Dietary fat switches on an appetite-protecting brain protein in male mice but not females. Delete it and the females overeat fat, gain more weight, and setmelanotide, the $441,000-a-year MC4R obesity drug, loses much of its appetite-suppressing punch on them.
Nearly 40 percent of the adult blacklegged ticks sampled in one western North Carolina town carried the Lyme bacterium, in a state where doctors were trained for thirty years that the disease barely exists.
The sterile-fly barrier that kept the flesh-eating screwworm out of America for sixty years gave way, and Washington's answer has been a run of emergency drug authorizations, the newest for a Zoetis dog pill whose maker's own release cites no efficacy data against the parasite.
Metabolic & WeightSemaglutide and tirzepatide erased up to 22 percent of body weight in trials with thousands of patients. The research-only peptides sold beside them, like BPC-157, have not completed a single published human efficacy trial. A popular 2026 guide lists them as equals.
Infectious DiseaseVibrio vulnificus kills roughly one in five people it infects, and its northern edge has climbed about 30 miles a year since 1998. The big paper this week reached instead for grief and eco-anxiety.
Infectious DiseaseFor two years the message was that another ancestral booster would keep pace with the virus. The immunology says the opposite can happen: repeated shots against the 2020 strain can lock your antibodies onto a version of SARS-CoV-2 that stopped circulating, and in 2023 the WHO named immune imprinting
Infectious DiseaseFifty-one Finns sat in a 73°C sauna for half an hour, and every white blood cell type poured into their blood. Half an hour later the neutrophils and lymphocytes were back to baseline, and the immune system's chemical alarm had barely rung.
InvestigationsThe wool membrane grew more organized bone than collagen in a rat's skull. Collagen still grew more of it, the sample size never made the press release, and no one has put the material in a person.
Drugs & FDAIn 2019, NIH announced an algorithm that read cervix photos better than doctors, an AUC of 0.91. Its senior author has since written that the number came from overfitting and that the follow-on projects failed. Nature Medicine is now calling the same idea the 'missing piece.'
InvestigationsA five-step checklist cut central-line infections 66 percent and was credited with 1,500 lives saved in Michigan ICUs. Then the federal office that guards research ethics ordered it halted, because the hospitals had never run it past an institutional review board.