Two coffee drinkers, same BMI, different bodies a Finnish study of 2,264 46-year-olds found the heavier drinkers carried less fat

Researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) built a closed, fluid-filled system to support extremely premature fetal lambs outside the womb. The device kept lambs developing normally for up to four weeks. It does not grow an embryo from conception; it receives a fetus that has already spent roughly three-quarters of a normal sheep pregnancy developing inside the ewe, then extends that development outside the womb for several more weeks.

A 2,264-person Finnish study finds coffee drinkers have less fat, more muscle, and higher testosterone in men, independent of BMI.

A 2,264-person Finnish study finds coffee drinkers have less fat, more muscle, and higher testosterone in men, independent of BMI.

Up to 10 years before a Crohn's disease diagnosis, a potential Crohn's disease blood test signal was already higher in people who later developed more severe forms of the illness. Increased levels of the blood protein REG3-alpha were associated with Crohn's disease progression, and they were observed to be increased up to 10 years prior to diagnosis. The findings are from observational cohorts, which show association rather than cause.

Leaf litter decomposition in sacred forests of Western Odisha reached about 95% mass loss in six months. In the experiment, the samples consisted of 20 g of leaf litter placed in mesh bags. Local communities protect sacred groves through religious beliefs and cultural practices. Consequently, the authors describe them as one of the oldest forms of in situ biodiversity conservation in India.

Diabetic foot ulcer bacterial profile and antibiotic resistance patterns matter because every infected wound starts a race against time. Lab cultures take a couple of days to return, yet treatment must begin immediately often based on an educated guess about the bacteria involved. Guess wrong, and the infection can worsen quickly. That urgency is why a team at Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhubaneswar reviewed two years of hospital records (August 2022–August 2024) to map exactly which bacteria appear in these infections locally and how well common antibiotics work against them.

A genomic study describes Leopardus tilcayo, a small spotted cat from Bolivia's Yungas forest, as a new species. The study began with a single animal. A local man in Bolivia had found the kitten near a forest road and raised it at home, believing it was a domestic breed. After about a year, he gave it to the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary.

Drivers who ate 10 or 20 mg THC gummies showed clear increases in lane weaving and slower reactions even though their blood THC never rose above the thresholds most jurisdictions use to define impairment. In a randomized clinical trial of 40 regular cannabis users, edible THC at 10 mg and 20 mg doses increased lane-position variability in a driving simulator by 2.0 cm and 3.3 cm, respectively, compared with placebo.

In evolutionary bioinformatics, after understanding the range of available nucleotide and amino-acid substitution models and their underlying mathematical assumptions (including detailed treatment of the Jukes–Cantor and Kimura two-parameter models), the critical practical question arises: Which substitution model should be used for a given data set? Simply choosing the most complex model with the largest number of parameters is not optimal. Increasing model complexity introduces additional free parameters and can lead to statistical overfitting.

College students who took notes by hand scored higher on questions that tested real understanding than students who typed notes on laptops, according to controlled experiments. A 2014 study in the journal Psychological Science examined how college students take lecture notes. It found that students who wrote notes by hand scored higher on conceptual test questions than students who typed on a laptop.

Billions of possible changes in human DNA have been difficult to study one by one, but a new DeepMind atlas puts predictions for all of them in reach. Google DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a free database that stores AI-generated predictions for the effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations in the human genome. Researchers can now look up any of these variants instead of running the underlying prediction model themselves.

Five baby orangutans were rescued on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, from a casuarina forest in the Bichitrapur area of Bhograi block, Balasore district, Odisha, India — triggering the most comprehensive wildlife trafficking investigation in the region in over a year. Officials now suspect the animals were smuggled from outside India, primarily from the rainforests of Southeast Asia (notably Sumatra, Indonesia)

Anyone who has dealt with an infected wound knows how frustrating it can be. It doesn't just sit there; it gets worse, it hurts more, and if the infection isn't brought under control fast, healing takes forever. Hospitals usually reach for antibiotic ointments in these situations, but there's a catch that's becoming harder to ignore: bacteria are getting better at surviving antibiotics.

Researchers studied mice and found a brain-wide network that lets animals learn from punishment. This network is not one brain region. It has three hubs: the basolateral amygdala (BLA), the zona incerta (ZI), and the rostral linear nucleus of the raphe (RLi) in the midbrain. Researchers silenced these three hubs together. As a result, the mice did not learn which action caused the shock, and did not learn to avoid it.

A CRISPR-based tool called Y-CUT deletes the Y chromosome from mouse cells. This turns male clones into fertile females. A research team in Japan combined the tool with a cloning method called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Together, the two techniques produced both male and female clones from a single adult mouse. Those clones later mated, and the researchers reported that the offspring appeared healthy.

