There’s a long-held belief in diabetes prevention that weight loss is the main way to lower disease risk. Our new study challenges this.

For decades, people diagnosed with prediabetes—a condition affecting up to one in three adults depending on age—have been told the same thing by their doctors: eat healthily and lose weight to avoid developing diabetes.

This approach hasn’t been working for all. Despite unchanged medical recommendations for more than 20 years, diabetes prevalence continues rising globally. Most people with prediabetes find weight-loss goals hard to reach, leaving them discouraged and still at high risk of diabetes.

Our latest research, published in Nature Medicine, reveals a different approach entirely...

Astronomers have identified an enormous “growth spurt” in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our solar system, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own instead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tons a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind, providing valuable insights into how they form and grow.

“People may think of planets as quiet and stable worlds, but with this discovery we see that planetary-mass objects freely floating in space can be exciting places,” says Víctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Astro...

Research led by the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging in Cologne reports that misincorporation of ribonucleotides into mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) initiates an inflammatory cascade.

Mitochondria support cell survival through metabolic and signaling roles. Conversely, their disruption has been associated with inflammation, cell death and disease.

Innate immune activation through the cGAS-STING-TBK1 pathway can move a cell from short-term defense to a chronic state of alarm. cGAS-STING activity is linked to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and contributes to senescence and aging, intertwining immune signaling with tissue decline.

Senescent cells then adopt a secretor...

A team of scientists from the University of Chicago, the University of California Berkeley, Argonne National Laboratory, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed molecular qubits that bridge the gap between light and magnetism—and operate at the same frequencies as telecommunications technology. The advance, published today in Science, establishes a promising new building block for scalable quantum technologies that can integrate seamlessly with existing fiber-optic networks.

Because the new molecular qubits can interact at telecom-band frequencies, the work points toward future quantum networks—sometimes called the “quantum internet...