alternative_right shares a report from The Guardian: It has been estimated that during the height of the coronavirus pandemic 129bn disposable face masks, mostly made from polypropylene and other plastics, were being used every month around the world. With no recycling stream, most ended up either in landfill or littered in streets, parks, beaches, waterways and rural areas, where they have now begun to degrade. Recent research has reported a significant presence of disposable face masks in both terrestrial and aquatic environments.

They left newly bought masks of several different kinds for 24 hours in flasks containing 150ml of purified water, then filtered the liquid through a membrane to see what came out. Every mask examined ... leached microplastics, but it was the FFP2 and FFP3 masks -- marketed as the gold-standard protection against the transmission of the virus -- that leached the most, releasing four to six times as many. And they made an even more worrying discovery.

Subsequent chemical analysis of the leachate found medical masks also released bisphenol B, an endocrine-disrupting chemical that acts like oestrogen when absorbed into the bodies of humans and animals. Taking into account the total amount of single-use face masks produced during the height of the pandemic, the researchers estimated they led to the release of 128-214kg of bisphenol B into the environment. [The researchers wrote that "approximately 128â"214 kg of BPB were released into the environment each day from those masks."] The findings have been published in the journal Environmental Pollution.

A 67-year-old US man is still alive more than six months after receiving a kidney from a genetically modified pig. This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person. From a report: Researchers say the outcome is a landmark case of successful xenotransplantation -- the process of transplanting organs from animals to humans. The recipient, Tim Andrews, had end-stage kidney disease and had been receiving dialysis for more than two years before he underwent the surgery in January. He has been dialysis-free since receiving the kidney. Andrews was one of three patients to receive genetically modified pig kidneys supplied by the biotechnology company eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on compassionate grounds.

Reaching six months' survival is an amazing feat, says Wayne Hawthorne, a transplant surgeon at the University of Sydney in Australia. The first six months is the period of "highest risk for the patient and also the transplant," he adds. Possible complications include anaemia and graft rejection, when the immune system attacks the new organ. "The six-month time point marks that things have gone extremely well," Hawthorne says. Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a "fantastic long-term outcome," he adds. Previously, the recipient with longest-surviving genetically modified pig organ was a 53-year-old US woman, Towana Looney, who had a functioning pig kidney for four months and nine days. However, the organ was removed earlier this year because her immune system began to reject it.

University of Luxembourg mathematicians tested whether GPT-5 could extend a qualitative fourth-moment theorem to include explicit convergence rates, a previously unaddressed problem in the Malliavin-Stein framework. The September 2025 experiment, prompted by claims GPT-5 solved a convex optimization problem, revealed the AI made critical errors requiring constant human correction.

GPT-5 overlooked an essential covariance property easily deducible from provided documents. The researchers compared the experience to working with a junior assistant needing careful verification. They warned AI reliance during doctoral training risks students losing opportunities to develop fundamental mathematical skills through mistakes and exploration.

Somewhere in Houston, four research volunteers "will soon participate in NASA's year-long simulation of a Mars mission," NASA announced this week, saying it will provide "foundational data to inform human exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond."

The 378-day simulation will take place inside a 3D-printed, 1,700-square-foot habitat at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston — starting on October 19th and continuing until Halloween of 2026: Through a series of Earth-based missions called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog), NASA aims to evaluate certain human health and performance factors ahead of future Mars missions. The crew will undergo realistic resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, isolation and confinement, and other stressors, along with simulated high-tempo extravehicular activities. These scenarios allow NASA to make informed trades between risks and interventions for long-duration exploration missions.

"As NASA gears up for crewed Artemis missions, CHAPEA and other ground analogs are helping to determine which capabilities could best support future crews in overcoming the human health and performance challenges of living and operating beyond Earth's resources — all before we send humans to Mars," said Sara Whiting, project scientist with NASA's Human Research Program at NASA Johnson. Crew members will carry out scientific research and operational tasks, including simulated Mars walks, growing a vegetable garden, robotic operations, and more. Technologies specifically designed for Mars and deep space exploration will also be tested, including a potable water dispenser and diagnostic medical equipment...

