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Scientists have discovered a hidden cleanup system at the back of the eye that drains fluid and waste through a previously unknown pathway. The surprising finding, demonstrated in mice, could open the door to new treatments for glaucoma, macular degeneration, and other causes of blindness.

A simple change in the order you eat your food could help prevent blood sugar spikes. Scientists discovered that giving mice olive oil before carbohydrates slowed digestion and activated a surprising combination of hormones and nerve signals that helped regulate blood sugar, even in mice with type 2 diabetes.

One of the world's most common plastics may pose a hidden threat to liver health. Texas A&M researchers discovered that polyethylene microplastics can contribute to fatty liver disease, with potentially worse effects when combined with an unhealthy diet. Even more surprising, this widely used plastic was previously considered relatively harmless.

Neanderthals may have used a sticky substance made from birch bark to treat wounds thousands of years before antibiotics existed. Researchers recreated ancient birch tar production techniques and discovered that every sample could inhibit the growth of bacteria responsible for dangerous wound infections. Previously known mainly as a prehistoric glue, birch tar may have doubled as a surprisingly effective natural medicine.

Scientists have developed a tiny, injectable device that can control nerve activity without surgery, batteries, or wires, potentially transforming treatment for chronic pain and movement disorders. Powered wirelessly from outside the body, the seed-sized technology has shown promising results in early testing.

A surprisingly simple change in how you walk could help relieve knee arthritis pain and even slow joint damage. In a year-long clinical trial, researchers found that adjusting the angle of a person's foot while walking reduced osteoarthritis pain by an amount comparable to medication, without requiring drugs or surgery. Even more promising, MRI scans revealed that participants who adopted the personalized walking technique experienced slower deterioration in a marker of knee cartilage health.

A large study suggests loneliness and social isolation can cost people years of healthy life, especially when it comes to mental health. Men experiencing both lost about 5.8 years free from depression and anxiety, while women lost roughly 3.7 years.

A short course of immunotherapy before surgery may offer remarkably durable protection for some patients with stage two or three bowel cancer. In the NEOPRISM-CRC trial, 32 patients with a specific genetic form of bowel cancer received pembrolizumab for up to nine weeks before surgery instead of the usual post-surgery chemotherapy. After nearly three years of follow-up, none of the patients had experienced a cancer recurrence, including those who still had small traces of disease after treatment.

Ocular age estimates derived from fundus photographs, optical coherence tomography, ocular fluids, systemic omics, and multimodal models are increasingly reported in years. The eye is unusually tractable for organ-specific aging research because it is paired, repeatedly imageable, locally treatable, and linked to quantitative function. The familiar scale can obscure differences in what was measured, what the model was developed to predict, which quantity is reported, and what the study design...

Sensory degradation with aging can impair balance control, partly by disrupting visual contributions to self-motion estimation. We investigated age-related differences in center of mass (CoM) trajectories controlling in the frontal plane during exposure to repeated visual perturbations in walking. We hypothesized that the older adults would show larger responses to visual perturbations and less adaptation to repeated visual perturbation exposure. We applied three visual perturbations to 14...

Lysosomal decline and proteostasis collapse are defining features of aging and major contributors to neurodegenerative vulnerability, yet interventions that preserve neuronal lysosomal function across aging remain poorly defined. Here, we identify 20(S)-ginsenoside Rg3, a ginseng-derived natural product, as a geroprotective small molecule in Caenorhabditis elegans. Rg3 extended lifespan and preserved key physiological outputs, including locomotion and pharyngeal pumping, indicating that Rg3...

Centromeres are essential regions of the genome that ensure chromosome segregation during mitosis but are also hotspots for chromosome breaks and rearrangements in cancer. The mechanisms underlying this fragility are not fully elucidated. Here, we show that oxidative DNA damage destabilizes centromeres and promotes chromosome instability. Using a chemoptogenetic system to generate singlet oxygen locally at centromeres, we uncouple centromeric oxidative damage from global oxidative stress....

Aging is characterized by a progressive decline in cellular homeostasis accompanied by chronic, low-grade sterile inflammation, termed inflammaging, which contributes to the development of neurodegenerative, cardiometabolic, and neoplastic disorders. Although inflammaging represents a convergence point of multiple hallmarks of aging, the molecular networks linking these processes remain incompletely understood. Here, we propose the Aging Purinome as a systems-level framework describing the...

Transcriptomic surveys of aging tissues routinely report hundreds to thousands of differentially expressed long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), and the field has no agreed way of separating causal drivers from passengers that merely track the aging phenotype. I translate Sir Austin Bradford Hill's nine criteria for causal inference, formulated in 1965, into operational tests for aging-associated lncRNAs. Each criterion is recorded as 0, 1 or 2, and the per-criterion profile is the result: no sum or...

Senescence has been shown to contribute to the progression of aging-related diseases including degenerative disc disease (DDD). However, the mechanisms regulating senescence in the intervertebral disc (IVD) and other tissues/diseases remain poorly understood. Recently, ZNF865 (BLST) was identified as a previously uncharacterized zinc finger protein that regulates a wide array of genes related to protein processing, cell senescence, and DNA damage repair. Here, we show that ZNF865 expression...

Chronic diabetic wounds may fail to heal because immune cells remain locked in damaging inflammatory states instead of transitioning toward tissue repair. Researchers are exploring treatments that reprogram these immune responses, raising hopes for more targeted and effective therapies for diabetic ulcers.

Depression may not be one biological condition, but several distinct patterns of brain activity hiding under the same diagnosis. Researchers studying 263 people with depression identified five brain profiles, each showing different patterns of communication between brain regions and associations with symptoms such as anxiety, trauma, and substance abuse.

Teams led by physicist used “BootLoops” software to produce 36 papers in weeks on everything from linguistics to health policy

A six-month study suggests that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) may offer older adults a powerful advantage: losing body fat while keeping their muscle. Unlike moderate-intensity workouts, which led to a small loss of lean muscle, HIIT preserved it while also improving body composition around the waist.

Improving operational lifetime remains a major challenge for blue organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) harvesting triplet excitons. Achieving substantial lifetime enhancement requires analytical techniques that elucidate degradation mechanisms. Because conventional lifetime analysis involves destructive aging tests, developing non-invasive methods that correlate strongly with device longevity is highly desirable. Here, we show that the operational lifetime of blue phosphorescent OLEDs...