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Today:
New Breakthrough Could Help Prevent The Devastating Impact of Glaucoma
NEWS | 16 November 2025
There's fresh hope for early detection and new treatments of glaucoma, a group of eye diseases that have devastating effects on vision – and for which there is currently no cure. The scientists suggest that agmatine and thiamine could be used as biomarkers for earlier detection of glaucoma, allowing doctors to put preventative measures in place at an earlier stage. Of those, agmatine and thiamine were found to be especially reduced in people with glaucoma. "Agmatine and thiamine could be potential immunomodulatory or neuroprotective drugs to treat or prevent neuroinflammatory damage to the retina during glaucoma," write the researchers in their published paper. Glaucoma slowly leads to irreversible blindness, caused by damage to the nerves at the back of the eye.

Top Stories:
A Crucial Genetic Mutation Behind Crohn's Disease Has Finally Been Revealed
NEWS | 16 November 2025
Mutations in a gene associated with Crohn's disease have been found to rob critical immune cells of their ability to switch modes, causing them to overreact and trigger inflammation. Variations in the NOD2 gene have been linked to Crohn's in previous studies, yet their exact role in the disease's pathology has long been a mystery. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego used machine learning techniques to identify patterns in gene activity of immune cells in the gut. "When bound to girdin, it detects invading pathogens and maintains gut immune balance by swiftly neutralizing them." This gives us a much better understanding of the imbalance that helps to drive IBD and the role that NOD2 plays in Crohn's disease in particular.

World:
A Radical New Kind of Particle Accelerator Could Transform Science
NEWS | 16 November 2025
A particle accelerator that produces intense X-rays could be squeezed into a device that fits on a table, my colleagues and I have found in a new research project. The way that intense X-rays are currently produced is through a facility called a synchrotron light source. These are waves that form when laser light clings to the surface of a material. In the simulations, a circularly polarised laser pulse was sent through a tiny hollow tube. This unique architecture provides an ideal environment for the corkscrewing laser light to couple with the electrons.

Current Events:
One of Our Biggest Hopes For Alzheimer's Treatment Doesn't Seem to Work
NEWS | 16 November 2025
A new study shows that clearing away the amyloid-beta clumps doesn't appear to repair key brain functions. In particular, it doesn't restore the brain's mechanisms for clearing out waste, known as the glymphatic system. The study comes from researchers at the Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, who tested the new Alzheimer's drug lecanemab on 13 people with the disease. In other words, the drug doesn't seem to reverse the damage done by Alzheimer's, at least in terms of the brain's waste recycling. Past trials have shown that lecanemab does work at slowing down the steady march of Alzheimer's disease, but the drug functions best when administered at an early stage.

News Flash:
Scientists Discovered a Time Crystal That Reveals a New Way to Order Time
NEWS | 16 November 2025
New experiments have demonstrated the time rondeau crystal – a time crystal that repeats in time but never quite in the same way. "Our experiments show that breaking the periodicity of the drive can lead to new exotic forms of partial temporal order." "Perhaps one of the more famous examples of a rondeau in music is Mozart's Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March); hence, we refer to this type of temporal order as a rondeau order." To illustrate controllability, the team even encoded text – "Experimental observation of a time rondeau crystal. "Our experiments," the researchers write, "open a promising new avenue to investigate temporal order, demonstrating the long-lived stable coexistence of long-range temporal order and micromotion disorder at short timescales."

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SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 16 November 2025
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Latest:
Some People Never Forget a Face, And Now We Know Their Secret
NEWS | 16 November 2025
Super-recognizers are aces at remembering faces, but how do they do it? A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look 'smarter, not harder'. "AI has become highly adept at face recognition," explains Dunn. But given eye-tracking data from super-recognizers, the algorithms were more accurate at matching faces than when they were fed data from people with typical face recognition abilities. This 'jigsaw' approach challenged the assumption that remembering faces well involved looking at the center of a face and viewing it as a whole.

Breaking:
This Week in Science: Awesome Auroras, Morse Code For Bees, And More!
NEWS | 16 November 2025
This week in science: The Sun puts on a stunning light show; a winning strategy for 'rock, paper, scissors'; teaching bumblebees Morse Code, and much more! Scientists Reveal a Clever Trick to Help Win Rock, Paper, ScissorsAn analysis of 15,000 games of 'rock, paper, scissors' has revealed the best strategy: Be random and ignore what happened last round. Coffee Study Challenges Advice on Common Heart ConditionIn a study of patients undergoing treatment for irregular heartbeats, coffee drinkers actually had lower risk of recurrence than non-drinkers. That equates to a 39 percent lower risk for coffee drinkers. Scientists Have Trained Bumblebees to Understand a Form of Morse CodeScientists have trained bumblebees to understand a simplified version of Morse code, associating long or short light flashes with food.

