The University of Barcelona is consolidating its position at the forefront of European research thanks to the strategic project “VISI-ON-BRAIN: Cutting-edge Human In Vitro and In Silico Biomedical Tools on Brain Disorders”. This is a training and research programme involving 15 PhD researchers focused on developing new-generation human models to advance the study of complex brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. The key point of the initiative is the paradigm shift it proposes, as the study is carried out leaving behind the animal model and seeking a more ethical science, with experimental (in vitro) and computational (in silico) models.

Our News & Perspectives section of the Journal of Medical Internet Research delivers grounded, expert-led insights from our network of correspondents. Recent articles explore how digital innovation is tackling modern health challenges, from combating online misinformation and physician burnout to advancing wildfire exposure tracking, aging in place, and the humanizing power of digital narrative medicine.

New research from Texas A&M University shows that lettuce plants exposed to nanoplastics and cadmium, a toxic heavy metal, absorb up to 61% more cadmium into their edible leaves than plants exposed to cadmium alone.

As part of the University of Victoria Libraries’ Kula: Library Futures Academy, an open-source retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline is being developed using historic newspapers held in the archives. This combined with optical character recognition (OCR) technologies will better capture metadata from newspapers and produce information retrieval with generative AI to produce accurate, context-aware responses grounded in authoritative source material. 

ReNeuron Group Limited, a leading UK biotechnology company, has joined Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science (ILS) in a new strategic research partnership to advance next-generation exosome therapies, helping transport medicines to the parts of the body where they are needed most.

IOP Publishing’s annual highlights report is out now. It was published on the March 4th. See below. The report includes key milestones across the organisation’s strategy, such as continued growth in open access publishing, with more than half (51%) of all research in 2025 published openly, underscoring IOPP’s commitment to making high quality scientific knowledge accessible to the world.

Across the drylands where ICARDA works, Ramadan is widely observed as a month during which Muslims fast from dawn till dusk and gather each evening for iftar, the meal that breaks the fast. From Egypt to Morocco, Oman to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and beyond, millions begin that meal with a date, a highly nutritious fruit that holds significant religious and cultural importance. But if red weevil is not stopped, how long will this ancient tradition last?