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Wind howls and waves roar as storms rage over the open ocean. But even as gusts reach hurricane strength and swells rise as high as six-story buildings, the violent effects of these storms only reach about 500 meters beneath the surface.“The ocean’s four kilometers deep, so there’s a whole lot more going on,” said Bethany Kolody, a microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Beneath that half kilometer depth, the ocean is quiet. Winds and waves no longer dictate how the water moves; density does. Deep inside the ocean, there is a point at which the water density…

Credit: Md Saiful Islam Khan / iStock / Getty Images Plus Multiple myeloma, the second most common blood cancer in the United States, is diagnosed about twice as often in men as in women. While this disparity has been recognized for decades, the biological reasons behind it have remained unclear. A new peer-reviewed study published in Cancer now provides one of the most detailed explanations to date, demonstrating that men not only develop multiple myeloma more frequently, but also present with more aggressive disease at diagnosis. Researchers analyzed data from 850 patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma enrolled in the Integrative Molecular…

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a disabling psychiatric disorder that places a heavy burden on patients, families, and health systems. Despite available antipsychotic medications, many patients experience persistent symptoms, making effective treatment and long-term recovery a continuing challenge. Emerging research suggests a link between gut dysbiosis and SCZ. This IPA blog describes the plausible mechanisms and the growing field of studies exploring the potential of microbiome-based therapies. Schizophrenia, in brief More than 50 million people globally suffer from SCZ. Men and women are affected by SCZ in roughly equal numbers. However, men typically develop the illness three to five years earlier than…

Credit: Alex Raths/Getty Images Wearable health devices, such as smartwatches, have become commonplace and enable continuous monitoring of physiological signals at the skin’s surface. A research team led by scientists at Tokyo City University and at The University of Tokyo, collaborating with researchers at RIKEN and at Canon Medical Systems Co., now reports on the development of a biohybrid approach that works by transforming engineered skin to a visible indicator of internal biological states. The ”living sensor display” is an engineered skin graft that fluoresces in response to specific internal biomarkers, such as those associated with inflammation. The system leverages…

Credit: SEBASTIAN KAULITZKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images Research led by Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto shows antibodies against flagellin, the main protein that makes up the long tail on many gut bacteria, can be found in the blood of a significant proportion of at risk people who go on to develop Crohn’s disease. The antibody response observed by the researchers was mainly directed at a small section of the flagellin protein, known as the hinge region, from normal gut bacteria and could be detected one to five years before diagnosis in those affected. Crohn’s disease is an autoimmune disease affecting the…

Credit: Dr_Microbe/Getty Images Researchers at the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) have newly identified sets of genetic variations that increase susceptibility to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and influence survival once the disease develops. The findings, published in Nature Communications, show that mutations in two genes, FCN1 and PLAT, a part of the innate defense mechanism called the complement system, are associated with an increased risk of developing PDAC, while the expression of other complement system genes shapes immune cell infiltration and prognosis. Together, the results suggest that genetic profiling of complement system pathways could help identify individuals at higher risk…

Credit: CIPhotos / iStock / Getty Images Plus Tahoe Therapeutics, Arc Institute, and Biohub have each made a multi-million dollar commitment to fill the massive data gap for virtual cell models. The teams exclusively told GEN Edge that more than 120 million single cell data points across 225,0000 perturbations will be generated using Tahoe’s Mosaic technology for mapping how drug molecules interact with biology. All three organizations lead a field that builds AI models trained on transcriptome data to predict how cell gene expression changes with cell states. In therapeutics, these virtual cells could gleam insight into new drugs capable of shifting cells from “diseased” to “healthy” with fewer off…

In September of 2024, Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, submitted his postdoctoral researcher’s paper to Nature Communications, since a publication in this journal would look good on the researcher’s curriculum vita. When it came time to pay for the article almost a year later, Weinberger got a shock. “It was probably double or triple anything I had seen previously,” he said. The current cost, called an article processing charge (APC), to publish an article in Nature Communications, an open access journal, is $7,540. Weinberger, who is an editor for FEM Microbes and previous sat on…

Credit: Dusan Stankovic / Getty Images / DigitalVision Vectors Eric Kelsic, PhD, has spent years thinking about how to target the brain for therapy. Through his career, Kelsic has seen central nervous system (CNS) programs rely heavily on brute force: local CNS injections offer limited benefit, are invasive and unscalable, and systemic adeno-associated virus (AAV) delivery largely fails due to blood-brain barrier (BBB) exclusion, liver sequestration, and, ultimately, toxicity. To Kelsic and others, the bottleneck is clear—get through the BBB and keep clear of the liver. Many companies have seeded with the mission to engineer AAVs to get through the…

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. About 20 years ago there was a discovery that would forever change our ideas about fiber: our gut bacteria eat the fiber we eat to produce important signaling compounds called short-chain fatty acids. But before I get carried away, a little science lesson to frame the discovery. Cells are the fundamental unit of life. We’re composed of trillions of them. They communicate with each other through receptors on the surface of…