Trending:
Serotonin Could Play an Unexpected Role in Cancer, Scientists Discover
NEWS | 16 November 2025
However, recent research suggests this familiar molecule may play an unexpected role in cancer development. Scientists are also exploring how serotonin produced in the gut reaches cancer cells. Cells take up serotonin through tiny "transport channels" and the SSRIs block these channels, limiting serotonin's entry into cancer cells. For instance, people with depression may have lower serotonin activity in the brain, but the serotonin produced in the gut doesn't seem to have a clear effect on brain serotonin. Jeremiah Stanley, Postdoctoral Researcher, Viral and Cancer Genes, University of LimerickThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

This Just In:
The Eye's Maximum Resolution Is Even Higher Than We Thought
NEWS | 16 November 2025
What's the retinal resolution of the human eye, or how many pixels can we actually perceive? So these screens, it seems, don't provide any noticeable benefits over a lower resolution 2K television of the same size (44 inches). In this new study, Ashraf and colleagues found that the human eye has a higher resolution limit than previously suggested, although this limit varies by color. Given these findings, it appears that TV design may have reached a point of diminishing returns, at least in terms of resolution. Human senses are synergistic, and our ocular resolution depends on the eyes and the brain, as well as their interactions.

Today:
Many of Us Wash Raw Chicken. Here's Why It's Dangerous.
NEWS | 16 November 2025
Washing raw chicken might seem like the hygienic thing to do, but it's actually unnecessary and can even be dangerous. In 2022, an online survey found that among 1,822 consumers in the US, 73 percent of respondents said they washed their raw poultry. While washing chicken isn't necessarily the direct cause, it does raise the risk. In 2019, a study from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that 26 percent of participants who washed raw chicken transferred bacteria to their salad when they later used the sink again to wash their greens. To best protect yourself from Salmonella and E. coli in the kitchen, the USDA advises that:You do not wash raw meatYou use a dedicated chopping board for raw meatYou scrub your hands with soap for at least 20 seconds after touching raw meatYou use a food thermometer to ensure chicken is cooked to at least 74 °C (165 °F).

Top Stories:
Yuka The Woolly Mammoth Just Gave Us The Oldest RNA Ever Sequenced
NEWS | 16 November 2025
A woolly mammoth that lived and died nearly 40,000 years ago has given us a spectacular scientific first, millennia later. But RNA has a much shorter lifespan than DNA, making its preservation in ancient remains far less likely. In fact, just 3 of the 10 contained reliable sources of ancient RNA – and for two of those, the fragments were not detailed enough for analysis. Only one of the mammoths met that threshold: Yuka, a mummified male woolly mammoth calf that lived and died 39,000 years ago, discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. Yuka may even offer a blueprint for the ideal conditions of ancient RNA preservation, helping scientists narrow down where to focus their efforts in future research.

World:
Why Stroke Risk Is So Much Higher in Women, According to Experts
NEWS | 16 November 2025
Stroke risk in women is shaped by biology and hormones throughout the reproductive years. For example, a research review found that reproductive factors, hormonal exposure and immune system differences all contribute to higher stroke risk in women. Asian women and women from mixed ethnic backgrounds also face higher risks, according to MBRRACE UK, a longstanding official audit of maternity care quality and outcomes. Women from minority ethnic groups are also more likely to have stroke risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes and reduced access to high-quality maternal healthcare. Women who go through menopause early, before the age of 42, have an even higher risk.

Current Events:
Scientists Capture The Moment a Supernova Rips Open Its Star, in Stunning First
NEWS | 16 November 2025
For the first time, scientists determined the shape of a supernova's shock front as it burst through the surface of a dying star. The star begins to implode, generating a shockwave that propagates inward toward its core, where it rebounds and erupts outward, punching through the star's outer surface. "For a few hours, the geometry of the star and its explosion could be, and were, observed together." As the supernova continued to evolve, the astronomers saw that shape again in the expanding hydrogen-rich material blasted outward. What this means is unclear, but one possibility is that the star may have (or had) a binary companion whose gravitational influence shaped its death.

News Flash:
Scientists Identify Neurons Driving Anxiety – And How to Calm Them
NEWS | 16 November 2025
Anxiety disorders are the world's most common type of mental health condition, impacting the lives of around 360 million people. This rebalancing was done via a gene called GRIK4, which has an important role in brain messaging. In addition, the team identified a specific type of neuron in the amygdala as responsible for the symptoms of anxiety. The same treatment was also successful when applied to non-engineered mice with higher anxiety levels, further demonstrating the crucial role localized parts of the brain have in anxiety disorders, and how these circuits could be rebalanced. Though the same processes are yet to be observed in the human brain, mice are considered good scientific stand-ins, hinting at new treatments that could help calm our own overexcited, anxious brains.