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A peer-reviewed study in Cell reports that isoUDCA, a female-enriched bile acid produced by a group of gut bacteria that estrogen favors, promotes cholesterol handling and bile acid metabolism in the liver. The authors say this signaling alleviates chronic liver injury and mediates protection from chronic liver disease in females.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, applies a counterfactual causal model to electronic health records to estimate individual effects of sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, medications with broad metabolic and cardiovascular benefits. The authors report that across diagnostic categories the model's predicted treatment value outperformed real-world prescriptions. They say this highlights subpopulations where these drugs may yield superior outcomes.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, introduces Vascular Proximity Coverage, a CT-based measure of how close pulmonary vessels sit to lung tissue, in 7,881 COPDGene participants with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The authors report that lower coverage was associated with worse lung function, shorter six-minute walk distance and greater dyspnea, and that the lowest quartile had 38% higher mortality than the reference quartile. They say the measure captures information that total vessel volume does not.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, reports that a 4-billion-parameter open large language model (LLM), fine-tuned on public data, estimated the carbohydrate in 100 real meals described in words with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 12.2 g, against 22.6 g for an automatically matched food composition table. The authors also report that a personalised gradient boosting model correlated with observed postprandial glucose rises at 0.63 in one dataset of 45 adults and 0.49 in one of 99 people with type 2 diabetes. The model lost correlation when applied from one dataset to the other.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, examines PhenoAge, a blood-based biological aging clock, in 3,067 patients undergoing primary tumor resection. The authors report that PhenoAge acceleration rose with tumor stage, and that one or two of its eight blood components, differing by cancer type, carried the prognostic signal. They suggest that in cancer PhenoAge may reflect disease burden rather than biological aging.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, maps regulatory interactions at the 9p21.3 locus, one of the strongest genetic risk loci for cardiovascular disease. The authors identify the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) MIR31HG as a likely effector transcript, reporting that it responds to hemodynamic flow and that its depletion in endothelial cells was associated with endothelial activation.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, represents digital clock drawing tests as networks built from 3,362 Framingham Heart Study participants, with and without cognitive impairment. The authors report that network-based models achieved performance comparable to established summary feature baselines across command-only and copy-only conditions. They suggest the approach could support automated screening after external validation.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, applied Phage-display ImmunoPrecipitation Sequencing (PhIP-Seq) to 321 individuals in the Austrian CORSA cohort (Colorectal Cancer Study of Austria), including controls, adenomas and colorectal cancer patients. The authors report that overall antibody repertoires showed limited predictive performance, but specific signals such as Helicobacter pylori CagY stood out as a candidate marker of colorectal cancer.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, analyzed 8,936 diabetes-free adults in the Tsuruoka Metabolomics Cohort Study in Japan over a median of 9.20 years, during which 1,038 developed diabetes. The authors report that the urine metabolomic risk score was associated with incident type 2 diabetes after adjusting for established risk markers and the plasma score, while the plasma score was not. They say urine provides a complementary perspective on metabolic variation.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, is an umbrella review of systematic reviews on exercise as an adjunct to treatment for substance use disorders, including tobacco and nicotine dependence. The authors report exercise may improve tobacco and drug craving and inhibitory control, but most evidence is of low or very low certainty. Evidence on relapse, treatment retention and safety was insufficient for reliable synthesis, so they say exercise should be evaluated as an adjunct rather than a substitute.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, developed a multi-domain risk model using polygenic scores and 10 early-life behavioral and environmental risk factors in four longitudinal cohorts from the United States, United Kingdom and Finland. The model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.78 for any substance use disorder, with 69% sensitivity and a 45% positive predictive value, in a sample where 22.0% had the disorder. The authors say performance was comparable across alcohol, cannabis and tobacco.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 5, Gemini 3.5 Flash and Qwen 3.6, multimodal large language models (LLMs), on 60 contrast-enhanced T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations of gliomas and brain abscesses. The authors report the models' tumor calls shifted much more with the referral text than the imaging difference between confirmed gliomas and abscesses, and that an instruction to ignore the text only partly reduced this.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, reports the first genome-wide association study of the phosphoproteome, testing over 8,000 site-specific phosphorylation levels in lung or kidney tissue from 324 participants. The authors identify 379 protein quantitative trait loci (pQTLs) and 46 phosphorylation quantitative trait loci independent of protein abundance. They report that a kidney site in STK4 colocalized with markers of kidney function, with no pQTLs at that locus.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, models optimal trade sanctions among a sanctioner (Home), a target (Foreign) and a Bystander that may act alone or ally with either. In a calibration exercise on sanctions against Russian crude, cooperation among India, China and Russia best matched observed data. The authors estimate sanctions could have been roughly 70% more effective had China and India acted unilaterally or had the sanctioning coalition made them a better offer.
