Trials of a new cholesterol-lowering pill have shown promising results for people with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH), a genetic disorder that leads to high levels of LDL cholesterol.

HeFH is a common condition affecting about 1 in 250 people, caused by a mutation in a gene that impairs the body’s ability to remove low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol from the bloodstream. This inherited condition increases the risk for premature atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD)—a buildup of fatty deposits in arteries, leading to narrowed vessels that can restrict blood flow to vital organs.

The drug, called Enlicitide and developed by Merck, is a new type of PCSK9 inhibitor. It works by binding to PCSK9, a blood protein that typically degrades the liver receptors that clear LDL cholesterol. By blocking PCSK9, Enlicitide protects these receptors and boosts the liver’s ability to clear LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream, lowering the risk of heart disease.

The findings are published in the journal JAMA.

Year-long trial

The trial was a phase 3, 52-week, randomized trial that included 303 adults from 17 countries with HeFH who were already taking statins or other lipid-lowering therapies. Participants were randomly sorted into two groups. One group received the 20 mg Enlicitide pill once a day while the other group received an inactive pill (placebo). Neither the patients nor the doctors knew who received which.

After 24 weeks, LDL cholesterol levels dropped by an average of 58.2% in patients taking Enlicitide, while those on the placebo saw almost no change. At the 52-week stage at the end of the trial, Enlicitide patients achieved an average drop of 55.3% in their LDL cholesterol, while the placebo group saw their levels rise by 8.7%.

This potential new therapeutic also lowered levels of other cholesterol particles that contribute to ASCVD risk. Apolipoprotein B levels were reduced by 48.2% and Lipoprotein (a) levels decreased by 24.7%.

Drug safety

The drug was also well tolerated with few side effects. The proportion of participants reporting at least one adverse effect was similar between the groups: 77.7% for Enlicitide and 76.2% for the placebo. The proportion of participants who stopped taking the medication due to an adverse effect was also similar, with 2% for Enlicitide and 3% for the placebo.

“In adults with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, Enlicitide is an effective and well-tolerated treatment for lowering the level of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol,” wrote the researchers in their study.

Ongoing trials of Enlicitide are gathering data about whether this powerful cholesterol reduction translates into fewer heart attacks and strokes. The scientists also want to test the pill in a wider population of high-risk patients beyond those with HeFH.

A new system could overhaul maps that misclassify hundreds of thousands of smallholder coffee and cacao farmers as working in forests. Without better maps, deforestation regulations could ripple through markets from remote farms to a caffe mocha near you.

Sample Earth, launched by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and available on Harvard Dataverse, helps mapmakers build accurate, inclusive maps to prevent smallholder farmers from being wrongly classified as producing major commodities in forested areas. Misclassification risks excluding compliant producers from markets enforcing deforestation-free rules, particularly the European Union’s new regulation (EUDR).

The initiative is the result of a collaboration between Alliance researchers, tech companies (including Google), and the World Cocoa Foundation. Researchers call on private-sector mapmakers to adopt their model to harden their supply chains against disruption.

Producers of coffee and cacao, and the companies that buy their products, could soon lose access to the world’s second-largest economy. The European Union, at the end of next year, will phase in the long-delayed EUDR legislation that requires many agricultural commodities to be certified deforestation-free. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of producers will face considerable hurdles, and not because they produce on land that hasn’t been deforested since 2020 (the EU’s cutoff date): It’s due to maps that wrongly classify their farmland as forest.

For example, the EU’s main reference map, published in 2025, misclassifies more than half the coffee production zones in Colombia, China, Guatemala and Mexico as forest, according to research by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. Similar reference maps have the same shortcomings. This is because these maps are “trained” on land-cover datasets that largely exclude remote areas cultivated by smallholders.

Improving these maps is urgent. To spark the creation of better maps, the Alliance recently launched Sample Earth, a trusted and inclusive global benchmark and reference dataset that accurately represents remote smallholder farms. The initial data tranche includes approximately 100,000 open-access, time-stamped geolocation points in Ghana and Vietnam. The countries are the second-largest producers of cacao and coffee, respectively.

“Maps are needed for due diligence, and buyers will likely steer clear of areas misclassified as ‘high risk’ for deforestation,” said Louis Reymondin, a data scientist at the Alliance. “With Sample Earth, we invite governments, companies, NGOs and research institutions to invest in expanding this inclusive, high-quality land-cover reference to preserve livelihoods and incentivize environmental protection.”

Smallholders produce an estimated 60% of the world’s coffee and 90% of its cacao. If maps used for compliance are inaccurate, buyers may decline purchases from entire regions rather than risk penalties for non-compliance, effectively shutting smallholders out of major markets.

“Most maps are not accurate at local scales because the data is biased toward regions with a lot of training data,” said Thibaud Vantalon, a scientist at the Alliance’s Digital Inclusion research area. “Remote regions are very poorly mapped. Sample Earth means to fill this gap in training data for smallholders.”

