals a cosmic heavyweight that weighs in at 100 million times the mass ... Read more The post Gluttonous Black Hole Gorges on Stars in Ancient Galaxy appeared first on European Space Agency Tracker.