Category Health/Medical

A team of scientists at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center (The Institute) has made a landmark discovery that sheds light on how the immune system protects the gut during infection. By studying intestinal worms—also known as helminths—the team, led by Professor Irah King, uncovered a previously unknown immune mechanism that preserves intestinal function in the presence of persistent infection.

Their finding, published in the journal Cell, could pave the way for new treatments for helminth infections, which affect over two billion people worldwide at some point in their lives, as well as for other intestinal diseases.

The results could also help revisit older therapeutic strategies that were previously dismissed due to an incomplete understanding of...

Caffeine is not only found in coffee, but also in tea, chocolate, energy drinks and many soft drinks, making it one of the most widely consumed psychoactive substances in the world.

In a study published in Communications Biology, a team of researchers from Université de Montréal shed new light on how caffeine can modify sleep and influence the brain’s recovery—both physical and cognitive—overnight.

The research was led by Philipp Thölke, a research trainee at UdeM’s Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (CoCo Lab), a...

Wenzhou Medical University researchers have reimagined the spleen as a viable site for islet transplantation, enabling long-term diabetes control without the burden of full immunosuppression. Nanoparticle-driven spleen remodeling allowed transplanted mouse, rat, and human islets to restore normal blood sugar in diabetic rodents and cynomolgus macaques.

In type 1 diabetes, the immune system destroys native beta cells, the insulin-producing cells housed within pancreatic clusters called islets of Langerhans...

Is artificial intelligence (AI) capable of suggesting appropriate behavior in emotionally charged situations? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the University of Bern (UniBE) put six generative AIs—including ChatGPT—to the test using emotional intelligence (EI) assessments typically designed for humans.

The outcome: these AIs outperformed average human performance and were even able to generate new tests in record time. These findings open up new possibilities for AI in education, coaching, and conflict management. The study is published in Communications Psychology.

Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of processing, interpreting and generating human language...