Making map-making better

Sample Earth is designed to improve map accuracy and to streamline the map-making workflow. Data scientists, the people who make maps with satellite imagery, spend an estimated 80% of their time collecting, cleaning and organizing training data. Sample Earth provides reference samples to reduce that burden and speed up the creation of accurate land-cover maps for compliance.

“High-quality data and data-based action are the foundation for compliance with deforestation-free rules and net-zero carbon emission targets,” said Michael Matarasso, the Impact Director and Head of North America at the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), a partner in Sample Earth.

“However, highly accurate public data is rare… This poses a significant risk to all stakeholders involved. A standard to deliver highly accurate and transparent data in partnership with governments and farmers is of critical importance more than ever.”

Sample Earth aims to set a new transparency and quality benchmark for map-based compliance tools. Currently, no universal standard exists for third-party accuracy assessments of maps used in deforestation due diligence. Sample Earth plans to include a built-in improvement mechanism that allows mapmakers to access confidential land-use reference data to validate and refine their maps without exposing individual farmers’ locations.

“Global forest maps have advanced, but without open, standardized reference data, progress in disambiguating forest land use from other land use like cacao and coffee agroforestry remains limited” said Rémi d’Annunzio, Forestry Officer at FAO and product manager of Whisp. “Today, initiatives like the Forest Data Partnership and DIASCA are putting efforts such as Sample Earth high on the global agenda as we work to define and standardize guidelines for open reference data collection.”

Sample Earth builds on nearly two decades of Alliance research using satellite imagery to monitor land-cover changes across the Global South. The team plans to expand the dataset within Vietnam and Ghana and add other countries with high rates of misclassified smallholder farms, including Colombia and Honduras, along with coffee- and cacao-producing nations across Africa and Asia.

Seeking modern cartographers

Sample Earth’s roster of collaborators includes the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, Germany’s international development agency (GIZ), Google, Satelligence and WCF. The Alliance is actively seeking more collaborators and investors.

“For EUDR to succeed, we need to lower the burden of monitoring and reporting, and we need to ensure that longstanding smallholder farms can be reliably reported as non-deforested areas,” said Dan Morris, a researcher at Google AI for Nature and Society. “AI combined with satellite imagery is a powerful tool that can help address these challenges, but AI systems are only as good as their training and validation data.”

Inaction could disrupt supply chains and consumer markets, and not just in the EU; other jurisdictions are following suit in building similar legislation that will apply to most agricultural commodities. Supply constraints are feasible if maps do not quickly improve, which could push up prices. It’s bad news across supply chains, from vulnerable smallholders who already face myriad challenges to food-inflation-weary consumers worldwide.

Sample Earth’s proposition is straightforward: better, inclusive training datasets will yield more accurate maps, protect compliant farmers from unwarranted exclusion, and give buyers and governments transparent tools to verify deforestation-free claims. By filling the data gaps that leave smallholder landscapes underrepresented, Sample Earth aims to make compliance affordable and fair, while supporting conservation and sustainable livelihoods in the tropics.

Provided by The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture

Agricultural producers and manufacturers often need information about crop attributes, from nutrient content to chemical composition, to make management decisions. In recent years, multispectral imaging has emerged as a useful tool for product analysis, but the required equipment is expensive. Standard RGB cameras are much more affordable, but their images show only visible attributes.

However, if RGB images can be “translated” to multispectral images, pictures taken with a smartphone or any regular camera can yield sophisticated information. This process requires complex computer modeling and machine learning, but once the techniques are developed, they can be applied to simple devices anyone can use.

In two new papers published in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explore the reconstruction of multispectral and hyperspectral images from RGB for chemical analysis of sweet potatoes and maize.

“An RGB camera captures only the visible range in three bands, red, green, and blue. The pictures cannot provide any chemical information, which you often need for crop analysis. We reconstructed images from these three bands to include information from the near-infrared range, which you can use to determine chemical composition,” said Mohammed Kamruzzaman, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE), part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and The Grainger College of Engineering at the U. of I. He is corresponding author on both studies.

“This work has many potential applications in the agricultural industry and can significantly lower costs. While a multispectral camera costs $10,000 or more, you can get an RGB camera for a few hundred dollars,” he added.

Analysis of sweet potato attributes
In the first paper, the researchers provide a large dataset of reconstructed images for chemical analysis of sweet potatoes that anyone can access and use for their own modeling.

“Most existing image reconstruction models focus on non-biological objects like tables and chairs, which are very different from biological objects. Our goal was to create an RGB-to-hyperspectral image dataset for a biological sample and make it publicly available,” said lead author Ocean Monjur, doctoral student in ABE.

