Dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be driving the ever-faster expansion of the universe, appears to be changing over time, according to new observations released Wednesday.
If dark energy is in fact weakening, it would likely mean that science’s understanding of how the universe works will need to be rewritten.
The new findings come from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which sits on a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the U.S. state of Arizona.
A study from Emory University suggests that levodopa, a medication that increases dopamine levels in the brain, may help treat individuals with depression who experience motivational impairments due to high inflammation. Researchers found that a common blood test measuring C-reactive protein (CRP), a blood biomarker of inflammation produced by the liver, could help determine which patients are most likely to respond to repeated doses of levodopa.
The findings, published in the March 2025 print edition of Brain, Behavior and Immunity, show that in participants with CRP levels above 2 mg/L, daily administration of levodopa improved connectivity within a key brain reward pathway—the ventral striatum to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex —after just one week of treatment across a range of doses.
While about half of the participants responded best to a lower dose of 150 mg/day, the other half required up to 450 mg/day for levodopa to effectively overcome the effects of inflammation on this dopamine-rich reward circuit.
University of Toronto researchers have discovered nine new genes used by bacteria to protect themselves against phages—viruses that infect them.
In a study published in Nature Microbiology, the researchers describe how they used a combination of bioinformatics and laboratory testing—on sediment samples obtained from tanks at Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada—to identify the previously unknown defense genes.
The findings could have profound implications for the development of strategies to treat bacterial infections, particularly those that are drug resistant.
With this record-breaking distance, secure quantum communication has now gone close to global.
THURSDAY, March 20, 2025 (HealthDay News) — A California pet food company has recalled raw chicken products after they were linked to bird flu infections in tw
Photons injected into a semiconductor platform scatter into an exotic supersolid state.
“We have found a key to controlling the switching on and off of proteins by combining photochemistry and hydrolysis,” says KTH researcher Tove Kivijärvi.
When designing materials that aim to improve medicine, you need to be able to control the functions of the material in a very precise way. If this is achieved, cell environments similar to the human body can be created in the lab, which is important for understanding biological mechanisms, disease processes and how the body repairs itself. Biological materials can also be used to study how drugs work and to streamline drug testing and preclinical studies.
Nature — Using advanced brain-recording techniques, parrots were found to have a brain organization for vocal control similar to humans, making them an important model for studying speech and for…
MIT engineers have developed an efficient method to directly convert skin cells into functional neurons, bypassing the time-consuming step of creating stem cells first.
Contact: Cara Martinez | Email: [email protected]
Los Angeles — April 14, 2015 – An injection of stem cells into the eye may soon slow or reverse the effects of early-stage age-related macular degeneration, according to new research from scientists at Cedars-Sinai. Currently, there is no treatment that slows the progression of the disease, which is the leading cause of vision loss in people over 65.
“This is the first study to show preservation of vision after a single injection of induced neural progenitor stem cells into a AMD-like rat model for retinal degeneration,” said Shaomei Wang, MD, PhD, lead author of the study published in the journal STEM CELLS and a research scientist in the Eye Program at the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute.