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Cognitive flexibility problems may arise months before memory impairment in Alzheimer’s

When most people think about Alzheimer’s disease, memory loss is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Forgetting a loved one’s name, missing appointments or repeatedly misplacing everyday items are often considered early warning signs. But what if the disease begins affecting the brain long before memory problems become noticeable? New research from scientists at Texas A&M Health suggests that another change in brain function may appear even earlier: difficulty adapting when circumstances change.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, researchers found that animal models with Alzheimer’s-related brain changes developed problems with cognitive flexibility months before they showed signs of memory impairment. Cognitive flexibility refers to the brain’s ability to adjust behavior, learn new rules and adapt when situations change.

“We found that this function was impaired before we could detect deficits in spatial memory,” said neuroscientist Jun Wang, Ph.D., professor in the Texas A&M University Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine at Texas A&M Health.

Faulty calcium signaling may drive dry mouth in Down syndrome, raising gum disease risk

Researchers at NYU College of Dentistry have uncovered what may be biologically driving oral health issues unique to Down syndrome. Their study, published in Cell Reports, describes a molecular mechanism—a defect in calcium signaling—behind low saliva production, along with other factors that may contribute to gum disease.

“Understanding the processes responsible for low saliva in Down syndrome and developing therapies to restore salivation could have a transformative impact on the oral and overall health of people with Down syndrome,” said Rodrigo Lacruz, professor of molecular pathobiology at NYU College of Dentistry and the study’s senior author.

XMM-Newton and Chandra help revise distance to Milky Way’s outer spiral arms

The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they found the outer arms to be up to 10% farther away than previously thought.

Perhaps surprisingly, we don’t know much about the structure of our galaxy’s outer regions. It’s difficult to observe our galaxy from the inside: The solar system is well embedded in its disk, preventing a bird’s-eye view, and many regions are obscured by thick clouds of cosmic dust.

But this is changing: We have learned a huge amount since the launch of ESA’s star-surveying Gaia space telescope. Using data collected by Gaia, scientists are mapping the Milky Way galaxy in more detail than ever before by measuring precise distances to its stars. Before Gaia, we weren’t even sure whether our galaxy had two or four spiral arms (we now know the answer to be four).

A Zen Priest explains how spirituality will evolve in the future

Love it or hate it, the world’s religions are in no danger of disappearing any time soon. But that doesn’t mean religious and spiritual sensibilities aren’t going to evolve. To learn more about religion’s future, we talked to Michael LaTorra. By day, he’s a mild-mannered Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico State University, and by night he’s a black-garbed Zen priest at the Zen Center of Las Cruces.

He is also the author of A Warrior Blends with Life: A Modern Tao, a book about spirituality in modern life.

LaTorra: The old ways are dying. The largest world religions, Christianity and Islam, continue to grow in membership. But internally, they are riven with factionalism. People may become members of these religions because they are seeking God or maybe just community fellowship or simply because they were born into families associated with those religions. What some people find, after a while, is that their religion has many dogmatic beliefs and rules for living that sometimes do not fit with what seems like a good life, a fulfilling life. Nevertheless, some people remain affiliated with a religion due to social pressure that would make leaving very difficult. The lesson to draw from this is that people belong to religions for lots of different reasons, and not always because they believe every dogma in it. Often times, people stay in a religion because leaving it would put them at odds with their families and friends.

Why manufacturing is the missing link in paediatric drug discovery

As therapies grow more personalized and molecularly complex, advancing them from lab to clinic depends not only on drug discovery, but on how those drugs are made. Frank Fazio, president of the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) Facility at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, explains how close integration of research and production is helping reshape paediatric drug development — and accelerating the path from discovery to patient care.

How is biological insight reshaping drug safety?

Precision has improved dramatically. As we understand the underlying biology better, we’re selecting more relevant targets and pursuing them with greater confidence. We still encounter failures, but it feels less frequent because the biology is becoming clearer.

Meituan Trains the First Frontier-Scale LLM Entirely on Chinese Domestic Chips: LongCat-2.0

* Performance: The model is optimized for “agentic coding” tasks. In benchmarks, it scored 59.5 on SWE-bench Pro, surpassing Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro and slightly exceeding OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. It also performed strongly on other agent and reasoning tests.

* Inference and Release: Before its official launch, it operated anonymously on OpenRouter as “Owl Alpha,” becoming one of the platform’s top three most-used models. The model weights and technical infrastructure are expected to be released soon on platforms like Hugging Face. API pricing is set at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3 per million output tokens, with promotional rates available.

Meituan trained LongCat-2.0 on over 50,000 unnamed Chinese AI ASICs arranged in superpods with high-bandwidth interconnects. The chips share architectural similarities with Huawei’s Ascend 910C series, though Meituan has not publicly named the exact vendor.

The training run consumed more than 35 trillion tokens, including hundreds of billions of tokens with approximately 1-million-token context lengths. This level of scale — previously achieved only on NVIDIA GPUs or Google TPUs — required extensive custom engineering in parallelism, fault tolerance, and numerical stability.

The team implemented 6D parallelism (tensor, context, expert, data, pipeline, and embedding parallelism) to efficiently distribute both the MoE layers and the novel embedding components across the cluster.

Blood protein clocks flag higher risks of death and chronic disease

Organ-specific age gaps showed strong associations with cancers affecting the corresponding organ. The strongest association was observed between kidney biological age and renal cancer (HR, 1.6). Organ-specific aging in lungs and intestines also increased the risk of lung cancer and stomach cancer, respectively (HR, 1.4 for both). The sensitivity analysis yielded largely similar results, except for attenuations in kidney and lung cancer, indicating the robustness of the primary findings.

The Global Proteomic Aging Clock predicted mortality from any cause as accurately as conventional risk factors. Combining the findings with established risk factors further improved mortality prediction compared with using risk factors alone.

Single Injection Reverses Osteoarthritis in Animals in Just 4 Weeks

The chronic loss of joint cartilage known as osteoarthritis causes pain and bone decay for hundreds of millions of people every day.

But a new treatment option just got a step closer to human trials – in the form of a simple, single shot.

Based on ongoing animal experiments, researchers have shown that injecting a carefully engineered, slow-release drug-delivery system into the damaged joint can coax the body’s own cartilage and bone cells to carry out an effective repair job in just a few weeks.

Addressing Barriers to Transitioning Pediatric Patients With Epilepsy to Adult Health Care in the United StatesA Narrative Review

Purpose of ReviewAdolescents with childhood-onset epilepsy, along with their families, must navigate a complex constellation of uncertainties related to physical, psychological, and social changes as well as medical and possibly legal ramifications as…

Fear-learning circuit shows how stress disrupts brain’s ability to suppress trauma

Fear is often thought of as a negative emotion but is actually a natural protective response to perceived threats or danger. It helps us survive. When we experience a situation that causes fear, it becomes stored in our brain as a fear memory. These fear memories prevent us from touching a hot stove after being burned or from stepping onto a busy street.

What about fear memories that take over? Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is caused by severe acute or chronic stress that disrupts the learning process designed to suppress fear memories. These memories then begin to negatively affect a person’s quality of life.

Typically, our fear memories can be suppressed through extinction learning. The original memory or fear isn’t forgotten, but a new memory is formed and suppresses the original fear memory. However, extinction learning can become tricky in situations that involve traumatic memories.

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