Sweet potatoes are a popular food source, and they are also used for a wide range of industrial purposes including textiles, biodegradable polymers, and biofuels. Assessing quality attributes such as brix (sugar content), moisture, and dry matter is important for determining the usage and value of potatoes. Chemical laboratory analysis is time-consuming and destroys the samples. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is fast, accurate, and non-destructive, but it is expensive and complicated.

That’s why the researchers created Agro-HSR, a large database of reconstructed RGB to HSI images for the agricultural industry. The dataset includes 1322 image pairs from 790 sweet potato samples, collected from one or both sides of each potato. For 141 potato samples, they measured brix, firmness, and moisture content to evaluate the accuracy of the reconstructed images, finding them to be highly correlated with the actual measurements.

They tested their dataset on five popular hyperspectral imaging reconstruction models to determine which performed best, finding that two models (Restormer and MST++) consistently outperformed the others on all metrics.

“To our knowledge, this is the largest dataset for hyperspectral image reconstruction, not just for agriculture but overall. We are providing this database so anyone can use it to train or develop their own models, including models for other agricultural products,” Kamruzzaman said.

Evaluating chlorophyll content for maize growth
In the second paper, the researchers describe a novel method for multispectral image reconstruction to analyze chlorophyll content in maize. They also introduce a simple device that people can use to take pictures in the field and get immediate results.

“Our target measure is chlorophyll content, which is an indicator of plant growth. With this device you can take a picture, get the chlorophyll content, and determine the crop’s growth status,” Kamruzzaman said.

To develop their model, the researchers collected images from three different locations: a research field in Hengshui, China; the U. of I. Plant Biology Greenhouse; and the U. of I. Vegetable Crops Research Farm.

At each location, they divided the area into varying levels of soil fertility, and at the Illinois research farm, they subjected the maize to three levels of stress by flooding throughout the growth period.

In all of these settings, they tested several modeling approaches to reconstructing multispectral images from RGB. Based on their findings, they created a novel model called Window-Adaptive Spatial-Spectral Attention Transformer (WASSAT), which more accurately aligned with the actual data.

“We combined spectral and spatial attention modes to establish an adaptive window that can discern crops from soil and other elements, capturing the complexity of a field environment. Then we reconstructed 10-band images to predict chlorophyll content, and we found our results performed better than other models,” said lead author Di Song, doctoral student in ABE.

“We have developed a handheld device that incorporates the model. You can use it to take an RGB image, which will be converted to a multispectral image that provides much more information,” he said. “Next, we plan to add a prediction model, so the farmer can simply take a picture and get the chlorophyll content without having to interpret the images.”

This approach offers a cost-effective solution for accurate crop monitoring, enabling precise growth assessment and stress detection, the researchers concluded in the paper.

If Eli Lilly’s obesity pill orforglipron is approved and priced around $200 per month, analysts at Truist predict patients will flock to it.

Eli Lilly’s trio of obesity medications could reach $101 billion in peak revenue worldwide, with 17.6 million eligible people around the world taking one of the pharma’s medications, according to a new estimate from Truist Securities.

The firm has updated revenue expectations for Lilly in light of the recent White House agreement to lower the price of its weight loss medications and provide access to those drugs to Medicare patients. While a lower price would suggest less revenue, Truist is confident that Lilly has secured a wider patient population with the deal.

Truist had previously expected Lilly’s incretin medicines—which are the approved injectable drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, as well as the hotly anticipated oral option orforglipron—to reach $85 billion in peak sales. The number went up by $16 billion mainly thanks to orforglipron, which has risen from peak revenue assumptions of $22 billion to $41 billion. The firm is predicting higher uptake due to favorable pricing that will boost accessibility for patients.

If Lilly prices the drug at around $200 per month, Truist said it believes patients will flock to it.

“We note that the obesity market is highly elastic with higher volumes of patients tending to stay on drug for longer periods of time given lower price points,” Truist wrote. “We also believe that the orforglipron pricing will increase competitiveness with compounders that may otherwise have captured market share in the obesity space.”

Lilly is working to bring orforglipron to market after a series of positive readouts, both for weight loss and for treating diabetes. Truist suspects Lilly will use a priority review voucher it has in hand to get the drug through the FDA faster, with access beginning in the first half of 2026.

“We anticipate rapid uptake and significant expansion of the obesity market once the oral pill has been approved,” Truist wrote.

Orforglipron is expected to book about $500 million in sales for its first year on the market, reaching 360,000 patients. Overall, Truist expects the trio of medicines to collect $25.7 billion in 2026.

Investors in Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) seemed only mildly fazed by Wednesday’s series of company announcements. The artificial intelligence (AI)-based drug developer’s stock barely moved on Wednesday, then dropped on Thursday, after reporting mixed third-quarter results, setting the stage for future pipeline announcements, and announcing a change at the top.

Recursion finished the third quarter with a net loss of $162.253 million, 69% higher than the $95.841 million net loss in Q3 2024, driven by higher R&D and business costs. But the company’s earnings per share (EPS) of negative 36 cents beat analyst consensus forecasts of a slightly worse negative 37 to 38 cents.

