A new study found that a widely used depression screening questionnaire is accurate for people with and without chronic pain, debunking a common misconception that the screening inflates depression scores for people with chronic pain.

People who carry the APOE2 version of the apolipoprotein E gene are more likely to live to advanced age and are partly protected against Alzheimer's disease, but scientists have struggled to explain why. A new study from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, now published in Aging Cell, offers a mechanistic answer: APOE2 helps human neurons keep their DNA intact and resist becoming senescent, a damaged, dysfunctional state that accumulates with age and contributes to neurodegeneration.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed ApexGO, an AI-powered method for improving promising but imperfect antibiotic candidates. Unlike many AI approaches that screen databases for molecules that might work, ApexGO starts with a small number of starter molecules and makes step-by-step edits, using a predictive algorithm to guide the search toward stronger versions. In tests against disease-causing bacteria, 85% of the AI-generated molecules halted bacterial growth, while 72% outperformed the peptides from which they were derived. The work points toward a more systematic approach to antibiotic discovery, using AI to guide researchers toward molecules most worth testing.