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Learning the language of lasso peptides to improve peptide engineering

In the hunt for new therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases, lasso peptides prove to be a catch. Their knot-like structures afford these molecules high stability and diverse biological activities, making them a promising avenue for new therapeutics. To better unleash their clinical potential, a team from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology has developed LassoESM, a new large language model for predicting lasso peptide properties.

The collaborative study was recently published in Nature Communications.

Lasso peptides are made by bacteria. To produce these peptides, bacteria use ribosomes to build chains of amino acids that are then folded by biosynthetic enzymes into a unique slip knot-like structure. Through this process, thousands of different lasso peptides are generated, many of which have demonstrated antibacterial, antiviral, and anticancer properties.

Men experience more brain atrophy with age despite women’s higher Alzheimer’s risk

Women are far more likely than men to end up with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This may, at least partially, be due to women’s longer average lifespans, but many scientists think there is probably more to the story. It would be easy to surmise that the increased risk is also related to differences in the way men’s and women’s brains change as they age. However, the research thus far has been unclear, as results across different brain regions and methods have been inconsistent.

Now, a new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that it’s men who experience greater decline in more regions of the as they age. Researchers involved in the study analyzed 12,638 brain MRIs from 4,726 cognitively healthy participants (at least two scans per person) from the ages of 17–95 to find how age-related changes occurred and whether they differed between men and women.

The results showed that men experienced declines in cortical thickness and in many regions of the brain and a decline in subcortical structures in older age. Meanwhile, women showed greater decline only in a few regions and more ventricular expansion in older adults. So, while differences in brain aging between the sexes are apparent, the cause of increased AD prevalence in women is still a bit mysterious.

A ‘flight simulator’ for the brain reveals how we learn—and why minds sometimes go off course

Every day, your brain makes thousands of decisions under uncertainty. Most of the time, you guess right. When you don’t, you learn. But when the brain’s ability to judge context or assign meaning falters, thoughts and behavior can go astray. In psychiatric disorders ranging from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder to schizophrenia, the brain may misjudge how much evidence to gather before acting—or fail to adjust when the rules of the world change based on new information.

“Uncertainty is built into the brain’s wiring,” says Michael Halassa, a professor of neuroscience at Tufts University School of Medicine. “Picture groups of neurons casting votes—some optimistic, some pessimistic. Your decisions reflect the average.” When that balance skews, the brain can misread the world: assigning too much meaning to random events, as in schizophrenia, or becoming stuck in rigid patterns, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Understanding those misfires has long challenged scientists, says Halassa. “The brain speaks the language of single neurons. But fMRI—the tool we use to study brain activity in people—tracks blood flow, not the electrical chatter of individual brain cells.”

Social conflict among strongest predictors of teen mental health concerns, research shows

Approximately 20% of American adolescents experience a mental health disorder each year, a number that has been on the rise. Genetics and life events contribute, but because so many factors are involved, and because their influence can be subtle, it’s been difficult for researchers to generate effective models for predicting who is most at risk for mental health problems.

A new study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis provides some answers. Published Sept. 15 in Nature Mental Health, it mined an enormous set of data collected from pre-teens and teens across the U.S. and found that social conflicts—particularly family fighting and reputational damage or bullying from peers—were the strongest predictors of near-and long-term mental health issues.

The research also revealed sex differences in how boys and girls experience stress from peer conflict, suggesting that nuance is needed when assessing social stressors in teens.

Triplets born from proton collisions found to be correlated with each other

For the first time, by studying quantum correlations between triplets of secondary particles created during high-energy collisions in the LHC accelerator, it has been possible to observe their coherent production. This achievement confirms the validity of the core-halo model, currently used to describe one of the most important physical processes: hadronization, during which individual quarks combine to form the main components of matter in the universe.

Quarks and the gluons that bind them are the most numerous prisoners in today’s universe, locked inside protons, neutrons and mesons. However, at sufficiently high energies—such as those that existed shortly after the Big Bang or those that occur today in in the LHC accelerator—quarks and gluons are released, forming an exotic “soup”: . Under normal conditions, this plasma is not stable, and as soon as it cools down sufficiently, the quarks and gluons bind together again, producing in a process called hadronization.