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is an aggressive brain tumour. The tumour grows in the brainstem. It comprises 10–20% of paediatric brain tumours. Median overall survival for DIPG is approximately 11 months without effective intervention. Recurrent central nervous system (CNS) cancers are typically incurable with significant treatment-related morbidity. This highlights the need for new therapeutic approaches. For about two decades, progress in treating these aggressive paediatric brain tumours has been limited.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections cause millions of deaths annually. The global health challenge requires new antimicrobial agents. Citrus sinensis contains bioactive compounds with diverse biological activities. Previous research demonstrated anti-MRSA activity for hesperitin, coumaric acid, and ferulic acid from Newhall navel orange peel. Citrus sinensis produces carotenoids, cinnamic acid derivatives, flavonoids, alkaloids, limonoids, sterols, terpenoids, vitamins B and C. Polymethoxyflavones are characteristic of the Citrus genus.

In the inner northwest of Melbourne, a flesh-eating bacterial disease that once stayed coastal has been climbing into ordinary suburbs, leaving destructive skin ulcers months after summer mosquito season. A randomized field trial in Melbourne cut mosquito egg counts by 70% using autodissemination stations over eight weeks. In an exploratory analysis, the trial also coincided with fewer human Buruli ulcer cases during its period of peak effect.

Researchers have created edible cookies from plastic waste by feeding discarded soda bottles and corn stalks to specially programmed yeasts that rebuild the carbon into protein, fats, and vanilla flavor. At Southern Illinois University Carbondale have programmed yeasts to convert polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and agricultural waste into proteins, fats, acids, vitamins, and flavor compounds that form 3D-printed protein-rich cookies known as µBites.

The oldest records of life from India rocks could be on a 3.5-billion-year-old chert layer in east India. For a 3497 5 Ma chert in Bhitardari, in the Singhbhum Craton, the researchers report carbonaceous matter which, along with isotope data and stratified texture, suggests an ancient microbially mediated mat. Kerogen and other carbonaceous materials rank among the earliest potential records of terrestrial life…

Futurist and former Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil predicts that people in reasonably good health could reach "longevity escape velocity" around 2030. The term describes a point where medical advances add more than one year of life expectancy for every year a person lives. At that point, remaining life expectancy would stop shrinking and begin increasing over time. Kurzweil has given slightly different target years across interviews, including 2029, 2030, and 2032.

Roughly half the people on Earth carry Helicobacter pylori in their stomach lining. Most never develop symptoms. A minority develop ulcers, and a smaller minority develop stomach cancer. Researchers have long wanted to know what distinguishes infections that stay harmless from those that progress toward disease. A team at Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhubaneswar investigated this question by examining the bacteria's genes rather than patient symptoms alone.

Women develop a chronic lung disease marked by damaged, widened airways nearly twice as often as men, and new diagnoses climb sharply once women reach their sixties right after natural menopause has usually occurred. Researchers who tracked nearly 97,000 postmenopausal American women for a median of 16 years found that a longer stretch between a woman's first period and her menopause was linked to a lower risk of developing bronchiectasis, a chronic lung disease marked by damaged, widened airways.

A TikTok video of a small, white fish surfacing from a borewell located near the Indian-Nepalese border has helped researchers make an interesting discovery in Bihar state. The fish has been identified as Gangaichthys indonepalicus, a newly found genus and species of miniaturized earthworm eels adapted for a wholly subterranean lifestyle. The fish exhibits a pair of tiny, eye-like structures covered by skin as well as lack of any pigmentation, both…

For three months after a brain hemorrhage damaged her optic nerves, a 26-year-old woman’s pupils never reacted normally to light. Doctors then performed the first case of mitochondria injected into eyes, using her own mitochondria in each eye. Afterward, her pupils regained a measurable, statistically significant response to light. Her actual vision did not improve. Researchers posted the case as a preprint on 10 August 2026.

The question of whether raising a daughter is more stressful than raising a son has floated around dinner tables, parenting forums, and research departments for decades, and the evidence never settles cleanly. It depends on the age of the child, the parent's own temperament and history, and what the word "hard" is even standing in for that particular week. Exhaustion, worry, conflict, and heartbreak all get filed under the same word, even though they are very different experiences.

For decades, a computer meant silicon, circuits and electricity but a new server rack in Singapore is keeping thousands of living human brain cells at work. On August 17, 2026, NUS Medicine, data center operator DayOne, and Melbourne-based biotech company Cortical Labs unveiled a 20-unit rack of biological computers running on lab-grown human neurons at the National University of Singapore's Life Sciences Institute.

