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A new randomized controlled trial has found promising evidence that the smoking cessation medication varenicline (Chantix/Champix) can help people with cannabis use disorder (CUD) to reduce cannabis use. CUD is a rising problem globally, partly due to recent legalization in several countries and US states, and until now no medications have been found to treat it.

There are indications that a simple finger-prick blood test could, in the future, detect Alzheimer's disease long before the first clinical symptoms become apparent. This is shown by research conducted by the European PREDICTOM consortium, in which UZ Brussels and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) are partners. This approach could offer a more accessible and less burdensome alternative to the current, complex diagnostic methods.

Rag rugs, the kind Grandma used to make from worn-out sheets and bits of cloth, may seem like relics from a bygone era, but they hold valuable modern-day lessons.

Social media is often criticized for fueling misinformation and violence, but it could actually play a role in preventing genocide and mass atrocities—if used strategically.

Coworking spaces have emerged as an alternative to traditional workplaces. Driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote working, these spaces are becoming increasingly common in cities, as well as in rural areas, where they hold promise for community engagement and local development, but also face challenges such as funding and long-term viability.

For many medical students, the earliest years of training are heavy on textbooks and light on real patient contact. But a new study suggests that meaningful clinical learning can begin much earlier, not in hospitals, but in people's homes.

Electrifying cars and trucks can cut greenhouse gas emissions, but in cold regions the climate benefits hinge on what powers the grid.

Alcohol-free and low-alcohol ("nolo") drinks have the potential to improve public health, but experts writing in The BMJ call for a precautionary approach that maximizes potential benefits (e.g., increased substitution of alcoholic drinks with nolo alternatives) while minimizing risks (e.g., preventing encroachment of nolo drinks into alcohol-free spaces).

Wearing a cast for six weeks appears to be no less effective than surgery for healing unstable ankle fractures and carries fewer treatment-related harms, finds a clinical trial from Finland published in The BMJ.

A research team at Tohoku University, in collaboration with Denka Company Limited and U-A Corporation, has developed a high-fidelity "dry" simulator for endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD). ESD is a minimally invasive procedure developed in Japan to treat early gastrointestinal cancers, but its high complexity carries risks of bleeding and perforation, requiring advanced technical skills.

Many people are surprised to learn that clinical trials aren't just for people who have run out of standard treatment options, but are an important part of cancer care at every stage and most aspects of diagnosis and treatment. They help physicians study new and better ways to diagnose, treat and improve the quality of life for people. They also give patients access to promising treatments that they might not otherwise receive.

The way the brain develops can shape us throughout our lives, so neuroscientists are intensely curious about how it happens. A new study by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT that focused on visual cortex development in mice, reveals that an important class of neurons follows a set of rules that while surprising, might just create the right conditions for circuit optimization.

Graphene has long been hailed as a "wonder material." It is incredibly strong, highly conductive and almost impossibly thin—just one atom thick. These properties make it a promising candidate for next-generation technologies such as flexible electronics, wearable devices and printed sensors. Yet despite years of research, turning graphene into practical, printable inks has remained a major challenge.

Generative artificial intelligence models have left such an indelible impact on digital content creation that it's getting harder to recall what the internet was like before it. You can call on these AI tools for clever projects such as videos and photos—but their flair for the creative hasn't quite crossed over into the physical world just yet.

UF Health Cancer Institute researchers have discovered a small compound produced naturally by gut bacteria that doubled the response to lung cancer immunotherapy treatment in mice and can now be made into a drug for testing in humans.

Physicist Davide Bossini from the University of Konstanz has recently demonstrated how to change the frequency of the collective magnetic oscillations of a material by up to 40%—using commercially available devices at room temperature.

Clinician-scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that significantly improves diagnostic accuracy for functional seizures—a condition often misdiagnosed as epilepsy.

A by-product of rice bran oil production has long been recognized as a source of beneficial lipids for skin health and nutrition. Now, researchers have uncovered an entirely new class of skin-active molecules hidden within this agricultural residue.

Metabolic bariatric surgery (MBS) is associated with improved outcomes in patients with psoriasis, according to a review published online Jan. 12 in BMC Surgery.

Tired of hauling your boat out of the water to clean its hull? Graphene can replace the toxic chemicals usually used to do this job.

For quantum computers to outperform their classical counterparts, they need more quantum bits, or qubits. State-of-the-art quantum computers have around 1,000 qubits. Columbia physicists Sebastian Will and Nanfang Yu have their sights set much higher.

For decades, dopamine has been celebrated in neuroscience as the quintessential "reward molecule"—a chemical herald of pleasure, motivation, and reinforcement. In popular understanding, higher dopamine levels were equated with stronger motivation and better learning. However, new research from Wroclaw Medical University published in Progress in Neurobiology shows that this picture is incomplete.

The human brain is complex. Understanding deep brain function usually requires the insertion of probes that frequently result in irreversible tissue damage. Current neural probes are made out of silicon, a brittle material that can shatter during placement.

Piezoelectric nanoparticles deployed inside immune cells and stimulated remotely by ultrasound can trigger the body's disease-fighting response, according to an interdisciplinary team of Boston College researchers.

For years, endocrinologist Leigh Perreault, MD, felt there had to be a better way to help patients with weight management than sending them home with advice to change their diet and increase their exercise.

For decades, scientists have investigated the neurokinin-1 receptor (NK1R) as a potential target for treating major depressive disorder. Early studies suggested promise, but enthusiasm faded after clinical trials of drugs such as aprepitant failed to show clear benefits, raising doubts about whether NK1R itself was a viable antidepressant target.

U.S. overdose deaths fell through most of last year, suggesting a lasting improvement in an epidemic that had been worsening for decades.