This mission, facilitated by NASA's Human Research Program, is the second one-year Mars surface simulation conducted through CHAPEA. The first mission concluded on July 6, 2024.

Four years ago a small Microsoft Research team started creating an analog optical computer. They used commercially available parts like sensors from smartphone cameras, optical lenses, and micro-LED lights finer than a human hair. "As the light passes through the sensor at different intensities, the analog optical computer can add and multiply numbers," explains a Microsoft blog post.

They envision the technology scaling to a computer that for certain problems is 100X faster and 100X more energy efficient — running AI workloads "with a fraction of the energy needed and at much greater speed than the GPUs running today's large language models." The results are described in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, according to the blog post: At the same time, Microsoft is publicly sharing its "optimization solver" algorithm and the "digital twin" it developed so that researchers from other organizations can investigate this new computing paradigm and propose new problems to solve and new ways to solve them. Francesca Parmigiani, a Microsoft principal research manager who leads the team developing the AOC, explained that the digital twin is a computer-based model that mimics how the real analog optical computer [or "AOC"] behaves; it simulates the same inputs, processes and outputs, but in a digital environment — like a software version of the hardware. This allowed the Microsoft researchers and collaborators to solve optimization problems at a scale that would be useful in real situations. This digital twin will also allow other users to experiment with how problems, either in optimization or in AI, would be mapped and run on the analog optical computer hardware. "To have the kind of success we are dreaming about, we need other researchers to be experimenting and thinking about how this hardware can be used," Parmigiani said.

Hitesh Ballani, who directs research on future AI infrastructure at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, U.K. said he believes the AOC could be a game changer. "We have actually delivered on the hard promise that it can make a big difference in two real-world problems in two domains, banking and healthcare," he said. Further, "we opened up a whole new application domain by showing that exactly the same hardware could serve AI models, too." In the healthcare example described in the Nature paper, the researchers used the digital twin to reconstruct MRI scans with a good degree of accuracy. The research indicates that the device could theoretically cut the time it takes to do those scans from 30 minutes to five. In the banking example, the AOC succeeded in resolving a complex optimization test case with a high degree of accuracy...

As researchers refine the AOC, adding more and more micro-LEDs, it could eventually have millions or even more than a billion weights. At the same time, it should get smaller and smaller as parts are miniaturized, researchers say.

USA Today has an update on the curtailing of "mirror life" research: Kate Adamala had been working on something dangerous. At her synthetic biology lab, Adamala had been taking preliminary steps toward creating a living cell from scratch with one key twist: All the organism's building blocks would be flipped. Changing these molecules would create an unnatural mirror image of a cell, as different as your right hand from your left. The endeavor was not only a fascinating research challenge, but it also could be used to improve biotechnology and medicine. As Adamala and her colleagues talked with biosecurity experts about the project, however, grave concerns began brewing. "They started to ask questions like, 'Have you considered what happens if that cell gets released or what would happen if it infected a human?'" said Adamala, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. They hadn't.

So researchers brought together dozens of experts in a variety of disciplines from around the globe, including two Nobel laureates, who worked for months to determine the risks of creating "mirror life" and the chances those dangers could be mitigated. Ultimately, they concluded, mirror cells could inflict "unprecedented and irreversible harm" on our world. "We cannot rule out a scenario in which a mirror bacterium acts as an invasive species across many ecosystems, causing pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans," the scientists wrote in a paper published in the journal Science in December alongside a 299-page technical report...

[Report co-author Vaughn Cooper, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how bacteria adapt to new environments] said it's not yet possible to build a cell from scratch, mirror or otherwise, but researchers have begun the process by synthesizing mirror proteins and enzymes. He and his colleagues estimated that given enough resources and manpower, scientists could create a complete mirror bacteria within a decade. But for now, the world is probably safe from mirror cells. Adamala said virtually everyone in the small scientific community that was interested in developing such cells has agreed not to as a result of the findings.

