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Your clothes may become smarter than you

You’re probably used to the sight of smartwatches on people’s wrists. But what about smart clothes? Researchers at the University of Georgia are exploring how the clothes people wear can potentially track and protect their health. Smart textiles are fabrics that can monitor the body’s vitals and movement in real time. They’re flexible and lightweight, making them more comfortable to wear while moving.

The present publication focuses on MXenes, a class of two-dimensional, microscopic materials made from metals that can be coated or printed onto fabrics. The researchers conducted a comprehensive analysis of hundreds of published studies to examine the different properties of MXenes and how they could be used in smart textiles. The paper is published in the journal ACS Omega.

“MXenes have some advanced properties,” said Joyjit Ghosh, corresponding author of the study and a doctoral student in UGA’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Not only can they detect body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate, he said, but they are also antimicrobial, making them ideal for hospital settings.

Scientists successfully harvest chickpeas from ‘moon dirt’

As the U.S. plans to return to the moon with the upcoming Artemis II mission, a question endures: What will future lunar explorers eat? According to new research from The University of Texas at Austin, the answer might be chickpeas.

Scientists have successfully grown and harvested chickpeas using simulated “moon dirt,” the first instance of this crop produced in this medium. The research, which was conducted in collaboration with Texas A&M University, is described in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Sara Santos, the principal investigator of the project, said that the work is a giant leap in understanding what it will take to grow food on the lunar surface.

Functional recovery of the adult murine hippocampus after cryopreservation by vitrification

Year 2025

Cryopreserving the adult brain is challenging due to damage from ice formation, and traditional freezing methods fail to maintain neural architecture and function. Vitrification offers a promising alternative but has not been surveyed in the brain. Here, we demonstrate near-physiological recovery of the adult murine hippocampus after vitrification of brain slices and of the whole brain in situ. Key features of the hippocampus are preserved, including structural integrity, metabolic responsiveness, neuronal excitability, and synaptic transmission and plasticity. Notably, hippocampal long-term potentiation was well preserved, indicating that the cellular machinery of learning and memory remains operational. These findings extend known biophysical limits for cerebral hypothermic shutdown by demonstrating recovery after complete cessation of molecular mobility in the vitreous state. This suggests that the brain can be arrested in time and then reactivated, opening avenues for potential clinical applications.

Significance Statement While the brain is considered exceptionally sensitive, we show that the hippocampus can resume normal electrophysiological activity after being rendered completely immobile in a cryogenic glass. The work extends known biophysical tolerance limits for the brain from the hypothermic to the cryogenic range and establishes a protocol for its long-term storage in a viable state.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Immunopathology in human tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) is a bacterial pathogen that has evolved in humans, and its interactions with the host are complex and best studied in humans.

Myriad immune pathways are involved in infection control, granuloma formation, and progression to tuberculosis (TB) disease. Inflammatory cells, such as macrophages, neutrophils, conventional and unconventional T cells, B cells, NK cells, and innate lymphoid cells, interact via cytokines, cell-cell communication, and eicosanoid signaling to contain or eliminate infection but can alternatively mediate pathological changes required for pathogen transmission. Clinical manifestations include pulmonary and extrapulmonary TB, as well as post-TB lung disease.

Risk factors for TB progression, in turn, largely relate to immune status and, apart from traditional chemotherapy, interventions primarily target immune mechanisms, highlighting the critical role of immunopathology in TB.

Maintaining a balance between effector mechanisms to achieve protective immunity and avoid detrimental inflammation is central to the immunopathogenesis of TB. Many research gaps remain and deserve prioritization to improve our understanding of human TB immunopathogenesis.

Learn more in Science Immunology on WorldTBDay.

The balance between protective and pathological immune responses shapes progression of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection.

Continue reading “Immunopathology in human tuberculosis” | >

New computational biology for genome sequencing analysis

To improve the ability of metapipeline-DNA to determine where changes in the genome have occurred, the scientists worked with the Genome in a Bottle Consortium led by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. By incorporating this public-private-academic consortium’s meticulously validated resources, the researchers reduced the rate of false positives without reducing the tool’s precision in finding true genetic variants.

The researchers also produced two case studies demonstrating the pipeline’s capabilities for cancer research. The investigators used metapipeline-DNA to analyze sequencing data from five patients that donated both normal tissue and tumor samples, as well as another five from The Cancer Genome Atlas.

The next step is to get metapipeline-DNA into more labs to accelerate discoveries, and to continue improving the resource with more user feedback. ScienceMission sciencenewshighlights.

In a single experiment, scientists can decipher the entire genomes of many patient samples, animal models or cultured cells. To fully realize the potential to study biology at this unprecedented scale, researchers must be equipped to analyze the titanic troves of data generated by these new methods.

Scientists published findings in Cell Reports Methods discussing building and testing a new computational tool for tackling massive and complex sequencing datasets. The new resource, named metapipeline-DNA, may also make sequencing data analysis more standardized across different research labs.

The sequence of a single human genome represents about 100 gigabytes of raw data, the rough equivalent of 20,000 smartphone photos. The sheer scale of experimental data increases significantly as tens or hundreds of genomes are added into the mix.

Continue reading “New computational biology for genome sequencing analysis” | >

Chandra resolves why black holes hit the brakes on growth

Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Ten billion years ago, there was a period that astronomers call “cosmic noon,” when the growth of supermassive black holes (those with millions to billions of times the mass of the sun) was at its peak across the entire history of the universe. Between cosmic noon and now, however, astronomers have seen a major slowdown in how rapidly black holes are growing.

“A longstanding mystery has been the cause of this big slowdown,” said Zhibo Yu of Penn State University, lead author of the new study. “With these X-ray data and supporting observations at other wavelengths, we can test different ideas and narrow down the answer.”

Magnets turn random snapping in soft metamaterials into repeatable sequences

Cutting patterns into elastic materials allows you to unfold those materials into new shapes, and researchers have now demonstrated the ability to control the sequence in which that unfolding happens by magnetizing the materials. The work represents a fundamental advance in our understanding of metamaterial behavior and has also demonstrated its utility in applications focused on absorbing kinetic energy.

The paper, “Magnetic coupling transforms random snapping into ordered sequences in soft metamaterials,” is published in the journal Science Advances.

“If you cut a T-pattern into a polymer sheet, you’ve created a metamaterial, because you’ve changed the properties of the material,” says Haoze Sun, first author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. “If you pull the metamaterial sheet, all the cuts essentially pop open at once. These openings create a mesh-like pattern and extend the length of the sheet.

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