For The Better

Researchers have discovered how T cells — an important component of our immune system — are able keep on killing as they hunt down and kill cancer cells, repeatedly reloading their toxic weapons.

Clinical decisions made in the delivery setting as to whether to employ vaginal delivery or cesarean section are often made under high pressure, and with great uncertainty, and have serious consequences for mother and baby. Now, a new study of electron…

Hundreds of connections between different human diseases have been uncovered through their shared origin in our genome, challenging the categorization of diseases by organ, symptoms, or clinical specialty. A new study has generated data on thousands of…

Uses of facial images and facial recognition technologies — to unlock a phone or in airport security — are becoming increasingly common in everyday life. But how do people feel about using such data in healthcare and biomedical research?

Jellyfish have voracious appetites, and they aren’t considered the most selective eaters. Almost anything that gets stuck to their tentacles winds up in the gelatinous sack that they use to digest their food. This ‘take what comes’ feeding strategy has…

It remains a central challenge in psychiatry to reliably judge whether a patient will respond to treatment. Researchers now show that moment-to-moment fluctuations in brain activity can reliably predict whether patients with social anxiety disorder wil…

The molecular causes of a particular type of food-dependent Cushing’s Syndrome, a rare disease of the adrenal glands, are finally revealed.

An extensive field study into air quality along a road lined with buildings has confirmed that hedges can help mitigate traffic-related pollution up to 1.7m, reducing the pollutants breathed by pedestrians, young children and cyclists.

To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark. Unless CO2 emissions drop significantly, global warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, the American Midwest tro…

Based on the most comprehensive winter study to date, conducted in the Southern Ocean during July and August 2017, scientists were able to show that phytoplankton were indeed active during the icy cold and dark winter months. These findings are importa…

Not all ice is the same. The solid form of water comes in more than a dozen different – sometimes more, sometimes less crystalline – structures, depending on the conditions of pressure and temperature in the environment. Superionic ice is a special cry…

More than a third of all medicines available today are based on active substances from nature and a research team has developed a procedure to identify small active substance molecules much more quickly and easily.

In May 2020, a hole a little smaller than the state of Rhode Island opened up for two weeks in the Last Ice Area, a million-square-kilometer patch of sea ice north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island that’s expected to be the last refuge of ice in a rapi…

Hydropower is the dominant source of energy in the Amazon region, the world’s largest river basin and a hotspot for future hydropower development. However, a new study warns that in the coming decades, climate change-driven reductions in precipitation …

Researchers have developed a simple spatial light modulator made from gold electrodes covered by a thin film of electro-optical material that changes its optical properties in response to electric signals.

Researchers have described a new antibiotic that appears to have the potential to cure Lyme disease.

A new study found that the environmental lifestyle that bacteria possess reveal why some go rogue and turn deadly while others remain harmless to humans. The findings focus on Vibrio vulnificus, better known as the flesh-eating bacteria. However, what …