Another silver lining, according to analysts, is Recursion’s improving cash and cash equivalents position. Recursion said it rose to a pro forma cash balance of approximately $785 million (an unaudited figure), up 19% from $659.836 million as of September 30 and 32% from $594.35 million at the end of 2024.

The October cash total includes all $387.5 million raised in an “at the market” financing running through Q4 of this year and allows Recursion to extend its financial runway through the end of 2027 from earlier guidance of “into the fourth quarter” of that year.

The extended runway will help Recursion as it prepares to ring in 2026 with a new CEO.

Co-founder Chris Gibson, PhD, the current president and chief executive, will step down for Najat Khan, PhD, who has been chief research and development officer and chief commercial officer, and a member of Recursion’s board, since joining the company from Johnson & Johnson in July 2024. Gibson remains with Recursion as its new board chairman, succeeding Rob Hershberg, MD, PhD, who will become vice chairman and lead independent director.

“I’ve been working with Najat for the past 18 months in an incredible partnership to build our platform, to deliver on our pipeline and our partnerships. Everything that I have seen has convinced me that she is absolutely the right leader to take Recursion through its next chapter,” Gibson told analysts on Recursion’s quarterly earnings call.

“Pivotal chapter”

On the call, Khan added minutes later: “This is a pivotal chapter for Recursion, one that will require bold focus. The boldness will never go away.”

Khan’s key challenge as CEO will be advancing a pipeline of AI-based candidates that Recursion pruned from 11 to seven programs in May, one month before a restructuring that included eliminating 20% of its workforce, about 160 jobs.

“We’ve talked a lot about models, but proprietary high-quality data is critical and a critical moat to what we do,” Khan said. “Building our ClinTech platform—we’re in the clinic—this is going to be a critical part of what we do. And also, sharpening our portfolio, advancing multiple programs internally with our partners.”

“ClinTech” is Recursion’s effort to apply AI beyond drug design and discovery, toward the way it approaches clinical trials, an effort Khan discussed with GEN earlier this year.

Two analysts have advised investors to look to next year for significant pipeline data on Recursion’s lead oncology and rare disease programs, REC-617 and REC-4881, respectively.

That’s because a data update offered Wednesday for REC-617 from its Phase I/II ELUCIDATE trial (NCT05985655) offered little improvement in efficacy from results shared a year ago. That news sent Recursion shares barely dipping 0.8% on Wednesday from an even $5 to $4.96, then slumping 7% on Thursday to $4.62, a price that stayed unchanged at Friday’s close.

One partial response

Across 29 pre-treated patients with advanced solid tumors across six dose levels as of September 29, one showed a confirmed partial response (PR) while five others showed stable disease (SD) after treatment with REC-617, a precision-designed oral CDK7 inhibitor being developed to treat multiple advanced solid tumor indications—compared with December 2024 results from 18 patients also showing one PR but four SD.

Recursion highlighted more positive safety results showing two patients (6.9%) ending REC-617 due to a treatment-related adverse event, plus rates of GI-related toxicities that the company said were consistent with best-in-class potential, such as diarrhea (69%), nausea (41%), and vomiting (28%). In addition to a safety profile it termed “manageable,” Recursion said ELUCIDATE established a maximum tolerated dose at 10 mg once daily.

Inclusion criteria for ELUCIDATE allowed patients with cancers that included:

• Head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC)
• Pancreatic cancer
• Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)
• Breast cancer (hormone receptor-positive [HR+] and Human Epidermal Growth Receptor 2 negative [HER2-] that has progressed to a prior treatment with Cluster of Differentiation 4 [CD4] / Cyclin-Dependent Kinase 6 [CDK6] inhibitor)
• Platinum-resistant high-grade epithelial ovarian, primary peritoneal, or fallopian tube cancers, including high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC)

Recursion inherited REC-617 (formerly GTAEXS617) when it combined with British AI drug development pioneer Exscientia last year for $630.1 million, a deal value the company disclosed in its Form 10-K annual report for 2024, filed February 28.

Market watchers are awaiting Phase II monotherapy data and especially Phase I combination data for REC-617 in second-line and later (2L+) platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. Among combination regimens being studied are REC-617 plus Avastin® (bevacizumab) marketed by Roche and its Genentech subsidiary, plus paclitaxel or pegylated liposomal doxorubicin (PLD).

Full data from ELUCIDATE is expected to be presented next year at an unspecified medical conference.

“Incremental data for REC-617 (CDK7) will do little to change investor perception on the ‘differentiated asset’ bull [positive-case] thesis with meaningful combination data >1 year away,” Mani Foroohar, MD, a senior research analyst with Leerink Partners focused on genetic medicines, wrote in a research note.