The paper prompted nearly 100 scientists and ethicists from around the world to gather in Paris in June to further discuss the risks of creating mirror organisms. Many felt self-regulation is not enough, according to the institution that hosted the event, and researchers are gearing up to meet again in Manchester, England, and Singapore to discuss next steps.

A research team just discovered older mice have more of the protein FTL1 in their hippocampus, reports ScienceAlert. The hippocampus is the region of the brain involved in memory and learning. And the researchers' paper says their new data raises "the exciting possibility that the beneficial effects of targeting neuronal ferritin light chain 1 (FTL1) at old age may extend more broadly, beyond cognitive aging, to neurodegenerative disease conditions in older people." FTL1 is known to be related to storing iron in the body, but hasn't come up in relation to brain aging before... To test its involvement after their initial findings, the researchers used genetic editing to overexpress the protein in young mice, and reduce its level in old mice. The results were clear: the younger mice showed signs of impaired memory and learning abilities, as if they were getting old before their time, while in the older mice there were signs of restored cognitive function — some of the brain aging was effectively reversed...

"It is truly a reversal of impairments," says biomedical scientist Saul Villeda, from the University of California, San Francisco. "It's much more than merely delaying or preventing symptoms." Further tests on cells in petri dishes showed how FTL1 stopped neurons from growing properly, with neural wires lacking the branching structures that typically provide links between nerve cells and improve brain connectivity...

"We're seeing more opportunities to alleviate the worst consequences of old age," says Villeda. "It's a hopeful time to be working on the biology of aging."
The research was led by a team from the University of California, San Francisco — and published in Nature Aging..

ScienceAlert reports: It's no secret that excessive alcohol consumption damages the liver, but a new study reveals a previously unknown vicious cycle that makes that damage worse. Chronic alcohol use makes it easier for bacteria to leak out of the gut and migrate to the liver, causing further harm.

The new study, led by scientists at the University of California San Diego, examined human liver biopsies as well as mouse models of alcohol-associated liver disease. The team found that chronic alcohol use impaired the production of a cellular signaling protein called mAChR4 in the small intestine. Lower levels of this protein were found to interfere with the formation of what are called goblet cell-associated antigen passages (GAPs). These specialized structures play a key role in teaching the immune system to respond to microbes, particularly those that escape the gut into other parts of the body, where they don't belong...

The researchers found that if they restored the function of mAChR4, GAPs would form again, which in turn repaired the immune system's response to wayward gut bacteria, reducing liver damage. This could be done either by using drugs to directly activate mAChR4 or by targeting related pathways that end up having the same effect...

The research was published in the journal Nature.

An investigation has identified more than 1,500 research articles produced by a network of Ukrainian companies that could be one of Europe's largest paper mills -- businesses that produce fake or low-quality research papers and sell authorships. Nature: Anna Abalkina, a research-integrity sleuth and social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, discovered the paper mill in 2022 after spotting papers with author e-mail addresses that had domains that did not match the geographical locations of academic affiliations. She dubbed the paper mill 'Tanu.pro' after the most frequently used of these unusual domains.

Abalkina later teamed up with Svetlana Kleiner, a research integrity officer at the publisher Springer Nature, who is based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Together, they traced more than 60 suspicious e-mail domains that were linked to Tanu.pro and appeared among the author e-mails of 1,517 papers published between 2017 and 2025, listing more than 4,500 researchers affiliated with around 460 universities across 46 countries. The majority of authors were in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: LSD reduced symptoms of anxiety in a midstage study published Thursday, paving the way for additional testing and possible medical approval of a psychedelic drug that has been banned in the U.S. for more than a half century. The results from drugmaker Mindmed tested several doses of LSD in patients with moderate-to-severe generalized anxiety disorder, with the benefits lasting as long as three months. The company plans to conduct follow-up studies to confirm the results and then apply for Food and Drug Administration approval. [...]

For the study, researchers measured anxiety symptoms in nearly 200 patients who randomly received one of four doses of LSD or a placebo. The main aim was to find the optimal dose of the drug, which can cause intense visual hallucinations and occasionally feelings of panic or paranoia. At four weeks, patients receiving the two highest doses had significantly lower anxiety scores than those who received placebo or lower doses. After 12 weeks, 65% of patients taking the most effective LSD dose -- 100 micrograms -- continued to show benefits and nearly 50% were deemed to be in remission. The most common side effects included hallucinations, nausea and headaches.

