It may be possible to extract critical raw materials like lithium from brines (mineral-rich solutions) in salt lakes and geothermal systems without causing large-scale environmental damage. In the BRIDGE initiative, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources are investigating relevant deposits in the Atacama Desert with Chilean partners. The initiative’s objective is to analyze the resource potential of the deposits and develop strategies for environmentally friendly extraction. 

The symptom profiles of different neurodegenerative diseases often overlap, and diagnosing age-related cognitive symptoms is complex. A patient may have multiple overlapping disease processes in the brain at the same time. Now, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have developed an AI model showing that it is possible to detect several neurodegenerative diseases from a single blood sample. The study is published in Nature Medicine.

Why are some people unable to hear from birth, even though their inner ear appears intact? One possible cause lies in the so-called OTOF gene. It plays a central role in transmitting sound signals from the hair cells to the auditory nerve. Without this function, acoustic information does not reach the brain. Researchers from the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, the University Medical Center Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences have now, for the first time, generated marmosets in which this gene has been knocked out precisely. The animals are healthy and develop normally, but are deaf from birth. This provides the first primate model that realistically replicates key characteristics of human deafness.

Creatinine is a widely used marker of kidney function, but testing it still often depends on bulky instruments or methods prone to interference. 

The Robert A. Winn Excellence in Clinical Trials Award Program (Winn Awards) is pleased to announce that AstraZeneca has joined as a funding partner. AstraZeneca will support five medical students in the 2026 Winn Clinical Investigator Pathway Program (Winn CIPP), a six-week immersive summer program that prepares future physicians and clinical researchers to expand access to clinical trials and engage medically underrepresented communities. This partnership strengthens the Winn Awards’ mission of Better Science For All by providing opportunities for medical students from all backgrounds to explore community-engaged clinical research opportunities.

A new study led by Aalto University examines how AI companions impacted people’s mental health and social lives over a two-year period. Combining large‑scale data from the discussion platform Reddit with in-depth interviews, it showed that while interacting with an AI companion can support users, it also coincided with increased signs of distress in their online language. The work offers one of the first causal, long-term examinations of AI companions’ mental health impact at scale, grounded in first‑hand accounts of users’ everyday lives.

Existing plasmonic systems lack the required anisotropy for robust chiral control and tunable light confinement. Researchers demonstrate hyperbolic localized plasmon resonances in the anisotropic two-dimensional crystal MoOCl₂. Unlike conventional plasmons, these modes are intrinsically one-dimensional, independent of the metal–insulator–metal (Z-) gaps, and can generate strong optical chirality without breaking geometric symmetry. This approach could enable a versatile nanophotonic platform for polarization engineering, chiral sensing, and integrated quantum nanophotonic devices.

In a multicenter retrospective Chinese ICU cohort (5 hospitals, 2012–2023; 9,221 pediatric suspected-infection admissions; 13.4% mortality), the Phoenix Sepsis Score showed only moderate discrimination for in-hospital death (AUROC 0.60). Using XGBoost/SHAP-guided, clinically feasible predictors, the authors created PSS+, presented as a logistic regression nomogram, improving discrimination in internal (AUROC 0.75) and external (AUROC 0.71) validation versus PSS-4/8 and pSOFA.