New details of this fascinating phenomenon, obtained through the analysis of so-called three-body quantum correlations, have been reported by physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Krakow, working as part of the LHCb experiment conducted by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.

Webb sheds more light on composition of planetary debris around nearby white dwarf

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have performed infrared observations of a planetary debris disk around a nearby white dwarf known as GD 362. Results of the new observations, presented October 8 on the arXiv preprint server, yield important insights into the chemical composition of this disk.

White dwarfs (WDs) are stellar cores left behind after a star has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Due to their high gravity, they are known to have atmospheres of either pure hydrogen or pure helium.

However, there exists a small fraction of WDs that shows traces of heavier elements, and they are believed to be accreting planetary material. Studies of this material around WDs, which often forms dust disks, is essential to improving our knowledge of how planets form and evolve.

G7 and Australia sign deal on quantum tech benchmarks

Scientists from the G7 nations and Australia signed an “unprecedented agreement” regarding quantum technology on Wednesday, France’s national metrology lab told AFP.

The deal between laboratories involved in the science of measurement hopes to establish benchmarks regarding progress in areas such as quantum computers.

The field has seen leading claim breakthroughs in recent years that have later been questioned by researchers.

Streamlined method to directly generate photons in optical fiber could secure future quantum internet

With the rise of quantum computers, the security of our existing communication systems is at risk. Quantum computers will be able to break many of the encryption methods used in current communication systems. To counter this, scientists are developing quantum communication systems, which utilize quantum mechanics to offer stronger security. A crucial building block of these systems is a single-photon source: a device that generates only one light particle at a time.

These photons, carrying quantum information, are then sent through optical fibers. For to work, it is essential that single photons are injected into optical fibers with extremely low loss.

In conventional systems, single-photon emitters, like and rare-earth (RE) element ions, are placed outside the fiber. These photons then must be guided to enter the fiber. However, not all photons make it into the fibers, causing high transmission loss. For practical quantum communication systems, it is necessary to achieve a high-coupling and channeling efficiency between the and the emitter.

Twice around to return home: A hidden reset button for spins and qubits

The world is filled with rotating objects—gyroscopes, magnetic spins, and more recently, qubits in quantum computers. For example, the atomic nuclei in our bodies precess at megahertz frequencies inside NMR machines. In practice, it is often desirable to return such a rotating system precisely to its starting point. At first glance, this seems impossible: after an elaborate sequence of twists and wobbles, how could one possibly retrace the path back to the origin?

The astonishing answer is that it is always possible. No matter how tangled the history of rotations, there exists a simple recipe: rescale the driving force and apply it twice. A single application is never sufficient, but applying this doubled, rescaled force guarantees an exact return. Under this operation, the spin—or the qubit, or any rotor—will unfailingly come home.

This discovery was made by Distinguished Professor Tsvi Tlusty from the Department of Physics at UNIST and Jean-Pierre Eckmann from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters on October 1, 2025, reveals that, despite their apparent complexity, rotations conceal a fundamental order.

Record spin waves thanks to flux quanta

Spin waves are considered to be promising candidates for a new form of electronics. Instead of electrons, the focus here is on magnons. These quantized units of spin waves describe how spin precession propagates. Similar to electrons, magnons can transmit information in a conductor. However, they do so with much lower resistance and thus a fraction of the energy consumption.

At TU Braunschweig, the Cryogenic Quantum Electronics working group, together with international partners, has now set a new record for the wavelength of excited propagating magnons. The researchers led by Professor Oleksandr Dobrovolskiy used another quasiparticle, fluxons, to excite the spin waves. The team collaborated with partners from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, the University of Vienna and the University of Bordeaux.

“Fluxons move as magnetic flux quanta of a superconductor at speeds of up to 10 kilometers per second. We succeeded in using the ultra-fast fluxons to excite a spin wave in a neighboring magnet,” explains Dobrovolskiy. “This effect can be imagined as similar to the bow wave created by a speedboat in water. Except that our boat is so fast that it literally creates a kind of .”

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