Author: admin

High angle view of a woman taking a nap in her bed at night. Researchers at Stanford Medicine have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can predict a person’s risk of developing dozens of diseases using data from a single night of sleep. The model, called SleepFM, analyzes polysomnography recordings and forecasts the likelihood of future conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease and cancer to neurodegenerative and mental disorders. The research, published in Nature Medicine, shows that sleep data could do more than simply diagnose sleep disorder and may one day be used to assess long-term health risks. “We record…

PEGASUS leverages multi-modal data streams to learn the rules of macrocyclic peptide permeability [1910] 1910 is on a mission to “make undruggable targets a thing of the past” by “turning every pharma company into an AI company,” says founder and CEO, Jen Asher, PhD. The Sam Altman–backed AI drug discovery biotech closed out 2025 by rebranding from “1910 Genetics” to simply “1910,” signaling the company’s broad commitment to multi-modality drug discovery. “2025 has been about us reintroducing ourselves to the world. ‘1910’ speaks to how we are bringing frontier AI research to bear in a modality agnostic manner,” Asher told GEN Edge. Recently in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, 1910 published PEGASUS, an AI model that learns the…

Founded in 2001 by Fei Mao and Vivien Chen, Biotium has become a mainstay of high-performance fluorescent reagents for the life sciences. By uniting chemists and biologists, the company continues to engineer reagents optimized for clarity, reproducibility, and emerging techniques.Lori Roberts, PhDDirector of BioscienceBiotiumIn this Innovation Spotlight, Lori Roberts, the director of bioscience at Biotium, discusses the past, present, and future of the company, highlighting their mission rooted in direct communication with researchers and scientific curiosity. Could you share the story behind Biotium’s founding and what inspired its mission to innovate fluorescence technology?Biotium was founded in the early 2000s, but…

A person dear to me died last month from cancer. She was young and beautiful. She did science with all her heart until the final weeks of her life while she waited for a miracle. Having worked on cell-based therapies, she told me when she was first diagnosed that a CAR T cell therapy would save her life. She just had to hang on.   It didn’t. She died. And I am angry at science.   CAR T therapy was sold as a revolution. In 2015–2017, it really looked like one: children with otherwise fatal leukemias walked out of hospital in remission. Eight years…

As winter swoops over the world, wrapping the days in mist and hardening the ground beneath a layer of frost, people retreat indoors to snuggle into cozy blankets. With heaters humming in the background, they indulge in steaming hot chocolate to keep themselves warm. However, not all animals on the planet have this luxury. They have come up with other strategies to survive frigid temperatures. Some frogs adopt an unusual approach: Wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) and Cope’s gray tree frogs (Dryophytes chrysoscelis) bury themselves under leaves on the forest floor, which offers some protection from the cold. However, as temperatures…

It is the golden question that halts many gluten-free dieters at the bar: Is whiskey gluten-free? You look at the bottle. You know it’s made from grains. You might even see “barley” or “rye” mentioned in the very villains of a gluten-free diet. Logic tells you to put the bottle down. But then your friend tells you, “It’s distilled, so the gluten is gone!” Who is right? The short answer is: Yes, pure distilled whiskey is generally gluten-free. However, the long answer is more complicated. While the science of distillation theoretically removes gluten proteins, the reality of additives, cross-contamination, and…

Credit: Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Parvalbumin (PV) interneurons act as the brain’s rhythm keepers. By regulating local circuit activity and maintaining excitation–inhibition balance, they help stabilize cortical network function. When these cells malfunction or decline—as seen in disorders such as schizophrenia and epilepsy—neural networks can become unstable, leading to cognitive and behavioral disruptions. Yet despite their importance, PV interneurons have been difficult to generate in vitro, with multiple studies noting the challenge of producing subtype‑specific PV cells from stem cell or fetal sources. A team at Lund University now reports a major step toward overcoming that barrier. In a…

Coral reefs support roughly a third of all marine life.Image credit:© iStock.com, Aaron BullCoral reefs make up a tenth of one percent of the ocean’s surface area but support up to a third of multicellular ocean species. The reefs provide valuable shelter from predators and ocean currents for many species, and they serve as a source of food for others.Now, a new study suggests another role for reefs in setting a daily rhythm for microbes living nearby.How Coral Reefs Support Ocean Microbial LifeTropical coral reefs don’t just support larger marine species; they are also home to a huge range of…

Credit: Natalia Misintseva / Getty Images A growing body of research suggests that dementia risk is influenced not only by genetics and cardiovascular health, but also by how well the body keeps time. Now, a large prospective study published in Neurology provides some of the strongest evidence yet that disruptions to circadian rhythms, the body’s internal clock, are associated with a substantially higher risk of developing dementia in older adults. “Changes in circadian rhythms happen with aging, and evidence suggests that circadian rhythm disturbances may be a risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases like dementia,” explained study author Wendy Wang, PhD, MPH, of…

A new study led by scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and INSERM identified genes essential for turning embryonic stem cells into brain cells, including a gene linked to a previously undescribed neurodevelopmental disorder. Full details are provided in Nature Neuroscience in a paper aptly titled “CRISPR knockout screens reveal genes and pathways essential for neuronal differentiation and implicate PEDS1 in neurodevelopment.”  According to the paper, the scientists used CRISPR-based gene editing to systematically and individually switch off the roughly 20,000 genes in mouse embryonic stem cells and assess how they affected brain development. Disrupting genes one by one,…