Years before symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease manifest, the brain starts changing and neurons are slowly degraded. Scientists at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH) and the University Hospital Tuebingen now show that a protein found in the blood can be used to precisely monitor disease progression long before first clinical signs appear. This blood marker offers new possibilities for testing therapies. The study was carried out in cooperation with an international research team and published in the journal Nature Medicine.

“The fact that there is still no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s is partly because current therapies start much too late,” say...

An international team led by the University of Liverpool and McMaster University has made a significant breakthrough in the search for new states of matter. In a study published in the journal Nature Physics, researchers show that the perovskite-related metal oxide, TbInO3, exhibits a quantum spin liquid state, a long-sought-after and unusual state of matter.

Using cutting-edge experimental technologies, including inelastic neutron scattering and muon spectroscopy, researchers discovered that the exotic quantum state in TbInO3 emerges from the complexity of the local environment around the magnetic ions in the material, ...

The strange orbits of some objects in the farthest reaches of our solar system, hypothesised by some astronomers to be shaped by an unknown ninth planet, can instead be explained by the combined gravitational force of small objects orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, say researchers.

The alternative explanation to the so-called ‘Planet Nine’ hypothesis, put forward by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the American University of Beirut, proposes a disc made up of small icy bodies with a combined mass as much as ten times that of Earth...

New printing technique and materials could be used to develop intelligent materials and self-adaptive infrastructures and transducers. The piezoelectric materials that inhabit everything from our cell phones to musical greeting cards may be getting an upgrade thanks to work discussed in the journal Nature Materials released online Jan 21.

Xiaoyu ‘Rayne’ Zheng, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, and a member of the Macromolecules Innovation Institute, and his team have developed methods to 3D print piezoelectric materials that can be custom-designed to convert movement, impact and stress from any directions to electrical energy...