Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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An avalanche is caused by a chain reaction of events. A vibration or a change in terrain can have a cascading and devastating impact.

A similar process may happen when living tissues are subject to being pushed or pulled, according to new research published in Nature Communications, by Northeastern University doctoral student Anh Nguyen and supervised by Northeastern physics professor Max Bi.

As , Bi and Nguyen use and mathematics to understand the mechanical processes that organisms undergo on a cellular level. With this more recent work, they have observed that when subjected to sufficient stress, tissues can “suddenly and dramatically rearrange themselves,” similar to how avalanches are formed in the wild.

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Scientists are finding clues for how to treat diabetes and hormone disorders in an unexpected place: a toxin from one of the most venomous animals on the planet.

An international research team led by University of Utah scientists has identified a component within the venom of a predatory marine cone snail, the geography cone, that mimics a human hormone called somatostatin, which regulates the levels of blood sugar and various hormones in the body. The hormone-like toxin’s specific, long-lasting effects, which help the snail hunt its prey, could also help scientists design better drugs for people with diabetes or hormone disorders, conditions that can be serious and sometimes fatal.

New research explores how one venom mimics a human hormone that regulates blood sugar, which could lead to better treatment for diabetes.

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Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that is usually diagnosed in its late stage on the basis of clinical symptoms, mainly motor disorders. By this point, however, the brain is already severely and irreparably damaged. Moreover, diagnosis is difficult and often incorrect because the disease takes many forms, and symptoms overlap with other disorders.

Researchers from the PRODI Center for Protein Diagnostics at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and the biotech company betaSENSE have now discovered a biomarker in the that facilitates a reliable diagnosis at an early stage and can shed light on the progression of the disease and the effect of a therapy. They report their findings in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine from April 25, 2025.

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Quasicrystals, exotic states of matter characterized by an ordered structure with non-repeating spatial patterns, have been the focus of numerous recent physics studies due to their unique organization and resulting symmetries. Among the quasicrystals that have sparked significant interest among the physics community are so-called quantum quasicrystals, which are comprised of bosons (i.e., subatomic particles that have spin in integer values, such as 0, 1, 2, and so on, and can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously).

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPIPKS) recently introduced a new theoretical framework that describes low-energy excitations in bosonic quantum quasicrystals. Their newly devised theory, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, is an extension of conventional theories of elasticity, which also accounts for the unique symmetries of quantum quasicrystals.

“This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration with two colleagues, Prof. Francesco Piazza and Dr. Mariano Bonifacio, which began in 2022 when I was a guest scientist at MPIPKS in Dresden, Germany,” Alejandro Mendoza-Coto, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.

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Karolinska Institutet researchers report that children born before 34 weeks of gestation show persistent deficits in cognitive abilities at ages 9 to 10. Impairments appear independent of socioeconomic status, genetic predisposition, and prenatal or child-specific risk factors. Lower scores were observed in vocabulary, working memory, episodic memory, and recall tasks. Children born late preterm (34–36 weeks) or early term (37–38 weeks) performed comparably to those born full term.

Preterm birth affects approximately 13 million infants worldwide each year and remains a leading cause of childhood morbidity and mortality. Although advances in perinatal care have increased survival, cognitive deficits in these children continue to present major public health concerns.

Critical brain development processes that occur between 24 and 40 weeks of gestation may be disrupted by premature birth. Prior research has mostly focused on extremely or very , often overlooking those born moderately or late preterm, who constitute a large portion of preterm births.

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