Open lines of communication between the body’s organs are important to health and often falter with age. A new study in mice by researchers at WashU Medicine shows how signals that travel from skeletal muscle to the brain and then activate brown fat and control core body temperature are weakened in elderly mice. The research suggests that finding ways to restore these signals could offer new opportunities to support healthy aging.

The study—led by S...

The effects of extreme space weather may be larger than previously thought, research in the journal Nature reveals. The paper, titled “Regression to the mean can explain saturation of geomagnetic storms,” is led by Dr. Nithin Sivadas of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and co-authored by Dr. Maria Walach from Lancaster University.

Space weather—caused by fluctuating electric fields in Earth’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere—can affect technologies on and around Earth in several ways...

Tiny particles made from the membranes of human immune cells could offer a promising new way to fight fungal infections that are becoming harder to treat. Engineers at the University of California San Diego created antifungal nanoparticles that target Candida albicans, a fungus responsible for oral and vaginal yeast infections as well as life-threatening bloodstream infections. In mice with severe Candida infections, the nanoparticles greatly reduced the amount of fungus in major organs and significantly improved survival.

The research, published in Cell Biomaterials, was led by Liangfang Zhang, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineerin...

During the day, our brain acquires new memories; at night, during sleep, it consolidates the important ones and eliminates the useless ones. A similar principle has been applied to Hopfield networks, one of the classic models of artificial intelligence inspired by the workings of the brain. In 2025, Federico Ricci-Tersenghi and colleagues developed Daydreaming, an algorithm that combines the learning of new memories with the elimination of spurious ones, drastically improving the network’s capacity.

One limitation remained, however. These networks lose effectiveness when they work with real-world data, which are rarely perfectly balanced—for example, very bright or very dark images, in which white or black pixels overwhelmingly dominate...