Patients who got dummy pills also improved -- a common phenomenon in psychedelic and psychiatric studies -- but their changes were less than half the size those getting the real drug. The research was not immune to problems seen in similar studies. Most patients were able to correctly guess whether they'd received LSD or a dummy pill, undercutting the "blinded" approach that's considered critical to objectively establishing the benefits of a new medicine. In addition, a significant portion of patients in both the placebo and treatment groups dropped out early, narrowing the final data set. It also wasn't clear how long patients might continue to benefit. If the two trials are successful, Mindmed will submit them for FDA approval.

"It's possible that some people may need retreatment," said Dr. Maurizio Fava of Mass General Brigham Hospital, the study's lead author and an adviser to Mindmed. "How many retreatments, we don't know yet, but the long-lasting effect is quite significant."

The study has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Fine-particulate air pollution can drive devastating forms of dementia by triggering the formation of toxic clumps of protein that destroy nerve cells as they spread through the brain, research suggests. Exposure to the airborne particles causes proteins in the brain to misfold into the clumps, which are hallmarks of Lewy body dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's disease. The finding has "profound implications" for preventing the neurodegenerative disorder, which affects millions worldwide, with scientists calling for a concerted effort to improve air quality by cutting emissions from industrial activity and vehicle exhausts, improving wildfire management and reducing wood burning in homes.

The researchers began by analyzing hospital records of the 56.5 million US Medicare patients. They looked at those who were admitted for the first time between 2000 and 2014 with the protein damage. Armed with the patients' zip codes, the scientists estimated their long-term exposure to PM2.5 pollution, airborne particles that are smaller than 2.5 thousandths of a millimeter. These can be inhaled deep into the lungs and are found in the bloodstream, brain and other organs. They found that long-term exposure to PM2.5 raised the risk of Lewy body dementia, but had less of an impact on rates of another neurodegenerative brain disease that is not driven by the toxic proteins. Lewy bodies are made from a protein called alpha-synuclein. The protein is crucial for healthy brain functioning, but can misfold in various ways to produce different kinds of harmful Lewy bodies. These can kill nerve cells and cause devastating disease by spreading through the brain.

To see if air pollution could trigger Lewy bodies, the team exposed mice to PM2.5 pollution every other day for 10 months. Some were normal mice, but others were genetically modified to prevent them making alpha-synuclein. The results were striking: in normal mice, nerve cells died off, leading to brain shrinkage and cognitive decline. The genetically modified mice were largely unaffected. Further work in mice showed that PM2.5 pollution drove the formation of aggressive, resilient and toxic clumps of alpha-synuclein clumps that looked very similar to Lewy bodies in humans. Although the work is in mice, the findings are considered compelling evidence. The work has been published in the journal Science.

In a landmark collaboration across 22 labs, neuroscientists have created the first brain-wide map of decision-making in mice, tracking over 620,000 neurons across nearly 280 brain regions. They found that decision-making is distributed much more broadly than previously thought, involving not just "cognitive" centers but also regions linked to movement. From a report: The task was deceptively simple task. Mice sat in front of a screen that intermittently displayed a black-and-white striped circle for a brief amount of time on either the left or right side. A mouse could earn a sip of sugar water if they quickly moved the circle toward the center of the screen by operating a tiny steering wheel in the same direction, often doing so within one second. On some trials, the circle was faint, requiring the animal to rely on past experience to make a guess, which allowed researchers to study how expectations influence future decisions. While the mice performed the task, researchers recorded brain activity using high-density electrodes that allowed them to monitor hundreds of neurons across many regions simultaneously. The work was divided across the participating labs, so that each lab mapped a particular region of the mouse brain. The pooled dataset covers 620,000 neurons recorded from 139 mice in 12 labs, encompassing nearly the entire brain. The resulting map revealed that decision-making activity is distributed across the brain, including in areas traditionally associated with movement rather than cognition. The findings have been published in two papers in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: According to a new medical survey, scrolling on your smartphone while using the toilet may dramatically increase your risk of hemorrhoids. The evidence is laid out in a study published on September 3 in the journal PLOS One. [...] Over the past 20 years, one single device has unequivocally lengthened the amount of time most people spend sitting. "We're still uncovering the many ways smartphones and our modern way of life impact our health," Harvard Medical School gastroenterologist and study co-author Trisha Pasricha said in a statement. "It's possible that how and where we use them -- such as while in the bathroom -- can have unintended consequences."