“Key value driver”

Dennis Ding, equity analyst with Jefferies, called the 2L+ ovarian cancer combination study “the key value driver” for REC-617 in a research note. For that study, Ding wrote, success would mean improving on current standard-of-care, which consists of chemotherapy plus bevacizumab, a combo that has generated progression-free survival of ~6.7 months.

By the end of this year, Recursion plans to report Phase II data on its lead rare disease program REC-4881 from its Phase Ib/II TUPELO trial (NCT05552755). REC-4881 is an oral non-ATP-competitive, allosteric small molecule inhibitor of MEK1 and MEK2 is being developed to reduce polyp burden and progression to adenocarcinoma in people living with Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP).

In May, Recursion presented preliminary data from TUPELO showing REC-4881 (4 mg QD) leading to a preliminary median 43% reduction in polyp burden among six patients studied at the week 13 assessment. Five of six patients (83%) experienced reductions in polyp burden ranging from 31% to 82%, though the sixth showed a substantial increase from baseline.

Driving the jump in net loss was a 62% spike in R&D expenses to $121.062 million from $74.6 million a year ago, reflecting higher acquired in process R&D (IPR&D) costs after Recursion bought full rights to REC-102 (formerly REV102), and oral, small molecule ENPP1 inhibitor being developed for the treatment of hypophosphatasia (HPP) from former joint venture partner Rallybio, and acquired Exscientia.

Also contributing to red ink was a 10% jump in general and administrative expenses to $41.628 million from $37.757 million a year ago, again reflecting the Exscientia buyout. In addition, Recursion’s $5.18 million in Q3 revenue was 80% below the $26.082 million reported in the year-ago quarter, reflecting a $30 million milestone payment under its up-to-$12 billion collaboration with Roche and Genentech, launched in 2021.

Roche and its Genentech subsidiary are using Recursion’s namesake Operating System to advance therapies in 40 programs that include “key areas” of neuroscience and an undisclosed oncology indication.

“Google map of the brain”

The latest fruit from that partnership emerged October 29, when Roche and Genentech accepted from Recursion a microglia map—a whole-genome map of specialized microglial immune cells or “Google Map of the Brain”—that the companies plan to use toward discovering neurodegenerative disease targets.

The $30 million microglia map payment will appear in Recursion’s fourth quarter 2025 results.

“These digital maps allow us to move from this empirical sort of one-at-a-time approach into really a search function,” Gibson explained. “Our colleagues at Roche [and] Genentech—our team—can just type in any gene in the microglial map or the iPSC-derived neuronal map, and they can see the relationships across the rest of the genome.”

As CEO, Khan continued, “My focus is going to be translating these platform insights into repeatable clinical proof, whether it’s through our wholly owned programs or with partners scaling the platform that we have, where we have a clear, clear advantage, and building a company that delivers sustainable value.

“The foundation is strong, the vision is clear, the opportunity ahead is extraordinary,” Khan added. “I couldn’t be more excited.”

Leaders and laggards

• Biohaven (NYSE: BHVN) shares plummeted 40% from $13.95 to $8.34 on Wednesday, after the company acknowledged that its new drug application (NDA) for Vyglxia® (troriluzole) to treat spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) was rebuffed by the FDA via a complete response letter. The FDA cited several issues it had with the company’s three-year real-world evidence-based Study 206-RWE (NCT06529146)—including potential bias, design flaws, lack of pre-specification, and unmeasured confounding factors. Study 206-RWE showed a 50–70% slowing of SCA progression in Vyglxia patients vs. matched untreated external controls; a > 50% reduction in risk of falls in troriluzole-treated subjects vs. placebo as reported in the Phase III Study-206 (NCT03701399); and analyses showing a delay in becoming wheelchair bound or losing the ability to walk, decreased gait impairment, and improvement in overall functioning. Biohaven said it will request a meeting with the FDA, prioritize three late‑stage programs, and reduce annual direct R&D spending by approximately 60%.
• Sarepta Therapeutics (SRPT) shares nosedived nearly 38% from $24.45 to $15.81 in afterhours trading on November 3 after the developer of rare disease genetic therapies acknowledged that its Phase III confirmatory ESSENCE trial (NCT02500381)—assessing its ultra-rare disease phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomer (PMO) therapies Amondys 45 (casimersen) and Vyondys 53 (golodirsen) in 225 children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy amenable to exon 45 or 53 skipping—did not achieve statistical significance on its primary endpoint, change from baseline in the four-step ascend velocity at week 96. However, Sarepta said it saw “positive and encouraging trends” such as a 30% reduction in disease progression over two years vs. placebo on the four-step ascend velocity in 168 patients whose double-blind period did not overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic (excluding 57 overlapping patients). Sarepta said it intends to schedule a meeting with the FDA to discuss the possibility of converting from accelerated to traditional approval.

A husband’s optimism and confidence may play a crucial, if often unseen, role in helping babies arrive healthy and on time.