Traditional techniques of converting fossil fuels for heat and power generation and chemical production increase the carbon footprint, harming society and the environment. To mitigate this problem, carbon capture and storage technologies aimed at lowering carbon dioxide emissions and encompassing renewable energy utilization, circular economy, and green chemical synthesis are promising.

Coffee beans that pass through the digestive tracts of animals get their unique flavors from the activity of gut microbes, report researchers from the Institute of Science Tokyo. The guts of Asian elephants that produce Black Ivory coffee (BIC) were rich in pectin-digesting bacteria. Heat-driven degradation of pectin during roasting makes coffee bitter. Bacterial activity that reduces the pectin content of BIC could be the source of its smoother, chocolaty, and less bitter flavor.

In 2026, astronauts will travel around the moon for the first time since the Apollo era, powerful new space telescopes will prepare to survey billions of galaxies, and multiple nations will launch missions aimed at finding habitable worlds, water on the moon and clues to how our solar system formed.

Early in 2025, scientists discovered a promising new antibiotic in a soil sample from a lab technician's backyard. The molecule, called lariocidin, is produced by the microbe Paenibacillus and shows broad activity against pathogenic bacteria, including several that are multi-drug-resistant. Now, the researchers report in ACS Infectious Diseases how Paenibacillus avoids harm by its own antibiotic—information that is crucial for developing lariocidin or similar compounds into new drug candidates.

For many years, I lived in the Indian city of Chennai, where the summer temperatures can reach up to 44° C. With a population of 4.5 million, this coastal city is humid and hot.

Sometimes to truly study something up close, you have to take a step back. That's what Andrea Donnellan does. An expert in Earth sciences and seismology, she gets much of her data from a bird's-eye view, studying the planet's surface from the air and space, using the data to make discoveries and deepen understanding about earthquakes and other geological processes.

The Indonesian Throughflow carries both warm water and fresh water from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean. As the only low-latitude current that connects the two bodies of water, it plays a key role in ocean circulation and sea surface temperature worldwide.

Fluorophores are chemical compounds or molecules that absorb light energy at one wavelength and re-emit it as light at a longer, lower-energy wavelength, acting as glowing tags or markers. The absorption process is known as excitation, and the re-emission is visible as fluorescent light, which makes these molecules crucial for biological imaging, diagnostics, and tracing cellular molecules like proteins or lipids under normal or various infectious conditions.

Genetic disorders occur due to alterations in the primary genetic material—deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)—of an organism.

Researchers at Kumamoto University have discovered that a purely inorganic crystal grown from water solution can emit circularly polarized light, a special form of light whose "handedness" distinguishes left from right.

When energy researchers talk about the future of the grid, they often focus on individual pieces: solar panels, batteries, nuclear plants, or new transmission lines. But in a recent study, urban systems researcher Anton Rozhkov takes a different approach—treating the energy system itself as a complex, evolving organism shaped as much by policy and human behavior as by technology.

In numerous scientific fields, high-throughput experimentation methods combined with artificial intelligence (AI) show great promise to accelerate innovation and scientific discovery.

The Dodge Charger won the 2026 North American Car of the Year award, while the Ford Maverick Lobo took the crown for the truck honors, and the Hyundai Palisade won the utility award.

Underwater robots face many challenges before they can truly master the deep, such as stability in choppy currents. A new paper published in the journal npj Robotics provides a comprehensive update of where the technology stands today, including significant progress inspired by the movement of rays.

If trucks ran on hydrogen instead of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide emissions from heavy-duty road transport could be significantly reduced. At the same time, a new study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden shows that differences in how the gas is produced, distributed and used greatly affect its climate benefits.

Converting the vibrations generated by water currents in contact with an object into energy. This is the basis of the new system designed by Francisco Huera, a researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). The device harnesses the energy of water currents from the vibrations that occur when water passes around a cylinder and creates vortices behind it. This method has a very simple structure: a submerged cylindrical tube hanging from an axis that oscillates like a pendulum when the water current makes it vibrate.

A team of engineers has made major strides in generating the tiniest earthquakes imaginable. The team's device, known as a surface acoustic wave phonon laser, could one day help scientists make more sophisticated versions of chips in cellphones and other wireless devices—potentially making those tools smaller, faster and more efficient.

Researchers have created a self-healing composite that is tougher than materials currently used in aircraft wings, turbine blades and other applications—and can repair itself more than 1,000 times. The researchers estimate their self-healing strategy can extend the lifetime of conventional fiber-reinforced composite materials by centuries compared to the current decades-long design-life.

The world's first dataset aimed at improving the quality of English-to-Malayalam machine translation—a long-overlooked language spoken by more than 38 million people in India—has been developed by researchers at the University of Surrey.

UC Riverside chemical engineering researchers have completed construction of a multi-kilogram-scale biomass processing facility that transforms forestry and agricultural biomass waste into pulp that can be made into many fiber and textile consumer products.

If you use consumer AI systems, you have likely experienced something like AI "brain fog": You are well into a conversation when suddenly the AI seems to lose track of the different ideas you have been talking about and how they fit together.

On Jan. 13, Apple Inc. announced a new subscription bundle of creative apps called Creator Studio, an attempt to give its photo- and video-editing software fresh momentum in the face of intensifying competition.

In March 1976, Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak both signed a $500 check weeks before the official creation of a California company that would transform personal computing and become a global powerhouse.

A research team led by Professor Su-Il In of the Department of Energy Science & Engineering at DGIST has achieved a breakthrough improvement in the performance of the radiation absorber, a key component of perovskite-based betavoltaic batteries, by applying additive engineering and antisolvent process control techniques.