For something as simple as hot leaves in water, tea carries a surprisingly complicated health story. A new review from researchers in China and the United States tries to straighten it out, and it lands on a clear headline for everyday drinkers: plain, brewed tea looks like a genuine ally for your heart, metabolism, and ... Read more The post Tea Is Mostly A Health Hero, But Not All Cups Are Created Equal appeared first on SciChi.

EU-funded researchers are exploring how Europe’s film industry is taking a different path from Hollywood, focusing on cultural diversity, collaboration and storytelling to boost global competitiveness and cultural influence. By Ali Jones In March 2025, a low-budget independent animation made history by becoming the first Latvian film to win an Oscar. Flow took home the award for ... Read more The post Lights, camera, action: Europe’s film industry wins audiences with storytelling and social reality appeared first on Horizon Magazine Blog.

EU-funded researchers are testing new hydrogen-powered burners that could slash emissions from one of the world’s most carbon-intensive industries – without shutting down production. By Tom Cassauwers When trucks filled with hydrogen arrive outside a Barcelona steel plant next year, most bystanders will barely register their arrival. But for Raquel Torruella Martínez, project manager at ... Read more The post Turning up the heat on steel’s carbon pollution problem appeared first on Horizon Magazine Blog.

The discovery arrives without theatrics, just a quiet shift in how two species of cells behave when they are forced to share the same early life. In new research from UT Southwestern Medical Center, scientists report that turning off a single gene in mouse embryos suddenly allows human stem cells to hold their ground, a result that pushes the long imagined goal of growing human organs in animals a small but meaningful step closer.

For some people living with psychosis or bipolar disorder, coffee may be more than a small daily comfort. In a study of 436 adults in Norway with schizophrenia spectrum or affective disorders, researchers found that drinking up to three or four cups of coffee a day was linked to longer telomeres, tiny chromosome caps that track cellular ageing. The work, published in BMJ Mental Health, suggests that patients who stayed within the widely recommended caffeine limit had telomere lengths comparable to a biological age about five years younger than non coffee drinkers.

The spotlight that makes a singer feel untouchable on stage may be quietly cutting years from their life offstage. In a new matched case control study of 648 vocalists in Europe, the UK, and North America, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, researchers report that famous singers face a 33 percent higher mortality risk than less famous peers with nearly identical backgrounds.

Even late in life, sexual pleasure does not fade quietly. A new survey of more than three thousand women aged sixty and older shows that sex toys, masturbation, and the pursuit of reliable orgasm remain active, complicated parts of older adulthood according to researchers publishing in Menopause. The study, led by Jessica Hille and colleagues and published by The Menopause Society, focused on a demographically representative sample of women across the United States.

You don’t need to watch a knockout reel to see trouble building in a fighter’s brain. A new analysis presented by researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Cleveland Clinic Nevada at the Radiological Society of North America meeting looks inside the heads of professional boxers and mixed martial arts fighters, and what they found is not neat or orderly.

You don’t expect a pesticide or a flame retardant to bother the bacteria that line the human gut, but that is exactly what a large new screen suggests. Researchers at the University of Cambridge tested 1,076 industrial and agricultural chemicals against twenty two common gut species and found that 168 of them slowed or stopped bacterial growth. The work, published in Nature Microbiology, lands with a thud because most of these chemicals were never supposed to interact with bacteria at all.

The antibiotic era is starting to fray at the edges, and the lungs are one of the places where that rupture shows up fastest. In a new study in Nature Biotechnology, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai describe an experimental mRNA therapy that helps mouse and human lung tissues clear multidrug-resistant pneumonia while dialing down the inflammation that usually tears those tissues apart.

Sometimes the path to smarter machines begins with a single photon making a different choice. In a new study in the journal “Advanced Photonics,” an international team shows how a photonic quantum convolutional neural network, or PQCNN, can be built from existing hardware and gently steered by a simple adaptive trick called state injection. The result is a light based quantum network that classifies tiny images with better than 90 percent accuracy while using far fewer operations than its classical cousins.

Feeling too sick to socialize might not just be exhaustion talking. According to new research, it is a precisely wired conversation between the immune system and a specific set of brain cells that tells animals to pull away from the group. In a study published in Cell on November 25, 2025, scientists at MITs Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and collaborators at Harvard Medical School describe how the immune molecule interleukin 1 beta (IL 1β) acts on IL 1 receptor 1 expressing neurons in the brains dorsal raphe nucleus to shut down social behavior in mice.

