https://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Stimulating two brain areas, nudging them to collectively fire in the same way, increases a person's ability to behave altruistically, according to a study published in the PLOS Biology by Jie Hu from East China Normal University in China and colleagues from University of Zurich in Switzerland. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-gamma-synced-brain-nudge-people.html Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:00:01 EST news689849702 When scientists sequence tumor DNA, they typically find small amounts of genetic code from bacteria, viruses and fungi—microorganisms that—if actually present in tumor tissues—could influence how they grow, evade immunity or respond to treatment. But do microorganisms truly reside in tumors, or do the samples become contaminated before sequencing occurs? https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-prism-reanalyzes-tumors-reshaping-debate.html Sat, 07 Feb 2026 11:00:11 EST news689528186 Blood flows around the body through a complex network of vessels, which must constantly adapt to changing needs. The balance between growing new vessels and stabilizing existing vessels, so they aren't leaky, must be finely tuned. Abnormal blood vessel growth has been linked to a wide range of diseases, including bleeding disorders, cancer and diabetic retinopathy, but the underlying mechanisms aren't fully understood. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-link-protein-key-disorganized-blood.html Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:20:04 EST news689519330 University of Queensland researchers who mapped cancer cell "neighborhoods" in the most common type of lung cancer have found cell metabolism plays a critical role in determining how lung cancer patients will respond to immunotherapy. Their results are published in Nature Communications. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-personal-lung-cancer-cells-response.html Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:37:17 EST news689330162 For people who are at high risk of developing breast cancer, frequent screenings with ultrasound can help detect tumors early. MIT researchers have now developed a miniaturized ultrasound system that could make it easier for breast ultrasounds to be performed more often, either at home or at a doctor's office. The new system consists of a small ultrasound probe attached to an acquisition and processing module that is a little larger than a smartphone. This system can be used on the go when connected to a laptop computer to reconstruct and view wide-angle 3D images in real time. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-portable-ultrasound-sensor-enable-earlier.html Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:30:01 EST news689264515 Musical chills are pleasurable shivers or goosebump sensations that people feel when they resonate with the music they're listening to. They reduce stress and have beneficial side effects, but they are difficult to induce reliably. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a practical system that uses in-ear electroencephalography sensors to measure the brain's response to music in real time and provide music suggestions that enhance chills. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-chill-brain-music-interface-emotional.html Fri, 30 Jan 2026 08:36:36 EST news688984561 Schizophrenia is a severe and often highly debilitating psychiatric disorder characterized by distorted emotions, thinking patterns and altered perceptions of reality, as well as mental impairments. This disorder typically emerges in late adolescence or early adulthood and requires lifelong treatment with antipsychotic medications. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-unveiling-schizophrenia-neural-mental-signatures.html Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:50:01 EST news688907386 Patients with CaV2.1 channelopathies face severe and often debilitating symptoms, such as seizures, migraines, tremors, and developmental delays. Although some symptoms overlap among these rare neurological conditions, patients often have different underlying mutations. In a recent study published in The FASEB Journal, researchers report the effects of two human CaV2.1 channelopathy mutations in a rat model, the findings of which could result in personalized therapies. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-mutation-specific-defects-neurological-disorders.html Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:00:41 EST news688928401 Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have developed a new way to predict how cancer cells evolve by gaining and losing whole chromosomes, changes that help tumors grow, adapt and resist treatment. In a new study, scientists describe a computational approach called ALFA-K that uses longitudinal, single-cell data to reconstruct how cancer cells move through different chromosome states over time and identify which configurations are favored by evolution. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-qa-discusses-tool-cancer-evolves.html Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:50:03 EST news688319281 The role that flies play in spreading cholera—a bacterial disease that causes severe diarrhea and dehydration—has been underestimated in Africa, which carries the largest burden of the disease. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-flies-linked-cholera-oral-vaccine.html Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:59:23 EST news688219021 Bowel habits aren't exactly dinner-table talk. But they reflect how quickly the gut moves things along, and when that goes wrong, people can experience constipation, diarrhea, or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Yet the biological mechanisms that control bowel movements are still not fully understood. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-unexpected-vitamin-b1-emerges-genetic.html Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:02 EST news688050326 Passive activities such as watching television have been linked to worse memory and cognitive skills, while 'active sitting' like playing cards or reading correlate with better brain health, researchers have found. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-brain-health.html Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:08:48 EST news688064882 Atrial fibrillation is one of the most common kinds of arrhythmia, causing the heart not to contract properly in order to pump the blood, which can lead to the formation of thrombi (blood clots) and the consequent associated risks (heart attack, stroke). Normally, patients with atrial fibrillation take anticoagulants, but the dose must be adjusted and kept as low as possible, because these drugs have negative side effects, especially as they increase the risk of heavy bleeding. If bleeding is internal, it can lead to hemorrhagic strokes, embolisms or abdominal bleeding. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-heart-doctors-patients-arrhythmia.html Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:20:03 EST news687626372 In its effort to correlate genomic structure with gene function, the 4D Nucleome Consortium (4DN), led by Job Dekker, Ph.D., at UMass Chan Medical School, has extensively mapped and analyzed the three-dimensional folding of the human genome in human embryonic stem cells and immortalized fibroblasts over time. The result is the most detailed view of the four-dimensional human genome available and the identification of more than 140,000 looping interactions between genes and long-range regulatory elements. The study is published in Nature. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-international-collaboration-3d-genome-cells.html Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:00:16 EST news687157091 Researchers at Leipzig University and the University of Gothenburg have developed a novel approach to assessing an individual's risk of metabolic diseases such as diabetes or fatty liver disease more precisely. Instead of relying solely on the widely used body mass index (BMI), the team developed an AI-based computational model using metabolic measurements. This so-called metabolic BMI shows that people of normal weight with a high metabolic BMI have up to a fivefold higher risk of metabolic disease. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-bmi-ai-reveal-hidden-metabolic.html Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:37:47 EST news687011821 Researchers have developed a new computational approach that uncovers possible drugs for specific cellular targets for treating glioblastoma, a lethal brain tumor. This approach enabled them to predict more effective treatment combinations to fight the disease on an individualized basis. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-algorithm-drugs-glioblastoma-diverse-cell.html Wed, 07 Jan 2026 05:00:03 EST news686853362 Depression, one of the most prevalent mental health disorders worldwide, is characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, impaired daily functioning and a loss of interest in daily activities, often along with altered sleeping and eating patterns. Past research findings suggest that stress can play a key role in the emergence of depressive symptoms, yet the biological processes via which it might increase the risk of depression remain poorly understood. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-stress-chemical-symptoms-depression.html Tue, 06 Jan 2026 08:50:01 EST news686839376 Public health researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health used computer modeling to reconstruct how the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the U.S. The findings highlight the rapid spread of pandemic respiratory pathogens and the challenges of early outbreak containment. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-respiratory-pandemics-rapidly-cities-simulations.html Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:00:03 EST news686841302 Humans possess a remarkable balance between stability and flexibility, enabling them to quickly establish new plans and adjust goals even in the face of sudden changes. However, "model-free reinforcement learning," which is widely used in robotics and exemplified by AlphaGo's famous match against Lee Sedol, struggles to achieve these two capabilities simultaneously. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-brain-ai-human-goals-uncertainty.html Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:19:08 EST news686215117 What makes someone a "morning lark" or a "night owl?" Why does jet lag hit us so hard, and why do some people struggle each winter with seasonal affective disorder? Clues to these puzzles may lie in a tiny brain region called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), the body's central circadian pacemaker. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-key-brain-cell-hubs-synchronize.html Mon, 22 Dec 2025 13:22:21 EST news685632122 Scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School have developed two powerful computational tools that could transform how researchers study the "conversations" between cells inside the body. The tools, called sCCIgen and QuadST, help scientists understand both where cells are located in tissues and how they communicate through genetic activity and chemical signals. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-scientists-virtual-tissue-tools-cells.html Mon, 22 Dec 2025 05:51:53 EST news685605076 Your "roommate's" genes could be influencing the bacteria living in your gut, and vice versa, according to a study of rats published in Nature Communications. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-genetic-health-ripple-social-groups.html Thu, 18 Dec 2025 05:00:06 EST news685192862 Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have launched Observer, the first multimodal medical dataset to capture anonymized, real-time interactions between patients and clinicians. Much like the medical drama The Pitt, which portrays life in the emergency room, Observer lets outsiders peer inside primary care clinics—only, in this case, none of the filmed interactions are fictional. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-video-dataset-captures-human-dynamics.html Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:38:53 EST news685100221 Australian scientists have identified the key genetic drivers behind long COVID, revealing why some people continue to experience debilitating symptoms long after their initial infection. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-covid-uncovers-genetic-drivers-disease.html Tue, 16 Dec 2025 06:41:10 EST news685089634 Recent technological and scientific advances have opened new possibilities for neuroscience research, which is in turn leading to interesting new discoveries. Over the past few years, many groups of neuroscientists worldwide have been trying to map the structure of the brain and its underlying regions with increasing precision, while also probing their involvement in specific mental functions. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-3d-reveal-hidden-microenvironments-mouse.html Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:10:01 EST news684579955 Aggressive T-cell lymphoma is a rare and devastating form of blood cancer with a very low five-year survival rate. Patients often relapse after receiving initial therapy, making it especially challenging for clinicians to keep this destructive disease in check. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-prognostic-tool-clinicians-high-cancer.html Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:35:05 EST news684432842 A research team led by Dr. Jinung An of the Division of Intelligent Robotics at DGIST has developed a new AI foundation model that creatively solved the problem of the "label data shortage," regarded as the biggest challenge in deep learning-based brain signal analysis. This technology is designed to self-learn brain signals and is gaining attention for its ability to deliver high accuracy with very small amounts of labels. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-ai-foundation-brain-shortage.html Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:20:01 EST news684425485 An international team led by the University of Michigan has introduced new methods that reveal which regions of the brain were active throughout the day with single-cell resolution. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-brain-day-clues-fatigue-mental.html Mon, 08 Dec 2025 12:19:34 EST news684418741 Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School and their international collaborators have developed a new computational tool that maps how gene pathways interact in complex biological systems. Using this novel algorithm, the team discovered a previously unknown protein pathway that, when blocked, triggers the death of blood cancer cells. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-hidden-metabolic-weakness-blood-cancers.html Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:29:25 EST news684415741 UCLA scientists have characterized the structure and function of a key survival protein in breast cancer cells that helps explain how these tumors resist environmental stress and thrive in acidic, low-oxygen environments that would normally be toxic to healthy cells. The paper is published in the journal Nature Communications. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-protein-reveals-breast-cancer-cells.html Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:15:23 EST news684162901