Not all pregnancy stress is the same and a new Columbia University study suggests the physical kind may carry the biggest hidden cost. Researchers at Columbia University identified three distinct patterns of stress among 187 pregnant women. They used 27 physical, psychological, and lifestyle measures collected early in pregnancy to do it. Women in a "physically stressed" group had 31% male births, compared with 56% in the healthiest group.

Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals. When people watch a short video they enjoy enough to finish, two brain regions involved in cognitive control show significant deactivation.

A team of researchers synthesized 17 new thiazolidinone-based compounds. Most of them blocked the activity of SHP-2, an enzyme linked to Noonan syndrome and several childhood leukemias. Compounds built around a benzothiazole ring generally inhibited the enzyme most strongly. Computer modeling of the top candidates pointed to hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic contacts as likely reasons behind their potency. The findings appeared in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry in 2008.

Doctors already knew long-lasting viral infections can slowly wear out the immune system’s killer cells. What remained unclear was whether the same thing happens to the cells that are supposed to attack cancer. Doctors have known for years that in long-lasting viral infections like hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV, the immune system's killer cells slowly lose their fighting power. This weakening is called T-cell exhaustion.

Higher intelligence links to lower life satisfaction when people socialize more often with friends. Researchers found this pattern in data from more than 15,000 young adults. The same data show denser living environments reduce life satisfaction more strongly among people with lower intelligence scores. The findings stem from the savanna theory of happiness. The theory states that life satisfaction responds to a situation’s current effects and to what those effects would have meant in the ancestral environment.

Cultures of roughly 800,000 human or mouse cortical neurons, grown on high-density multielectrode arrays and linked in real time to a simplified version of the arcade game Pong, improved their performance within about five minutes of closed-loop play. This improvement did not appear in control conditions that lacked structured feedback. The work sits in the broader effort to build hybrid systems that combine living neural tissue with silicon electronics…

Researchers found that higher levels of certain gut bacteria were tied to higher scores on a self-report psychopathy scale. The authors said this is the first study to examine the gut oral microbiome link to psychopathy traits. But they described the results as preliminary and correlational. They did not show that the microbes cause psychopathic behavior. Scientists already think the microbiome can influence mood and behavior.

People who take pain pills too often for headaches frequently develop medication-overuse headache. A recent study found these patients also experience more sleep problems, especially chronic insomnia and restless legs syndrome, than people with ordinary headaches. The good news is that treating the overuse and reducing the headaches often improves the sleep problems as well, without any special sleep medication.

Most oral cancers in India don’t appear out of nowhere. Roughly four out of five begin as something else first — visible changes in the mouth that doctors call oral potentially malignant disorders, or OPMDs. These lesions and conditions sit in a dangerous middle ground: not yet cancer, but carrying a clear, elevated risk of becoming it. A 2022 review published in…

Every year, the world produces about 60 million tonnes of PVC one of the most common plastics on Earth, and one of the hardest to recycle. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, shows up in pipes, credit cards, cable insulation, and countless other products because it is light, durable, and resistant to fire and ultraviolet light. Global production runs to roughly 60 million tonnes a year.

Cancer and cardiovascular disease (CVD) rank as the two leading causes of death in Europe. Researchers already knew the two conditions interact: people with CVD face a higher risk of dying from non-cardiac causes, especially cancer, than people without it. Large studies had found a 13% increased likelihood of developing cancer in people with CVD. Men and women also carry different baseline risks for both diseases.

Japan's summers have grown severe enough that the government recently coined new terminology just to describe days when temperatures climb past 40 degrees Celsius. The urgency isn't abstract: in Tokyo alone, 48 people were hospitalized for heatstroke on July 15 this year. Construction crews, factory floor staff, warehouse handlers, and event workers can't simply step into an air-conditioned office, so for them that heat is a daily occupational hazard rather than an inconvenience.

Researchers at UC Berkeley used artificial intelligence to design new versions of a small CRISPR enzyme called TnpB. Several of the resulting proteins, called SynTnpBs, cut DNA at least as well as the natural enzyme. Many even outperformed it, across bacterial, plant, and human cells alike. This held even though their amino acid sequences diverged substantially from the original protein…

Researchers determined the atomic structure of protein crystals that form naturally inside the embryos of Diploptera punctata, the only known viviparous cockroach species. These crystals, derived from a milk-like secretion produced by the mother, pack proteins, lipids, and sugars into a highly concentrated form. A single crystal holds an estimated energy content of roughly 232 kcal per 100 g — more than three times that of an equivalent mass of dairy milk (such as buffalo milk, previously one of the densest mammalian milks at around 110 kcal/100 g) or…

To a parent in the heat of the moment, a raised voice may feel like simple frustration. To a child