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A liquid brushed onto cavities in seconds may spare many young children from pain, infection, and surgery. A major U.S. trial found that silver diamine fluoride stopped decay in more than half of treated baby teeth. The treatment requires no drilling, shots, or sedation, although it does permanently darken the decayed area.

Signals traveling from the gut to the brain may help turn meals into lasting memories. Rats showed stronger memory activity after consuming nutritious foods, but not after drinking sweet liquids with little or no nutritional value. Blocking the vagus nerve erased this effect and made it harder for the animals to remember where food had been located. Over time, diets high in fat and sugar also weakened this memory system.

A new cooking method could make French fries crispier in less time while significantly limiting how much oil they absorb. Researchers propose combining microwave heating, which keeps oil out, with conventional frying, which provides the crunch consumers expect.

Sleeping well during a heatwave starts with stopping the home from overheating. Close blinds against strong sunlight, ventilate when the air outside becomes cooler, and avoid using heat-producing appliances during the hottest hours. Moving to a cooler room, choosing light bedding and using fans or ice packs safely can also make hot nights more manageable.

A grocery-store audit found that many foods marketed for toddlers may be far less healthy than parents expect. Of nearly 2,800 products examined in Texas, 81% were ultra-processed, and almost half failed at least one World Health Organization nutrient standard, often because they contained too much sugar, sodium, fat, or too many calories.

Researchers found that insulin-producing cells depend on a team of helper proteins to keep insulin production on track. When one key partner was missing, damaged proteins built up and the cells made less insulin. Strengthening this system could offer a new way to protect the pancreas as diabetes progresses.

“Huge” new study of Caribbean anole populations catches evolution in real time

A healthy lifestyle can prevent type 2 diabetes for many people, but new research suggests that weight loss alone may not be enough for one particularly vulnerable group. Even after losing about 8% of their body weight and keeping it off for years, people in a high-risk category known as cluster 5 continued to experience rising blood sugar, weakening insulin production, and a strong risk of developing diabetes.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) has a higher prevalence in women than men and is more frequently inherited from mothers than fathers. Yet, while neuroimaging and biomarker studies link maternal family history to stronger AD-related alterations, epidemiological studies suggest that paternal history confers comparable or even greater risk. Here, we leverage the deeply profiled PREVENT-AD cohort to derive three intermediate phenotypes of AD susceptibility. Drawing on nearly 1,000 individual study visits,...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Familial AD accounts for less than 1% of cases, while sporadic AD (SAD) accounts for over 95%. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the critical transition phase from normal aging to AD dementia. Understanding the pathological progression from MCI to AD and the mechanisms underlying SAD is essential. Rodent models, including transgenic and non-transgenic models, are vital tools for developing effective AD therapies. However,...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by progressive neurodegeneration and synaptic dysfunction that begins decades before clinical symptoms emerge. While AD research has traditionally focused on the brain, increasing evidence suggests that the retina undergoes pathological remodeling that shares features with cerebral changes. Advances in retinal imaging, including optical coherence tomography (OCT), OCT angiography, and hyperspectral approaches, have identified structural, vascular, and...

Healthy and pathological aging are associated with progressive changes in cortical inhibition, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Somatosensory gating (SG), the brain's suppression of redundant tactile input, provides a pre-attentive marker of inhibitory function. Paired-pulse paradigms concurrent with noninvasive magnetoencephalography (MEG) provide a millisecond portrayal of the neural dynamics underlying somatosensory processing and the gating of such...

Inflammaging, the chronic subclinical systemic inflammation accompanying aging, represents a critical pathogenetic mechanism underlying age-related neurodegenerative diseases. While amyloid beta (Aβ) peptides are established contributors to neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's disease, their role in aging-related subclinical inflammation remains insufficiently elucidated. In humans, Aβ exhibits dual functions: it supports neuronal activity, survival, and protection against neurotrauma, while also...

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The 9p21 locus encodes critical cell cycle regulators p16^(INK4A), p14^(ARF), and p15^(INK4B) and contains a high density of SNPs associated with aging-related diseases. Progress toward understanding 9p21 regulatory mechanisms has been constrained by complex transcript structures and a shortage of cell models that retain physiologic locus control. We innovated tools to deconvolve the expression and regulation of 9p21 transcripts in single cells. We find that 9p21 transcripts exhibit highly...