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Machine learning creates a color wheel for complex odors

If you want to describe a particular color, you could look to the Pantone color wheel to find its exact hue, saturation and brightness, and how it compares to other colors. But nothing like that has existed for complex odors.

20 Aug 2026

Scientists create brain organoids with distinct cortical regional identity

The human brain is often described as one of the most complex structures in biology, and much of its power comes from how it's organized.

20 Aug 2026

Wake-activated brain circuits reveal what drives the urge to sleep

Researchers identified wake-activated neurons in the median raphe and anterior medial preoptic area that track sleep pressure and help regulate when and how deeply mice sleep. Manipulating these circuits altered NREM sleep, sleep-pressure accumulation, and rebound sleep, revealing key neural mechanisms underlying mammalian sleep homeostasis.

20 Aug 2026

Capillaries drive new collateral artery formation after heart blockage

New research in mice challenges a long-standing view of how the heart builds backup blood vessels after a coronary artery blockage, showing that new collateral arteries arise primarily from capillaries rather than existing arteries.

20 Aug 2026

Cross-generational friendships reshape brain synchrony in unexpected ways

The closer two people grow, the more alike their brains work– or so the assumption goes. Two ETH Zurich studies challenge this idea by examining the brain activity of younger and older adults who drew together over several weeks.

20 Aug 2026

Sprinters and non-athletes had similar gut diversity, but one key difference emerged

College sprint athletes showed a distinct gut microbial community structure, including higher abundance of Segatella copri and Bifidobacterium adolescentis, compared with non-athletic students. Their microbiomes also showed predicted enrichment of carbohydrate and amino acid metabolism pathways, while exploratory analyses linked several dietary factors with the signature bacteria.

20 Aug 2026

Psilocybin may make the brain more organized than scientists expected

In 62 adults, researchers combined fMRI, EEG and machine learning to examine how psilocybin reshapes brain activity during rest, meditation, music and movie viewing. They found that context-sensitive neural organization tracked the intensity and quality of psychedelic experiences and was associated with next-day mindset change.

20 Aug 2026

What happens to your diet when you get better at cooking?

Cooking-skills interventions were associated with healthier dietary behaviors in healthy adults, including greater fruit and vegetable intake, improved diet quality, and greater cooking confidence. However, the certainty of evidence was low to very low, and too little evidence was available to determine whether cooking skills affect nutritional status.

20 Aug 2026

AI predicts vaccine response based on pre-existing antibody patterns

Vaccines protect most people from serious illness, but the strength of that protection can vary considerably from one person to another. A new study led by Arizona State University helps us understand why.

20 Aug 2026

Study shows how prostate tumors rewire metabolism to resist therapy

Prostate tumors can rewire amino acid metabolism to override the normal brakes on cholesterol production, a process that may fuel hormone therapy resistance, according to a study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

20 Aug 2026

Researchers maintain brain organoids for longer than ever before

An international team of researchers has maintained brain organoids, three-dimensional models of human brain tissue, for longer than ever before.

20 Aug 2026

New brain wave theory explains cognition and consciousness

A new theory, published in The Journal of Neuroscience by three scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, offers an explanation of how the brain produces cognition and consciousness: It uses traveling waves of rhythmic neural activity to coordinate nimble neural networks with analog computations.

20 Aug 2026

Researchers develop custom electronic skin for advanced prosthetic sensing

An electronic skin with a sensing system that can detect pressure and temperature could someday be used to help amputees gain feeling in their prosthetics.

20 Aug 2026

Review examines how medical imaging foundation models are moved toward clinical use

AI is already widely used for lesion detection, disease classification, and outcome prediction in medical imaging, but most systems remain narrowly designed for one task and depend heavily on expert-labelled data.

20 Aug 2026

AI-driven drug-target interaction prediction moves toward real-world workflows

Drug-target interaction prediction can help researchers explain mechanisms of action, identify candidate targets, reposition existing medicines and prioritize compounds before costly laboratory work.

20 Aug 2026

Brain organoid studies on the ISS move closer to new treatments

Research using human brain organoids onboard the International Space Station International Space Station (ISS) helped lead to the clinical trial of a potential therapy for Rett syndrome, a debilitating neurological disorder in children.

20 Aug 2026

New research reveals wild mice as reservoirs for antibiotic resistance

Antibiotic resistance in humans and farm animals poses a major health challenge. A new study published in the journal 'Nature Communications' reveals that this problem does not stop at hospital doors or farm gates - indeed, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) can also be detected in wild animals.

20 Aug 2026

Scintica and Indus Instruments introduce PulSAR MD: An integrated M-Mode and Doppler data acquisition system with powerful automatic analysis

Scintica and Indus Instruments are proud to introduce PULSAR MD (Preclinical Ultrasound for Small Animal Research M-Mode and Doppler) system, the next evolution in preclinical hemodynamic assessment.

From Scintica Instrumentation Inc. 20 Aug 2026

New sweating discovery reveals hidden limits of body cooling

The purpose of perspiration was a mystery in 1775, when English physician Charles Brian Blagden and a few inquisitive friends experimented on themselves by spending time in rooms heated to over 230° Fahrenheit.

20 Aug 2026

More coffee, higher testosterone? This study found a more complicated picture

Higher habitual coffee intake was associated with a leaner body composition, lower circulating branched-chain amino acids, and distinct cardiometabolic patterns in 2,264 middle-aged Finnish adults. Hormonal associations differed by sex, with broader testosterone- and SHBG-related patterns in men and more limited SHBG-related changes in women.

20 Aug 2026