Category Health/Medical

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...

Some people find it useful to talk through their problems—but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say.

In research published in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.

Philosophers, linguists an...

Korean researchers have developed a hierarchical AI technology that autonomously plans even complex, long-horizon tasks. The development of this hierarchical task-planning AI technology, which reduces hallucinations and doubles the success rate, is expected to help robots and agents carry out long-term missions.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) developed the hierarchical task-planning artificial intelligence (AI) technology “ReAcTree,” which autonomously divides tasks requiring complex and lengthy procedures into subgoals and carries them out, and presented it at AAMAS 2026, one of the world’s premier conferences in the AI agent field.

This research achievem...

Excessive blood loss is the leading cause of death from combat injuries, making rapid bleeding control one of the biggest challenges in battlefield medicine. Researchers at KAIST, including an Army Major, have developed a next generation spray-on powder that can stop severe bleeding in about one second. The innovation could significantly improve survival for wounded soldiers while also offering broad potential for civilian emergency care.

The research team, led by Professor Steve Park of KAIST’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Sangyong Jon of the Department of Biological Sciences, created a powder type hemostatic agent that quickly transforms into a strong hydrogel barrier whe...