Stockholm, October 5, 2026 Scientists won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing optogenetics, a gene-therapy based technique that uses light to control individual nerve cells in the brain. The Nobel Assembly cited their “discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” The three share the 12 million …
Eggshells usually have a short journey: breakfast, bin, done. But their calcium-rich structure could give them a second life inside something much less familiar, which are metal alloys. Researchers at North Carolina State University have demonstrated a way to use powdered eggshells to make stronger and harder magnesium alloys, replacing …
Some of the most useful medicines ever discovered began with something surprisingly small: a molecule made by a microorganism. The problem is that nature contains an enormous number of microbes that scientists cannot easily grow in the laboratory. Their DNA can still be recovered from soil, water and other environmental …
When a honeybee returns to the hive with news of food, she shakes her abdomen in a figure-eight pattern called the waggle dance. The angle tells nestmates which way to fly, and the waggle’s duration tells them how far. A 2026 study suggests the dance carries a third message: how …
Could something as simple as adding a handful of walnuts to dinner influence how you feel? A new study suggests it might. Researchers found that young adults who ate walnuts every day for eight weeks experienced a modest improvement in overall mood, alongside changes in a metabolite linked to serotonin …
Rust may look like a simple surface problem, but corrosion is one of the most persistent threats to modern infrastructure. Bridges, pipelines, ships, buildings and industrial equipment all depend on protective coatings that keep water, oxygen and corrosive chemicals away from metal. The problem is that these coatings eventually develop …
Replacing a damaged organ is already difficult. Replacing a gland that controls several other organs through hormones is an entirely different challenge. Now, scientists in Japan have taken an important step toward doing exactly that. They grew pituitary tissue from human stem cells, transplanted it into a macaque monkey whose …
What happens when plastic waste that is difficult to recycle is given a job that requires it to withstand tonnes of pressure? In Australia, some of it ends up underneath railway tracks. Researchers and engineers have spent years developing railway sleepers made largely from recycled plastic waste. The Australian-made product, …
Nearly two kilometres beneath the North Atlantic, there is no sunlight, no crashing waves and no obvious sign that the water is moving rapidly upward. But in 2021, scientists found a way to make this hidden movement visible. They released fluorescent dye into a deep underwater canyon and followed its …
In the span of a single week, between September 18 and 24, 2026, the US FDA cleared three targeted therapies for cancers of the breast, the bile duct, and the kidney. These are very different diseases, and the drugs act on very different targets. Read together, though, the approvals show …
For centuries, the human brain has been treated as a single organ. But new research is challenging one of the basic assumptions about how this extraordinarily complex structure develops. Scientists have found evidence that the brain may arise from two distinct developmental systems, which emerge separately before eventually becoming part …
The Y chromosome has often been treated as the relatively simple member of the human chromosome pair: important for sex determination, but containing far fewer genes than the X chromosome. Cancer biology is revealing a more complicated story. A new study has found that cancer cells can selectively delete sections …
Antibiotic resistance is a pressing global health problem, and some of the most promising leads may come from a surprising source: extinct animals. Rebuilding a 160-million-year-old defense Biologists at the University of Oregon have resurrected antimicrobial peptides, short protein fragments, from the ancestors of placental mammals. These ancestors date back …
Stress is a normal part of life. But what happens when the body’s stress system remains disturbed for years? A new study published in JAMA Network Open suggests that the way the stress hormone cortisol changes throughout the day may be linked to how the brain ages in older adults. …
Most cells in the human body have a built-in answer to severe damage: die. Through a controlled process called apoptosis, damaged or unnecessary cells can be removed without causing widespread inflammation. But some cells take a different path. They stop dividing, yet remain alive and metabolically active. This state is …
What if lowering high cholesterol did not mean taking a pill every day or getting injections every few weeks, but making a single change to your DNA? Scientists are beginning to test exactly that idea. In a small first-in-human clinical trial, it was found that one infusion of an experimental …
Some of the most useful chemical reactions work beautifully in a laboratory flask but become difficult when you move them into the watery environment of biology. Olefin metathesis is one of them. The reaction is a way of rearranging carbon–carbon double bonds to build new carbon–carbon bonds. In simple terms, …
What if a diagnostic test could detect the molecular fingerprints of disease before the body produced noticeable symptoms? That possibility is driving research into quantum sensors devices that exploit quantum properties of matter to measure extremely weak biological signals. Unlike conventional sensors, quantum sensors can detect tiny changes in magnetic …
A new study is offering an unexpected insight into what happens to a human heart after transplantation: the heart may gradually adjust its biological age to match the person receiving it. Researchers found that young hearts transplanted into older bodies showed signs of faster biological aging, while older hearts placed …
A drug originally inspired by HIV treatment has produced an unexpected result: it helped damaged nerves recover in mice with an experimental form of multiple sclerosis. The compound, called kamuvudine-9 (K-9), was developed from a class of antiviral drugs known as nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, or NRTIs. But researchers removed …
A drop of brackish water from a North Carolina marsh contained something scientists had never seen before: two previously unknown species of microscopic amoebae. The organisms belong to a rare genus called Paulinella. Unlike the amoebae most people picture as shapeless cells that crawl around and engulf food, these tiny …
What if, instead of searching for a naturally occurring virus that happens to kill a dangerous bacterium, scientists could systematically redesign these viruses to make them more useful? That possibility has moved a step closer with a new genetic tool developed by researchers at the University of Otago in New …
GLP-1 receptor agonists such as semaglutide, tirzepatide, and their cousins have earned their reputation as one of medicine’s genuine breakthroughs. But the enthusiasm surrounding them has curdled into a dangerous assumption: that they are a universal fix for obesity and metabolic disease. The data say otherwise, and it’s time the …
A skin cell becomes a skin cell. A neuron becomes a neuron. A heart muscle cell becomes a heart muscle cell. For a long time, scientists believed that once a cell became specialized, its identity was essentially permanent. Then researchers discovered something remarkable: a mature cell can be given a …
In Kishan Chand Jain v. Ethics and Medical Registration Board, heard alongside Dr. Sanjay Kulshresthra v. Union of India, a Supreme Court Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta (22 September 2026) confronted the regulatory vacuum surrounding drug pricing in India, flagging instances where medicines with a Price to …
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