To test this theory, Pasricha and colleagues oversaw a study of 125 adults who recently received a colonoscopy screening. The patients were surveyed on both their daily lifestyles and toilet traditions, while endoscopists subsequently evaluated them for hemorrhoids. Of those volunteers, 66 percent reported passing time in the bathroom while smartphone scrolling. After factoring in potential hemorrhoid influences like age, exercise habits, and fiber intake, the researchers determined that those who relied on this screentime had a 46 percent higher risk of hemorrhoid problems than non-users. "It's incredibly easy to lose track of time when we're scrolling on our smartphones -- popular apps are designed entirely for that purpose," added Pasricha.

The survey's results made this abundantly clear: 37 percent of smartphone users spent over five minutes at a time on the toilet, while barely seven percent of non-users reported the same. In general, people opted for reading the news and checking their social media while in the bathroom. [...] Pasricha cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions just yet, noting the preliminary study's comparatively small sample size. The team intends to investigate the issue further, possibly by tracking patients over longer periods of time, while also experimenting with ways to limit smartphone use. "We need to study this further, but it's a safe suggestion to leave the smartphone outside the bathroom when you need to have a bowel movement," said Pasricha. "If it's taking longer, ask yourself why. Was it because having a bowel movement was really so difficult, or was it because my focus was elsewhere?"

Nature's editorial board argues the UN's upcoming trans fat elimination proposal must specify "industrially produced" fats to avoid unintended consequences for nutrition in poor countries. The board supports a coalition led by the International Livestock Research Institute and African Union requesting precise language, noting natural trans fats occur in milk and dairy products.

The editorial extends criticism to the broader ultra-processed foods classification system. While acknowledging the 2009 NOVA scale by University of Sao Paulo's Carlos Monteiro pushed governments toward strong public health policies, Nature says the ultra-processed category problematically groups baby formula with hot dogs. The board calls for improved definitions that balance reining in industrial food production excesses while ensuring adequate calorie access globally.

A long-term study of over 12,000 adults suggests that artificial sweeteners like aspartame, saccharin, and sugar alcohols may accelerate cognitive decline in middle age, equivalent to about 1.6 years of extra aging. The Guardian reports: Sweeteners' association with cognitive decline is of such concern that consumers should instead use either tagatose, a natural sweetener, or alternatives such as honey or maple syrup, the researchers said. They looked at the impact of seven sweeteners on the health of the study's participants -- 12,772 civil servants in Brazil, with an average age of 52 -- who were followed up for on average eight years. Participants completed questionnaires detailing their food and drink intake over the previous year, and later underwent tests of their cognitive skills such as verbal fluency and word recall.

People who consumed the most sweeteners experienced declines in their thinking and memory skills 62% faster than those with the lowest intake, the researchers found. This was "the equivalent of about 1.6 years of aging," the researchers said. Consumption of combined and individual LNCs, particularly aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame K, erythritol, sorbitol and xylitol, was associated with cognitive loss. "Daily consumption of LNCs was associated with accelerated decline in memory, verbal fluency and global cognition," the authors say in their paper, published in the American medical journal Neurology. However, the trend was only observed in participants under the age of 60. That shows that middle-aged adults need to be encouraged to use fewer sweeteners, they added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic discussing organ transplants and immortality at the military parade in Beijing on Wednesday. The two leaders were captured on the stream as they walked with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Tiananmen Square, with the Russian translator saying: "Biotechnology is continuously developing," according to Reuters. "Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality," the translator added.