An NBER preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, documents that better managed firms, even in the same industries and labor markets, are more likely to train. The authors say training clusters around managerial or frontline worker development, and argue that organizational differences give firms incentives to train beyond explanations based on labor market frictions.
An NBER preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, studies France's pay-preserving cut in the workweek from 39 to 35 hours, bundled with employer payroll tax cuts. The authors report the package left employment unchanged, but absent the tax cuts the shorter workweek would have reduced employment by 3.8%. They also report shorter hours raised total factor productivity by 2%, limiting the output decline to 1%.
An NBER preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, reports a field experiment in 195 rural Sierra Leonean communities that upgraded Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) into mobile money and bank agents, crossed with a monthly consumer feedback mechanism. The authors report that upgrading expanded access, while feedback drove operational improvements of 20.5 percentage points, particularly in privacy and consumer protection, along with higher usage and revenues. They say accountability, not infrastructure alone, aligns provider incentives with consumer welfare.
An NBER preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, estimates that the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act, a one-time 5 percent tax on the worldwide net worth of individuals exceeding $1 billion, would collect about $30 billion before reductions in other tax bases. The authors estimate California's billionaires contribute $3.3–5.8 billion annually in state income taxes, so the present value of lost income tax from departures more than offsets the one-time revenue, for a net present value of negative $38.9 billion. Across simulated combinations, 85 percent of plausible outcomes produce a negative net present value of state revenues.
An NBER preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, is a chapter on the Indian pharmaceutical industry that uses Biomedtracker trial phase transition data to compare India with China and the United Kingdom. The authors report a bottleneck in moving clinical trials from Phase 1 to Phase 2, and argue that binding constraints in the Indian ecosystem, likely unrelated to intellectual property rights (IPR), are the cause. They also cite interviews with industry experts.
An NBER preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, examines a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fee waiver aimed at lower-income first-time homebuyers. The authors estimate mortgage intermediaries captured over 60% of $1.5 billion in total fee waivers during 2023–2024, rather than passing the savings through to borrowers. They report that loan officers with a track record of expensive mortgages passed through less than 20% of the waiver.
OpenAI says it is improving ChatGPT across low-resource programming languages, with new evaluations for software engineering, SQLite and COBOL migration.
A peer-reviewed PNAS study used a database of over four million occurrence records covering European bees and hoverflies over the past century. It found that most bee species and about half of hoverfly species declined in occupancy, while regional species richness changed modestly and species persistence stayed relatively high. The authors say the trends are a warning sign, with potential for recovery if urgent action is taken.
A peer-reviewed PNAS study analyzed Canada's National Forest Inventory to test whether understory vegetation (shrubs, herbs and bryophytes) is associated with carbon accumulation in overstory trees. The authors found that herb and bryophyte species richness was positively associated with decade-scale tree carbon accumulation, most strongly at warmer, drier and nitrogen-limited sites, while soil carbon showed no consistent association. It is an observational study, which shows a link, not a cause.
A peer-reviewed PNAS study evaluated about one million resolved contracts and questions from four collective forecasting platforms, covering twelve domains and horizons from hours to years. It found forecast probabilities were highly calibrated overall, meaning events given a p% chance occurred roughly p% of the time, though some consequential areas showed systematic over- or underestimation. The authors say aggregated predictions contain meaningful information about real-world uncertainty, but do not provide certainty about individual events.