A new study from University of California Merced psychology researchers found that when married fathers reported higher levels of resilience—a quality that includes traits such as optimism, self-esteem, and perceived social support—their partners showed lower levels of inflammation during pregnancy and carried their babies longer.

“This is one of the first studies to show that a father’s inner strengths, such as his optimism and ability to cope with challenges, can ripple through the family in measurable, biological ways,” said Professor Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, a co-author.

The findings were published in the journal Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine.

The research team, led by Ph.D. student Kavya Swaminathan, analyzed data from 217 mother-father pairs who participated in the Community Child Health Network study across five sites in the U.S.

Mothers provided blood samples during pregnancy that were analyzed for C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation associated with an increased risk of preterm birth. Both parents also completed surveys assessing resilience-related traits such as optimism, self-esteem and social support.

Preterm birth, defined as delivery before 37 weeks, is a leading cause of infant mortality and lifelong health complications, including heart disease and developmental disorders. High maternal inflammation is a well-established risk factor. The UC Merced study indicates one reason why some mothers may be biologically protected: their partners’ emotional resources.

In married couples in this study, higher paternal resilience was associated with lower maternal inflammation, which in turn predicted a longer gestation period. Every day in the womb is better for fetal health and development. Among unmarried or cohabiting couples, that connection was not seen.

“This study is exciting because it highlights how the people surrounding a pregnant woman can shape her biology in ways that affect both her health and her baby’s,” Swaminathan said.

The study does not prove cause and effect, but offers strong evidence that emotional and social strength in the father can have physical consequences for mothers and babies.

“Fathers who feel confident and supported might engage in more positive daily behaviors, such as cooking healthy meals, offering encouragement and reducing stress at home,” said Hahn-Holbrook, a Health Sciences Research Institute faculty member. “Emotional connections may also play a role, since couples tend to coregulate their moods and even their immune systems.”

The study draws on the biopsychosocial model, which examines how emotional and social factors interact with biological factors to shape health. Previous research has shown that chronic stress can increase inflammation during pregnancy. The UC Merced study flips the lens to examine how positive psychological resources can protect against it.

Others involved in the study included UCLA Professor Christine Dunkel Schetter, one of several primary investigators, along with UC Merced psychology Professor Haiyan Liu and Stony Brook University Professor Christine Guardino.

Posting on Twitter (also known as X) throughout the night is associated with worse mental well-being, according to a new study from the University of Bristol published in Scientific Reports.

Tweeting throughout the night explained almost 2% of variation in participants’ mental well-being, which is comparable to activities like binge drinking and smoking marijuana (as measured in previous studies).

Researchers suggested that actively using Twitter during the night could both disrupt and delay sleep, which could reduce the quality and quantity of sleep, harming mental well-being. Nighttime tweeting showed a weaker relationship with depressive and anxiety symptoms (compared to mental well-being), although this became stronger after results were split by age and sex.

Seventy-four percent of U.K. adults keep their phone in their bedroom at night, while 26% say they would check their phone if they wake up in the night, according to a 2022 YouGov survey.

Regulation and guidance for nighttime social media use

The study’s findings support calls for more regulation and guidance for nighttime use of social media. For example, TikTok, the online video-sharing app, introduced the tool “Wind Down” in March this year, which shows meditation videos at night to encourage younger users to stop scrolling.

Researchers say top-down approaches to change the user architecture of apps, like TikTok’s wind-down mode, as well as education campaigns to raise awareness within vulnerable groups, could help improve the safety of social media use.

Daniel Joinson, Doctoral Researcher and lead author of the paper said, “While social media is often treated like a monolith, its impact on mental health will depend on the exact behaviors the user performs and the experiences they have on these platforms. Our paper highlights the potential harm of a very specific behavior: nighttime content posting.

“Research like ours could help inform interventions or legislation that aim to deter harmful social media use, while enabling beneficial behaviors or experiences. This is made possible by having access to actual social media data, which is essential if we are to build a deeper understanding of the relationship between social media and mental health.”

Novel data collection approaches

The research drew on longitudinal data from 310 adults (aged between 18 and 60+) in the Children of the ’90s study who consented and were eligible to share their Twitter data, with 18,288 tweets included in the data. Participants’ mental health was measured at multiple timepoints using standard questionnaires, including the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (SMFQ). Importantly, instead of classifying people as simply depressed or not, mental health was measured on a scale, giving a more detailed picture. Participants’ tweets from within two weeks of these questionnaires were included in the analysis, but all others were not.

Uniquely, the study used data directly from Twitter (with the consent of the participant). This enabled the researchers to collect precise measurements of the time of day participants posted on Twitter.

However, the authors noted that the study participants were all adults, almost entirely white, and were more likely to be female. This data was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, a unique time for social media usage and mental health patterns.

The research team are now looking to understand more about how the patterns of emotion expression and social interactions relate to mental health and well-being.