A grey seal pup has just 17 days to drink its way into a dangerous ocean, and its mother’s milk is wired for that deadline. In a new Nature Communications study, researchers at the University of Gothenburg show that Atlantic grey seal milk carries roughly one third more distinct sugar molecules than human breast milk, including many giants never seen before, and that its chemistry shifts in lockstep with the pup’s crash course in survival.

You think you know why your dog acts the way they do, until a study like this yanks the ground a little. New research on more than a thousand golden retrievers shows that many of the same genes shaping human mood and intelligence are also steering fear, energy, and even aggression in these famously gentle dogs. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the work comes from a Cambridge-led team that sifted through nearly half a million genetic markers in golden retrievers and matched them against 14 everyday behaviors, from trainability to stranger-directed fear.

Half of the people who die by suicide never say a word about wanting to die. The silence around them feels ordinary right up until the moment it isn’t, and a new study from University of Utah Health suggests that this absence of signs is not simply a failure of screening or a missed diagnosis. It may reflect a different kind of biological risk altogether.

Some worries announce themselves in numbers, others in the way people talk. A new study from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and Public Agenda suggests both are happening at once, revealing a country uneasy about its democratic future and unsure how to talk about it without retreating into familiar camps. The researchers did not go hunting for crisis.

A bowl of fermented cabbage sounds unremarkable until you watch immune cells shift their posture after weeks of eating it. In a 12 week clinical trial in Korea, researchers used single cell RNA sequencing to track how kimchi changes human antigen presenting cells and gently steers CD4 T cells toward balanced defensive and regulatory roles. The work, published in npj Science of Food, offers the most detailed look yet at how a traditional fermented food can tune the immune system without setting off alarm bells.

The idea that the brain begins its work long before the world touches it feels almost mystical, yet the evidence keeps arriving. Now a team led by UC Santa Cruz shows that human brain organoids produce structured electrical sequences with no sensory input at all, a finding that shifts how we think about the earliest steps toward thought. The work, published in Nature Neuroscience, probes a period of development normally sealed away inside the womb.

A mother's fading memory and a son's quiet heartbreak helped steer a basic research question in a very specific direction. Years after that conversation in rural Anhui, Rutgers neuroscientist Peng Jiang and his collaborators report that a rare gene variant can help human microglia resist Alzheimer’s related tau pathology. The work, published in Nature Neuroscience, focuses on a trisomy 21 associated mutation once linked to leukemia risk in Down syndrome and reframes it as a potential source of resilience.

The same molecular playbook that taught our cells to fight a pandemic is now being tested against snake venom that melts human muscle. In a new preclinical study in Trends in Biotechnology, scientists from the University of Reading and the Technical University of Denmark report that intramuscular delivery of mRNA wrapped in lipid nanoparticles can prompt muscle cells to make their own venom blocking antibodies and blunt tissue damage from a notorious viper toxin.

Before a young orangutan ever forages alone in the forest, its mind is already carrying a crowded library of cultural knowledge. A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and based on 12 years of field data from Sumatran orangutans, shows that this library does ... Read more The post Orangutan Childhoods Run On Culture, Not Instinct appeared first on Wild Science.

On the floor of the South Atlantic, a 61 million year old pile of broken lava is quietly drinking carbon from the sea. In a study published in Nature Geoscience, a team led by the University of Southampton shows that rubble left behind by collapsing seafloor mountains can lock away seawater derived carbon dioxide for tens of millions of years.

A quiet brilliance runs through the skin long before birth, a kind of mechanical intuition that seems to know how to pull damaged tissue back together. In new work from Yale School of Medicine, researchers traced this instinct to some of the earliest choices made by embryonic skin stem cells, using zebrafish embryos and human skin models to understand how the body learns to heal.

For years, close orbiting exoplanets that seemed drenched in water were treated as cosmic migrants, born far from their stars and hauled inward later in life. A new set of laser driven experiments suggests something more startling. Dry, hydrogen rich worlds can manufacture oceans from the inside out, rewriting how scientists connect a planet’s water supply to its birthplace. In work led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory postdoctoral researcher Harrison Horn and published in Nature, researchers recreated the brutal conditions at the boundary between a rocky, molten core and a thick hydrogen atmosphere on sub Neptune sized planets.

A surprisingly small circle of social media users can reshape an entire country’s political divide, and Finland offers a vivid case study. In a new paper in the journal Network Science, researchers from Aalto University use Twitter data from the 2019 and 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections to show that elite accounts contribute far more to online polarization than their numbers would suggest.