A peer-reviewed PNAS study reports sudden, severe and persistent declines of 60 to 85% in deep-pelagic fishes, crustaceans and cephalopods in the Gulf of Mexico over a 3.5-year period. The authors say the declines were detected by both direct sampling and acoustic sensing, and that their timing points to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as the most parsimonious, or simplest, explanation. They found no natural factor tested, such as temperature, oxygen or food supply, correlated with the declines.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, analyzed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of 210 adults from the Transdiagnostic Connectome Project. In people with high anhedonia, meaning a diminished capacity to experience or pursue pleasure, the authors report that the cortex shifted upstream relative to the subcortex. They say signals traveling from subcortex to cortex weakened more than the descending signals.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, describes droplet culture, which grows tumor organoids in tiny Matrigel droplets to allow high-throughput drug and CRISPR screens. In a screen of over 5,000 clinical compounds, the authors report therapeutic opportunities that genomic profiling alone did not reveal. They also report a stomach cancer vulnerability linked to loss of UXS1.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, used hydrogels with tunable elasticity and viscosity and reports that cancer cells primed on soft, viscous substrates adopted stiffness-associated states and migrated more. In zebrafish and mice, the authors say viscous priming enhanced vascular arrest and metastatic colonization. They also report that transient microtubule disruption during priming shifted metastatic burden toward lymph nodes.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, reports that macrophages remove protein aggregates from other cells through trogocytosis, a partial engulfment of the target cell. The authors say this is triggered when lysosomal stress raises the transmembrane form of CSF1 on the cell surface, which macrophages detect through the CSF1 receptor.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, measured eleven root anatomical traits in 185 Vietnamese rice landraces and ran genome-wide association studies to find genetic regions linked to them. It identified 19 quantitative trait loci, and the authors say some overlapped with regions tied to drought-tolerance-related traits. They suggest a gene, OsWAK111, may influence cell elongation.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, reports that in a murine model of aortic stenosis, pharmacological activation of perivascular adipose tissue, the fat around the aortic wall, improved the condition, but not in mice genetically deficient in that fat. The authors also report that thermogenic fat activity in people correlated negatively with diagnostic criteria of aortic stenosis severity, and they suggest it may be a potential therapeutic target.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, reports that an extremophilic laccase with a phenolic redox mediator degraded over 97% of doxycycline within 2 hours and eliminated its antibacterial activity. The authors say direct enzymatic oxidation alone only partly removed that activity, and that the mediator was key. They suggest the system could support treatment of antibiotic-contaminated effluents.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, identifies KRT7-positive glandular duct cells as progenitors in ferret and healthy human airways. Fate mapping in ferrets, the authors report, showed these cells generate serous and mucous cells during gland development and expand after severe airway injury to repair the surface epithelium. They say the work may have implications for cystic fibrosis therapies.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, used gene-edited induced pluripotent stem cells deficient for ABCA7 and studied the astrocytes, neurons and microglia derived from them. The authors report ABCA7-deficient microglia had reduced lysosomal activity and phagocytosis, and that in tri-cultures with neurons, measures such as tau phosphorylation and synapse number worsened. They suggest the work points to a shared mechanism for the rs3752246 risk variant.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, compared recovery after 4h of isoflurane anesthesia with time-matched sleep and sleep deprivation in male C57BL/6J mice, using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings and cortical RNA sequencing. The authors report anesthesia recovery produced rebound arousal, fragmented sleep and ultra-slow EEG oscillations. They say cortical gene expression leaned toward an integrated stress response rather than the growth-permissive profile seen after sleep deprivation.
A preprint, not yet reviewed by other scientists, establishes population-specific white matter charts of 198 phenotypes for 19,215 Chinese and 15,584 Western participants across the lifespan. The authors report that Chinese population-matched charts predicted white matter phenotypes more accurately, and detected more extreme deviations in the Chinese population, than Western-derived models. They suggest reference-population mismatch can reduce the accuracy and clinical sensitivity of normative brain charts.
Pew Research Center's fact sheet says how Americans get news continues to evolve as platforms such as artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and email newsletters emerge. It covers how often Americans get news from digital devices.
Pew Research Center says many Americans use social media for news, and about a fifth or more regularly get news on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Pew Research Center says YouTube and Facebook are today the most widely used online platforms among Americans. The report also explores demographic patterns and trends shaping the social media landscape.