Researchers have discovered that the ability to have an erection or to orgasm is related to the levels of serotonin in the brain, but this relation only applies to depressed patients taking SSRI antidepressants.

At the moment, there is no test for who might experience sexual problems during treatment for depression, but this discovery may help depressed patients to choose antidepressants which allow them to maintain or regain an active sex life when treated with antidepressants. This work was presented at the ECNP conference in Amsterdam.

Sexual dysfunction is a common symptom of depression. SSRI antidepressants can help sexual dysfunction by improving mood, but at the same time, SSRIs themselves are often associated with sexual side effects.

Unfortunately, there’s no way of predicting these side effects in advance. Difficulty reaching orgasm is a common side effect, as are reduced desire and difficulty maintaining an erection. These side effects can affect up to 70% of patients taking SSRI medications, such as Prozac and escitalopram. These effects can be distressing, often leading to people stopping treatment.

The Copenhagen-based researchers studied 90 people who had been diagnosed with depression. They measured brain serotonin activity using a special EEG test called LDAEP (Loudness Dependence of Auditory Evoked Potentials), which is like a hearing test that reveals how your brain processes sound; perhaps surprisingly, this also tells us about serotonin levels in the brain—the lower the LDAEP, the higher the serotonin activity.

The patients then started an 8-week course of SSRI antidepressants, with the researchers carefully tracking any sexual side effects that developed. This allowed the researchers to see if they could predict who would have sexual problems based on their pretreatment LDAEP measurement.

Lead researcher Dr. Kristian Jensen (from Copenhagen University Hospital) said, “We discovered that people with higher serotonin activity before treatment started were much more likely to develop sexual side effects by the end of the eight-week antidepressant course, especially difficulty reaching orgasm.

“Using this non-invasive brain measure combined with information about sexual problems related to their depression, we could predict the ability to reach orgasm with 87% accuracy. We need a bigger study, with more men, to get an accurate figure for erectile dysfunction”.

He continued, “Currently, patients only discover sexual side effects after they’ve already started antidepressant medication. Measuring serotonin activity via the LDAEP test at the start of the course of antidepressants allows us to predict the likelihood of later sexual problems due to the SSRI.

“If confirmed, our findings could enable a more precise approach to depression treatment, helping doctors select medications to minimize sexual side effects in those patients most likely to develop SSRI-related problems. This could help treatment adherence and overall quality of life and generally give better treatment options for depression.

“Our findings seem only to apply to medication-induced sexual problems, so it’s not a general test for sexual difficulties. However, we are now looking to refine this. We have a 600-patient study underway which will look at how serotonin levels combined with sex hormone levels affect sexual function during depression and medication”.

Commenting, Professor Eric Ruhe, Professor of Difficult-to-Treat Depression at Radboudumc, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, said, “This is a very interesting study where the researchers innovatively use an easy-to-administer test to predict the chance of sexual dysfunction after the start of antidepressant [use].

“When replicated, this type of test might reliably help to know beforehand whether a patient will have sexual adverse effects or not. As many patients experience sexual dysfunction after the start of SSRI antidepressants (like escitalopram), the most important clinical application will be to predict that sexual dysfunction will not occur, especially in patients who worry about that adverse effect and are hesitant to initiate treatment.”

“I also encourage the researchers to expand their efforts towards developing a tool that can advise which drug to take instead, without just relying on current pharmacological considerations.”

Professor Ruhe was not involved in this work; this is an independent comment.

This work is currently under peer-review. The researchers note that the subjects in the study were comparatively young (average age 27) and mostly (73%) female, so they are now aiming to replicate the study in a much bigger group of 600 patients.

Dr. Jensen said, “The LDAEP itself is quite elegant: we play sounds at different volumes through headphones while measuring brain waves. It takes about 30 minutes and is non-invasive. It’s not generally available at the moment, but that may change if this test lives up to expectations”.

Griffith University researchers have shown that the shape and surface chemistry of microscopic “re-entrant” structures—tiny overhanging caps arranged like mushroom tops—can tune how cancer cells stick, spread and multiply.

Using an aggressive, triple-negative breast cancer cell line (MDA-MB-231), the team demonstrated that simple design rules could guide cell behavior in the lab.

The study has been published in Advanced Materials Interfaces and has also been selected for a feature on the back cover of the upcoming issue of the journal.

What are re-entrant microstructures?

Re-entrant microstructures have overhanging edges that create confined spaces and curved surfaces. The team fabricated arrays with circular, triangular and linear (microline) caps in two materials: hydrophilic silicon dioxide (SiO₂) and hydrophobic silicon carbide (SiC) and investigated how geometry and wettability affected the cancer cell responses.

Using a lab model, the team showed they could guide how MDA-MB-231 cancer cells—an invasive breast cancer cell—stuck, spread, and multiplied by tweaking the curves and chemistry of these tiny structures.

