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Tiny pollution particles from smoke, soot, and dust may worsen rheumatoid arthritis and raise the risk of painful flares, particularly after prolonged exposure. The findings suggest that avoiding poor air quality could become an important part of managing the disease.

A prescription form of THC helped many people with PTSD escape recurring trauma-related nightmares, with more than one-third reporting that the nightmares disappeared completely after ten weeks. The results could point toward a long-awaited treatment for one of PTSD’s most distressing and stubborn symptoms.

A simple change in posture may subtly affect how people feel and make decisions. Participants who sat upright reported greater feelings of pride and took more successful risks in a virtual balloon game than those who hunched over. Most did not realize researchers had influenced their posture, helping rule out the possibility that they were merely responding to expectations. The results suggest workplace ergonomics could influence more than physical comfort.

A group of brain cells called orexin neurons appears to help us keep working when reaching a reward becomes increasingly difficult. Blocking their activity weakened motivation in rats, pointing to a possible new target for understanding why people sometimes struggle to sustain goal-directed behavior.

New study spots “primordial spin” imprinted on galaxies by churning halos of dark matter

People with DNA variant from our evolutionary cousins tend to have more lean muscle mass

Virus reactivations by SARS-CoV-2 could worsen initial symptoms and increase risk of Long Covid

We investigated how patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) manage the explore-exploit trade-off in a structured reward-learning task. Patients were tested either on (n = 34) or off (n = 34) dopaminergic medication (levodopa), with age-matched polyneuropathy patients serving as controls (n = 35). Behaviorally, patients off medication showed marked learning and decision-making deficits, characterized by overexploration (excessive sampling of novel options) and insufficient exploitation...

Lifestyle habits, cognitive reserve, and affective reserve (secure attachment, extraversion, psychological resilience) predict resilience in the oldest-old, though the underlying biological mechanisms remain unclear. This study explored relationships between these protective factors, 120 + NULISA CNS blood biomarkers, and multidimensional health outcomes (global cognition, mental health, walking speed) in 401 dementia-free participants (age 83-87) from the InveCe.Ab study. Using sparse partial...

CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that endurance training is associated with more favorable renal biomarker profiles in the context of chronic opioid exposure.

Robots increasingly share spaces with people, supporting delivery services and mobility for the aging populations, yet their ability to share space comfortably lacks understanding and benchmarks for designers and policy-makers. We compared human-robot (HRI) and human-human (HHI) interactions across four real-world crowd datasets spanning Europe, North America, and Asia, using a unified pipeline to detect interactions, stratify by crowd density, and model pedestrian behavior. Local motion...

Neutrophils are increasingly recognized as key orchestrators of the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, yet their intrinsic plasticity, short lifespan and resistance to genetic manipulation have impeded therapeutic targeting. Here, we report a non-pharmacological, biophysical immunomodulatory strategy based on cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) to reprogram tumor-associated neutrophils and restore antitumor immunity. We show that CAP simultaneously delivers reactive oxygen species and redox...

Stem-cell-based in vitro models offer promising potential to elucidate human brain cell functions and interactions, but limitations in reproducibility, maturation and cell-type diversity persist. Especially, prolonged incorporation of mature microglia and studies of neuroinflammation have proven challenging. Here, we developed a human induced pluripotent stem cell-based three-dimensional cortical brain tissue model (3BTM) containing neurons, astrocytes and microglia with high reproducibility,...

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Hypothesis generation in biomedicine is constrained by human cognitive limitations in synthesizing insights from fragmented biomedical knowledge and multimodal data sources. Here we introduce XunZi, an AI biologist that integrates logical reasoning and multimodal data fusion to autonomously generate de novo therapeutic target hypotheses with testable mechanisms. XunZi has been trained on 24.4 million publications and 613.6 TB of multisource data spanning 21,008 human genes and 5,850 diseases,...

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