A protein long understood to drive inflammation by producing nitric oxide has a second, previously unknown role—it physically binds to another key protein inside cells to directly modulate the immune response. The discovery, published in Nature Metabolism, could open new routes to treating conditions such as cardiovascular disease, arthritis, Crohn’s and other inflammatory diseases.

When the immune system detects infection or injury, it triggers inflammation to fight back. That response is essential, but it must be carefully controlled...

In the race to make AI models not just reason better but respond faster, latency—the delay before an answer appears—is often treated as a purely technical constraint, something to minimize and move past. But how is this relentless push for speed actually impacting the people using these systems every day?

There is a rich body of work in human–computer interaction linking faster response to better usability. But AI models are fundamentally different from the deterministic systems that previous research was built on. When you wait for a file to download or a page to load, the outcome is fixed and predictable.

AI models are probabilistic—you cannot anticipate the precise response...

A team of astrophysicists from Nanjing University and University of Bonn have demonstrated that, rather than being random, the mass of new stars born inside a star cluster is actually governed by a defined process of self-regulation. Their work has been published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

How galaxy size shapes newborn stars
When a galaxy welcomes new stars, they are usually formed in star clusters inside vast gas clouds...

Restoring the gut microbiome to its youthful state may hold the key to slowing aging and preventing liver cancer, one of the fastest-growing cancers worldwide, according to a study to be presented at Digestive Disease Week (DDW 2026).

Researchers collected fecal samples from eight young mice and transplanted them back into the same mice when they were older, a process called fecal microbiota transplantation, or FMT. The eight controls received sterilized fecal slurry, and a small group of similar young mice provided additional baseline data.

None of the mice with the restored microbiome developed liver cancer by the end of the study, while liver cancer was found in 2 out of 8 aging controls...