According to the most comprehensive study to date, the global death toll from antibiotic resistance is expected to reach 1.9 million people annually by 2050.
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The number of people worldwide directly killed by antibiotic resistance will rise to 1.9 million a year by 2050, according to the most comprehensive study so far.
An AI model using deep transfer learning—the most advanced form of machine learning—has predicted spoken language outcomes with 92% accuracy from one to three years after patients received cochlear implants (implanted electronic hearing device).
The research is published in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.
Although cochlear implantation is the only effective treatment to improve hearing and enable spoken language for children with severe to profound hearing loss, spoken language development after early implantation is more variable in comparison to children born with typical hearing. If children who are likely to have more difficulty with spoken language are identified prior to implantation, intensified therapy can be offered earlier to improve their speech.
A designer version of the tau protein, developed by a team led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers, maintains its biological function while resisting aggregation, a pathological trait linked to neurodegenerative diseases called tauopathies.
These findings, reported in Structure, could lead to new treatments for conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and progressive supranuclear palsy.
“This is the first step toward creating a molecule that could, in principle, replace a protein that’s pathogenic (disease-causing) while still retaining its normal function,” said study leader Lukasz Joachimiak, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases and of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UT Southwestern.
Prescriptions for the new non-opioid pain medication suzetrigine more than doubled between April and August 2025, according to analysis from Epic Research. The increase indicates a growing interest in opioid alternatives for acute pain, even as clinicians grapple with how and where the drug best fits in practice.
Despite a surge in prescriptions for the non-opioid pain drug suzetrigine, clinicians are still sorting out who benefits the most and when.
Chess is a relatively simple game to learn but a very difficult one to master. Because the starting positions of the pieces are fixed, top players have relied on memorizing the “best” opening moves, which can sometimes result in boring, predictable games. To encourage more creative play and move away from pure memory, former world champion Bobby Fischer proposed Chess960 in the 1990s.
This variant of the game is so called because there are exactly 960 starting positions. It randomizes where the pieces at the back of the board (such as the knights, bishops and the queen) are placed at the start while keeping the rest of the rules the same. Although it was thought that this would make starting the game equally fair and complex for both players, new research suggests otherwise.
Quantum particles have a social life, of a sort. They interact and form relationships with each other, and one of the most important features of a quantum particle is whether it is an introvert—a fermion—or an extrovert—a boson.
Extroverted bosons are happy to crowd into a shared quantum state, producing dramatic phenomena like superconductivity and superfluidity. In contrast, introverted fermions will not share their quantum state under any condition—enabling all the structures of solid matter to form.
But the social lives of quantum particles go beyond whether they are fermions or bosons. Particles interact in complex ways to produce everything we know, and interactions between quantum particles are key to understanding why materials have their particular properties. For instance, electrons are sometimes tightly locked into a relationship with a specific atom in a material, making it an insulator. Other times, electrons are independent and roam freely—the hallmark of a conductor.
Perovskite solar cells have garnered widespread attention as a low-cost, high-efficiency alternative to conventional silicon photovoltaics. However, defects in perovskite films impede charge transport, resulting in energy loss and compromised operational stability.
One solution to this problem is “passivation treatment”—a process that adds chemicals such as simple salts or organic molecules to the film. These small molecules or ions latch onto defects in the perovskite material, preventing the defects from interfering with electrical flow. Unfortunately, verifying the internal efficacy of various passivation treatments remains challenging since most characterization techniques only probe the surface or provide averaged macroscopic information.
Now, however, researchers at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have made an important breakthrough by developing a three-dimensional (3D) electrical imaging technique that directly reveals how defect passivation treatments work in perovskite films. The study was published in Newton on December 31.