Category Biology/Biotechnology

Squishy, wrinkled, weighing about as much as a cantaloupe, the brain may not be much to look at from the outside. Yet with a network of roughly 86 billion neurons, it generates more impulses daily than all the smartphones on the planet combined.

Scientists can track all that activity with scans. But what does a well-balanced brain actually look like?

Spoiler alert: New research says there’s no universal signature of mental health—or illness.

The limits of a universal biomarker
“A lot of the work in neuroscience is trying to identify some kind of universal biomarker,” said Northeastern University London researcher Haily Merritt...

A large-scale study, presented at UEG Week 2026, has identified distinct antibody patterns up to 10 years before the diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), potentially opening new avenues for earlier risk detection and providing insights into future disease course.

IBD is a group of chronic conditions, including Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), in which abnormal immune responses contribute to ongoing inflammation and damage in the digestive system...

Could computers include tiny brain organoids one day? The human brain is an incredibly energy-efficient computer, and silicon processors that try to imitate it achieve huge energy savings over traditional processors. Now scientists are experimenting with using organoids modeled on the human forebrain to develop energy-efficient biohybrid computing.

A crucial first step toward this is learning whether the organoids can receive and relay signals reliably, which a Bristol-based team of researchers investigated using braille letters. They found that teams of three brain organoids produced signals that accurately corresponded to different letters 83% of the time.

“We can take information from a real ta...

A common gut bacterium produces a molecule that slows cholesterol production in the liver. When researchers gave the molecule to mice prone to artery disease, the animals developed roughly half as much fatty plaque as untreated controls.

The molecule acts on the same enzyme targeted by statins, the widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs. That connection offers a concrete explanation for something harder to untangle: how bacteria living in the intestine might influence the health of arteries elsewhere in the body.

Researchers at institutions including Sun Yat-sen University and Shenzhen ...