Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
JCI Perm1 enhances Nrf2driven antioxidant defense through Keap1 oxidation during myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury
Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, New Jersey, USA.
2Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
3Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, National Yang-Ming Chiao-Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Academic Group Think and Peer Review Journals
The contemporary university system faces an unprecedented crisis of epistemic legitimacy. While empirical and vocational disciplines (such as clinical medicine, structural engineering, and applied physics) remain constrained by real-world falsifiability and physical safety, non-rigorous, non-vocational fields—predominantly spanning theoretical humanities and speculative social sciences—have descended into self-referential group-think. This paper argues that the legacy model of peer-reviewed, paywalled academic journals in these non-empirical fields is economically extractive, intellectually calcified, and functionally obsolete in the era of artificial intelligence. Through an examination of institutional incentive structures, the performative jargon of soft disciplines, and the democratizing force of generative AI, we show how legacy publishing cartels protect ideological conformity rather than academic rigor.
A New Kind of HIV Pill Just Passed Its First Test in Humans
Scientists have just announced the results from the first clinical trial in people with HIV-1 of a new antiretroviral drug, which suggests it could be a very useful new tool in treating the virus.
The drug is currently known as ‘VH-499’ (that’s short for VH4011499), and it works by inhibiting the virus’s capsid protein, without which HIV cannot proliferate to harmful or transmissible levels.
“Advancements in care and prevention have transformed HIV-1 into a manageable chronic condition and reduced transmission rates,” write clinical pharmacologist Rulan Griesel and team in a paper announcing the clinical trial results.
This amino acid may help the body fight tumors and viral infections
The amino acid arginine helps keep the human body humming, most notably by synthesizing proteins that carry out a range of cellular processes. It’s produced by our bodies and found in common high-protein foods. Low levels of arginine are associated with a number of diseases, including colon cancer.
Sohail Tavazoie, head of Rockefeller University’s Elizabeth and Vincent Meyer Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology, has been investigating that connection for years. In 2023, Tavazoie’s team found that starving colon cancer cells of arginine increases the number of mutations they accumulate. Now they’ve discovered that an arginine-deficient diet also affects the immune system by stalling the production of the MHC-I protein, which alerts the immune system to dangers such as a mutating cell or an invading virus.
Intriguingly, they also found that a moderate dose of arginine—about as much as is found in a couple of over-the-counter tablets—could potentially restore expression of the genes responsible for MHC-I production. They published the results in the journal Cell.
Quantum randomness helps neural network recognize troublesome handwritten digits
Quantum computing and AI are among the most rapidly developing modern technologies. AI, in the form of machine learning, has been deployed for decades to recommend movies and TV shows and make it easier to search for images. Over the past several years, large language models have permeated even more facets of daily life, from writing emails to producing images, videos and songs in response to requests expressed in a few written lines.
Quantum computers, on the other hand, have remained almost exclusively in labs at universities and a handful of companies. Nevertheless, many researchers and engineers developing them are already looking for the earliest applications and predict a bright future in which quantum computers excel at certain tasks, like drug development and enabling new cryptographic techniques.
Despite machine learning and quantum computing both being heralded as revolutionary technologies, neither is a magic solution to every problem. They are each the products of a long line of research advances and are both still under active study.
How the heart’s ‘little brain’ helps it function and protects it against stress
For years, scientists have known that the heart has its own network of nerves, the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICNS), sometimes called its “little brain.” Exactly how it functions has remained something of a mystery, but a new paper published in the journal Cell sheds light on how these heart nerves work to keep the heart beating steadily.
The heart’s nerve cells fine-tune signals coming from the brain to control heart function, including heart rate. But because they are so few, doctors have struggled to determine exactly what they do. To solve this, researchers from Yale University School of Medicine genetically engineered adult mice so their heart nerves would glow, making them much easier to study.
After locating the nerves, the team analyzed which genes were active in them. They discovered that the nerves fell into two categories, which they called Npy neurons and Ddah1 neurons.