LUX-ZEPLIN, an experiment co-led by Brown University faculty and students, observed a particle interaction that could be interpreted as a signal from WIMPs, a dark matter candidate — but researchers need more data to confirm.
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Each human breath acts as unique fingerprint for thinking
Breathing shapes thinking, attention, memory, perception, emotional regulation, and overall mental health by affecting activity in a variety of brain areas. One way breathing affects brain activity is through its relationship with rhythmic patterns of neural activity, or brain waves. Eena Kosik-Rose and Bradley Voytek, from the University of California, San Diego, led a study exploring this relationship by assessing how individual breaths at rest influence brain waves. This work is published in JNeurosci.
Leveraging an epilepsy patient population with brain electrode implants for treatment purposes, the researchers compared the shapes of brain waves to the complex, variable shapes that individual human breaths create. The shape created by inhalation and exhalation corresponded to the shape of widespread neural activity in brain areas that support emotion, motivation, pleasure, thinking, attention, and memory.
Researchers have examined the relationship between these processes and breathing more simplistically-such as by looking at how breathing fast or slow influences brain activity and emotions or thought processes. But we found that this relationship is more nuanced than previously thought. Each breath you take has a fingerprint, so to speak, of impact on brain activity and mental state.
Urolithiasis in patients with cancer
In this Review, the authors explore the risk factors for urolithiasis in patients with cancer, the associations between urolithiasis and urinary tract cancers, the pathogenesis of urolithiasis in patients with urinary tract cancer and special considerations for management of urolithiasis after urinary tract diversion for cancer.
Single amino acid swap expands nanoparticle vaccine approach to influenza viruses
Influenza viruses constantly shapeshift to evade recognition by the immune system. This shapeshifting occurs in critical proteins like hemagglutinin (HA), which controls how the virus attaches to human cells before entering them. Influenza viruses can evade immunity in two major ways: through the gradual accumulation of mutations that make HA harder for the immune system to recognize or through reassortment events that can introduce substantially different viral proteins and potentially lead to flu pandemics. To address this challenge, seasonal flu vaccines remain the primary approach because they can be developed to target the flu viruses circulating most predominantly in a given season.
Now, in a Nature Communications study published Aug. 13, 2026, scientists at Scripps Research offer a blueprint for stabilizing the various versions of influenza’s HA protein and using it to build nanoparticle vaccine candidates. Influenza is the latest target made compatible with the nanoparticle technology, specifically called self-assembling protein nanoparticles (SApNPs), which work by organizing many copies of viral proteins into clusters that the immune system can more easily recognize. This framework could eventually be applied to inform the design of next-generation vaccines across diverse flu viruses.
“Influenza HA is naturally poised to change shape by design because it needs to undergo a dramatic structural change during viral entry,” says senior author Jiang Zhu, a professor at Scripps Research. “What I’m trying to do is to find a magic trigger that, no matter what flu strains come along, mutating that trigger will make a stable antigen that can be used in a nanoparticle vaccine.”
When EGFRMutant NSCLC Becomes SCLC: Can Immunotherapy Become Relevant Again?
All included patients had histologically confirmed EGFR-mutant lung cancer followed by biopsy-proven SCLC transformation. Fifty-nine patients were identified, making this one of the larger multicenter real-world datasets examining this specific resistance phenotype.
The median age was 57.8 years, and 76.3% of patients carried an EGFR exon 19 deletion.
Most patients had initially presented with metastatic disease, and 57 of 59 had received first-line EGFR-TKI therapy. Median progression-free survival on initial EGFR-targeted therapy was 14 months, while the median interval from metastatic diagnosis to histologic SCLC transformation was 22 months.
Human model of childhood dementia from drug screen and AI
In a new study published in the prestigious Nature Communications journal, medical researchers used patient-derived brain cells grown in the lab, combined with advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, to rapidly test approved drugs and pinpoint those that improve brain cell health.
The research focused on Sanfilippo syndrome, a devastating childhood dementia that causes progressive loss of memory, behavior and physical abilities. There are currently no widely available treatments.
Sanfilippo syndrome is one of more than 100 genetic disorders that together affect 1 in 2900 children in Australia and half of all children with dementia die by the age of ten.