Xi responded by saying that some predict that humans could live up to "150 years old." The Kremlin head later confirmed that the two leaders discussed immortality. "Modern means of healing, and medical means, all kinds of surgical means related to organ replacement, they allow humanity to hope that active life will continue not as it does today. The average age in different countries is different, but nevertheless, life expectancy will increase significantly," Putin told reporters, according to CNN.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: The insecticide chlorpyrifos is a powerful tool for controlling various pests, making it one of the most widely used pesticides during the latter half of the 20th century. Like many pesticides, however, chlorpyrifos lacks precision. In addition to harming non-target insects like bees, it has also been linked to health risks for much larger animals -- including us. Now, a new US study suggests those risks may begin before birth. Humans exposed to chlorpyrifos prenatally are more likely to exhibit structural brain abnormalities and reduced motor functions in childhood and adolescence.

Progressively higher prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos was associated with incrementally greater deviations in brain structure, function, and metabolism in children and teens, the researchers found, along with poorer measures of motor speed and motor programming. [...] This supports previous research linking chlorpyrifos with impaired cognitive function and brain development, but these findings are the first evidence of widespread and long-lasting molecular, cellular, and metabolic effects in the brain. "The disturbances in brain tissue and metabolism that we observed with prenatal exposure to this one pesticide were remarkably widespread throughout the brain," says first author Bradley Peterson, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. Senior author Virginia Rauh added: "It is vitally important that we continue to monitor the levels of exposure in potentially vulnerable populations, especially in pregnant women in agricultural communities, as their infants continue to be at risk."

The report notes that the EPA banned residential use of chlorpyrifos in 2001 but the pesticide is still used in agriculture around the world.

The findings have been published in the journal JAMA Neurology.

A group of more than 85 scientists have issued a joint rebuttal to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report about climate change, finding it full of errors and misrepresenting climate science. NPR: The group of climate scientists found several examples where the DOE authors cherry-picked or misrepresented climate science in the agency's report. For instance, in the DOE report the authors claim that rising carbon dioxide can be a "net benefit" to U.S. agriculture, neglecting to mention the negative impacts of more heat and climate-change fueled extreme weather events on crops.

The DOE report also states that there is no evidence of more intense "meteorological" drought in the U.S. or globally, referring to droughts that involve low rainfall. But the dozens of climate scientists point out that this is misleading, because higher temperatures and more evaporation -- not just low rainfall -- can lead to and exacerbate droughts. They say that there are, in fact, many studies showing how climate change has exacerbated droughts.

UK weather agency Met Office, in a blog post: Provisional Met Office statistics confirm that summer 2025 is officially the warmest summer on record for the UK. Analysis by Met Office climate scientists has also shown that a summer as hot or hotter than 2025 is now 70 times more likely than it would be in a 'natural' climate with no human caused greenhouse gas emissions.

The UK's mean temperature from 1 June to 31 August stands at 16.10C, which is 1.51C above the long-term meteorological average. This surpasses the previous record of 15.76C, set in 2018, and pushes the summer of 1976 out of the top five warmest summers in a series dating back to 1884.

A review of published meta-analyses examining protein supplementation found no evidence supporting intake beyond 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily, according to an analysis by cardiologist Eric Topol. The review examined multiple randomized controlled trials encompassing thousands of participants. The most widely cited Morton study, which included 1,863 participants across 49 trials, showed no statistically significant benefit at higher protein levels, with a p-value of 0.079.

Recent research from Washington University identified the essential amino acid leucine as activating mTOR in macrophages, promoting atherosclerosis progression. The mechanism was demonstrated in both mouse models and human studies measuring circulating monocyte changes following acute high-protein challenges increasing dietary protein from 22% to 50% of energy intake. Current USDA data indicates 55% of American men and 35% of women already exceed the 0.8 g/kg/day recommendation from the National Academy of Medicine. The protein supplement industry, exemplified by David bars containing 28 grams of protein in 150 calories using a modified plant fat called EPG, projects $180 million in 2025 sales.