Chronic neuropathic pain often brings a cruel companion: debilitating anxiety. These two conditions fuel each other, making treatment notoriously difficult.

A new international study has found that Indigenous oral traditions, some thousands of years old, hold valuable and often overlooked insights into volcanic eruptions – offering important lessons for modern disaster preparedness.

A novel interfacial engineering strategy for 3D-printed metal-cermet composites is provided, effectively suppressing sintering-induced cracking, and opens a promising pathway for manufacturing robust components for extreme environments.

A landmark review published in Targetome establishes targetome as a unifying concept for systematic, synergistic multi‑target intervention, breaks through the limitations of the “one gene, one target, one drug” paradigm, and proposes a three‑stage innovation roadmap to accelerate rational discovery of next‑generation combination drugs for chronic diseases including cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurodegenerative disorders.

A comprehensive review published in the inaugural issue of Targetome offers a full-spectrum overview of RNA therapeutics, dissecting their mechanisms of action, persistent delivery bottlenecks, cutting-edge delivery technologies, and global clinical progress across a wide range of diseases. The work, led by researchers from China Pharmaceutical University and The First Hospital of Hebei Medical University, clarifies core challenges and highlights transformative strategies to accelerate the clinical translation of RNA-based medicines, a fast-growing class of next-generation therapies.

Researchers from Donghua University and Yanshan University have developed an enhanced neural network called EF-YOLO, which significantly improves the automated detection of colorectal polyps—a key precursor to colorectal cancer. By integrating advanced modules such as transformer, deformable convolution, coordinate attention, and a newly designed multi-scale aggregation mechanism, the model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 96.60% on standard medical datasets. This represents a major step forward in reducing missed detections during colonoscopy and supporting early clinical intervention.

Researchers from Donghua University, in collaboration with ANTA Sports Products Ltd., have developed a one-step ultraviolet (UV) irradiation technology to significantly improve the thermal stability and hydrophilicity of medium molecular weight polyethylene (PE) fibers. By integrating crosslinking and grafting modifications using a cost-effective photoinitiator system and acrylic acid (AA) as a grafting monomer, the modified fibers exhibit excellent morphological integrity and mechanical performance at elevated temperatures (130–150 °C), while the water contact angle dramatically decreases from 105.0° (hydrophobic) to 48.4° (hydrophilic). This innovation offers a practical and scalable solution for expanding the application of PE fibers in high-temperature and dyeable textile production.