“Cells don’t just respond to chemicals: they ‘feel’ their surroundings,” said Dr. Navid Kashaninejad from Griffith’s Queensland Quantum and Advanced Technologies Research Institute (QUATRI) and School of Engineering and Built Environment.

“By changing curvature, spacing and surface chemistry, we can nudge how aggressive cancer cells attach and grow. That gives us more realistic tumor-like lab models for drug screening and design cues for implants and coatings that are less welcoming to cancer.”

Testing protocol

Researchers cultured MDA-MB-231 cells on each surface and tracked growth over three days using a PrestoBlue metabolic assay, alongside fluorescence microscopy and SEM to visualize spreading and cytoskeletal organization.

Dr. Kashaninejad said the method mimicked the environment of real tumors more accurately in the lab, which meant it could greatly improve how new cancer drugs were tested.

“It also opens the door to better ways of identifying treatments that stop cancer cells from spreading,” he said. “In the future, this approach could even be used to design medical implants or surface coatings that make it harder for cancer to grow on them.

“Our method shows cancer cell behavior can be precisely tuned by the curvature and chemistry of re-entrant microstructures.”

This study extended on previous work on simple micropillar arrays by demonstrating mechanosensitive behaviors that emerged when curvature and confinement were introduced through re-entrant structures.

The re-entrant designs were also structurally stable, supporting their use in long-term biointerface applications.

Ever wonder what your dog is trying to say? Well, a University of Texas at Arlington researcher is aiming to turn barks, howls and whimpers of man’s best friend into intelligible speech—a kind of Rosetta Stone of woof.

Computer scientist Kenny Zhu has built what he says is the world’s largest video and audio catalog of canine vocalizations. In papers published this year, Zhu and his colleagues at the university report potential phonemes—the smallest units of sound—and word-like patterns that could one day be turned into full sentences understandable to humans.

“The ultimate goal is to make a translator where you can talk freely with your pet,” said Zhu, a professor of computer science and engineering at UT Arlington. “We can already do instantaneous communication between human languages. Perhaps in the future we can do the same with animals.”

AI interprets dog

Humans have long wanted to talk to animals, and in the last century, scientists have tried: from teaching great apes sign language and English to bottlenose dolphins.

Zhu’s fascination with animal communication began in Nanjing, China, where he spent his childhood surrounded by dogs, ducks, chickens and the occasional hedgehog. He often wondered what the animals were saying to each other, though his curiosity cooled over time.

It wasn’t until decades later, when he was watching a BBC documentary on whale and dolphin communication, that questions from his childhood reemerged.

The documentary showed how long and hard it was to record and decode whale and dolphin exchanges. But with artificial intelligence, Zhu thought, there had to be an easier way to translate animal speech. With his background in natural language processing and AI development, he felt up to the task.

For his first project, Zhu wanted to see if a language model could hear a difference between Shiba Inus in Japan and in the United States. He and his colleagues mined dog videos posted on YouTube for the test. After it didn’t reveal any doggy dialect split, Zhu and his colleagues compiled hundreds of hours of synced audio and video to train an AI model to separate canine vocalizations into discrete phonemes.

Deciphering the vocalizations involves both sound and context, as a dog’s bark or whine may be tied to its situation, Zhu said. If a term aligns with the dog’s activity, that correlation signals potential meaning.

So far, the researchers have transcribed about 50 hours of barks into syllables. They have identified some possible words, like cat, cage and leash, and how these words seem to sound different based on the dog breed.

They have also identified how a dog’s linguistic capability appears to change as it ages. In one study, Zhu and his colleagues found that as a husky grows older, its bark lasts longer and potentially becomes more sophisticated.

Dr. Doolittle at your fingertips

This effort isn’t just about chatting with Fido like your next-door neighbor: It could also help flag early clues about your dog’s health, Zhu said. If a dog experiences any mental or physical changes, a smartphone app or other device outfitted with a dog translator could inform the owner.

To a similar end, Zhu is working on decoding cats. He’s drafting a proposal to the Morris Animal Foundation for a study investigating whether a cat’s vocalizations can provide insight into its mental state or behavior.

Another one of Zhu’s projects, with Texas A&M University, is tackling the sounds of cattle. Dozens of cows in monitored pens at the university have been recorded 24/7 for audio and video for over two months. The data will be compared to the animals’ veterinary records to see how it correlates with their health.

Zhu and his collaborators hypothesize that herd small talk may carry cues about bovine well-being. By analyzing those vocal patterns for linguistic structure, they hope to spot illness before a human sees a sick cow.

They aren’t the only ones using AI to decipher animal speech. At the University of Michigan, researchers have processed dog barks using AI models originally trained on human speech, and at Virginia Tech, scientists are building an AI system to decode cow vocalizations.

Meanwhile, a cottage industry of AI-powered dog collars and “cat translator” apps has sprung up, promising users the ability to better understand the needs of their pets.