Scientists may have found the brain’s “pain switch”—and how to turn it off. New research from the University of Colorado Boulder points to a little-known brain circuit that may determine whether short-term pain fades away or becomes a long-lasting problem. The findings suggest that this pathway plays a key role in turning temporary pain into chronic pain that can persist for months or even years.

The study, conducted in animals and published in the Journal of Neuroscience, focused on a region called the caudal granular insular cortex (CGIC). Researchers found that shutting down this circuit can both prevent chronic pain from developing and stop it after it has already begun.

“Our paper used a variety of state-of-the art methods to define the specific brain circuit crucia...

Many plastic products are designed to be used only once, yet the material itself lasts for years. But a new strategy is addressing this problem by creating products that self-destruct on command, known as living plastics. These materials incorporate activatable, plastic-degrading microbes alongside the polymers. One team reporting in ACS Applied Polymer Materials used two bacterial strains that worked together and completely broke down the material within just six days, without making microplastics.

Why scientists are rethinking plastics
Zhuoju...

Expose an animal to extreme physical stress, and the expectation is simple: It will break down. But when UC Riverside scientists subjected fruit flies to forces many times stronger than Earth’s gravity—a condition called hypergravity—the insects did something unexpected. They survived. They even mated and reproduced. Their movements and behaviors changed dramatically and then, over time, they recovered.

These findings, detailed in a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, point to a surprising resilience in how the body responds to high gravitational environments like those experienced by fighter pilots or by astronauts upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.

Even after more than six decades of human spaceflight, gaps persist in scientists’ understanding of t...

For decades, the relationship between fat and cancer has been treated as a question of quantity: Eat less fat, reduce your risk of developing cancer. But new research published April 29 in Cancer Discovery shows that for pancreatic cancer, the type of fat you consume matters more than the amount.

“It’s really the type of fat that you’re consuming, not just total fat content,” says Christian Felipe Ruiz, Ph.D., an associate research scientist in YSM’s Department of Genetics and lead author of the study. “Depending on the type of fat that you consume, it can go completely different ways. We found that some fats promote cancer, as we would expect, while other fats are really good at suppressing cancer.”

One fat in particular—oleic acid, the primary fatty acid in olive oil—may be ac...