What we now know about how smoking stiffens lungs
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 4-Jun-2026 13:16 ET (4-Jun-2026 17:16 GMT/UTC)
For the first time, scientists have directly measured how smoking changes the mechanical behavior of human lung tissue. The researchers found that smoking substantially stiffens this tissue in ways resembling fibrosis, a disease that scars and toughens the lungs.
At the cellular level, one major calcium signaling pathway is known as store-operated calcium entry, or SOCE. In this pathway, the endoplasmic reticulum—a major intracellular calcium store—acts like a sensor-and-supply system. When calcium levels inside the endoplasmic reticulum fall, the protein stromal interaction molecule 1 (STIM1) detects the change and activates ORAI channels in the plasma membrane. ORAI1 forms the pore of the calcium release-activated calcium channel, or CRAC channel, allowing calcium from outside the cell to enter the cytosol and trigger downstream signaling.
Understanding how this pathway works—and how it can be controlled when it doesn’t—is the focus of research led by Yubin Zhou, director of the Center for Translational Cancer Research at the Texas A&M Health Institute of Biosciences and Technology and professor in the Texas A&M Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine.
The Precourt Institute for Energy’s new Sustainable Mobility Center seeks to fundamentally rethink how people and goods move across land, sea, and air.
The inefficiency of current transportation systems underscores the urgent need for a coordinated, systems-level redesign rather than a simple fuel swap.
Research will be organized around five pillars: energy systems, infrastructure, economics and policy, safety, and interdisciplinary design.
For decades, ultrasound has been associated with diagnostics – a routine scan in a hospital room, a monitor displaying organs, tissues, or the first image of a baby. However, researchers are now looking at ultrasound from an entirely different perspective. New findings from scientists at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) suggest that ultrasound waves might not only help doctors see inside the body, but low-frequency ultrasound directly influences blood flow – potentially opening new possibilities to support the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, reducing the need for invasive procedures or medication in the future.
Neanderthal populations in southern Europe collected shellfish throughout the year, with a marked preference for the colder months, according to a new international study led by researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), the IsoTOPIK Lab at the University of Burgos (UBU), and the Instituto Internacional de Investigaciones Prehistóricas de Cantabria at the University of Cantabria (UC).