Toggle light / dark theme

Despite testing negative for rheumatoid arthritis, doctors diagnosed her with the condition after four months of visits.

However, the 40-year-old, who owns a marketing company, soon experienced excruciating stomach pains and a dramatic 14-pound weight loss within a month, with doctors attributing it to acid reflux.

Unsatisfied and desperate for answers, Bannon turned to the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI for a potential diagnosis, which she had been using for work.

Scientists in Germany have crafted “skyrmion bags” of light—complex vortex-like structures—on the surface of gold by cleverly manipulating how laser beams interact with nano-etched patterns.

This unusual feat not only adds a surprising twist to the physics of light but also hints at future technologies that could break the limits of current microscopes.

Skyrmion light bags: a new breakthrough

But now, a bold new idea is challenging this tidy system. Scientists at Rice University in Texas believe there may be a third kind of particle—one that doesn’t follow the rules of fermions or bosons. They’ve developed a mathematical model showing how these unusual entities, called paraparticles, could exist in real materials without breaking the laws of physics.

“We determined that new types of particles we never knew of before are possible,” says Kaden Hazzard, one of the researchers behind the study. Along with co-author Zhiyuan Wang, Hazzard used advanced math to explore this idea.

Their work, published in Nature, suggests that paraparticles might arise in special systems and act differently than anything scientists have seen before.

Sam Parnia, associate professor at New York University, suggests that death can be reversed and our brains may remain salvageable for hours or days after death. He emphasizes that death can be viewed as an injury process, with the potential for revival through ECMO machines and specific drugs used in CPR cocktails to aid recovery.

The global proliferation of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) poses a significant threat to the efficacy of antibiotic-based treatments for diseases. Effective monitoring of ARGs across both spatial and temporal dimensions is essential to understanding their transmission and implementing preventive measures.

A research team has developed a computational tool, Argo, designed to accurately track ARGs in environmental samples, providing insights into their dissemination and associated risks.

“Short-read sequencing method is currently used as a high-throughput DNA sequencing technique that generates large volumes of short DNA fragments, typically 150 base pairs. However, it often fails to provide information on the hosts of ARGs,” explained the senior author. “Without detailed host information, it becomes challenging to accurately assessing the risks of ARGs and tracing their transmission, hindering our understanding of their impact on human health and the environment.”

This week, researchers uncovered the negative pressure mechanisms plants use to communicate stress. Linguists found that the melody of spoken language in English functions as its own, distinct language. And there was also depressing news! Like the Trump administration slashing NASA’s budget, which could scrap the James Webb Space Telescope right at the beginning of its operational life (they’re also pushing to scrap the completed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope before its launch).

Additionally, researchers found that the video game Dark Souls has positive psychological effects on players; a physicist made a new contribution to the theory that the universe is a computational process; and scientists in Spain mapped the brain connectivity patterns of psychosis patients:

It’s no secret that our waistlines often expand in middle age, but the problem isn’t strictly cosmetic. Belly fat accelerates aging and slows down metabolism, increasing our risk for developing diabetes, heart problems and other chronic diseases. Exactly how age transforms a six pack into a softer stomach, however, is murky.

Now preclinical research by City of Hope has uncovered the cellular culprit behind age-related abdominal fat, providing new insights into why our midsections widen with middle age.

Published today in Science, the findings suggest a novel target for future therapies to prevent belly flab and extend our healthy lifespans.

In recent years, cell therapies have developed alongside chemotherapy and immunotherapy to become a new pillar in the treatment of patients with blood and lymph gland cancer. In solid tumors, such as skin, lung, or bone and soft tissue cancer (sarcomas), they have not yet proven themselves as a treatment method.

Tumor shrinkage was achieved only in rare cases, but the side effects were all the more severe. An international research group led by scientists from the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT/UCC) in Dresden has now conducted a Phase I clinical trial of a novel cell therapy approach that also shows promise for .

The results are published in Nature Medicine.