Researchers have developed a magnetic method for influencing deep-brain circuits without permanently implanted electrodes. A magnetic field may offer a new way to reach circuits buried deep within the brain without permanently implanting electrodes. An international research team injected magnetic nanoplatelets into a targeted brain region and used them to improve movement problems in mice [...]
Brain immune cells appear to drive reversible sleep loss in mice with Alzheimer’s-like disease. A fire starts in one room, but instead of containing the danger, the sprinkler system floods the entire house. The response causes far more damage than the original threat. Something similar may happen in Alzheimer’s disease. Amyloid plaques, the sticky protein [...]
Even modest sleep loss may quietly lead to weight gain and raise the risk of chronic disease over time. People who reduced their nightly sleep by about 80 minutes for six weeks gained an average of one pound and spent more time being sedentary, according to researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and [...]
Millions of Americans may have cholesterol levels that are now considered too high under newly updated heart health guidelines, according to a new study from Mass General Brigham. The research suggests that many people who could benefit from treatment are either not taking cholesterol-lowering medicine or are not receiving enough treatment to reach the latest […]
Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, whose move to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital this week has sparked public outcry, has a lengthy history of trying to "control and manipulate" medical professionals.
A new study strengthens the case for exercise as a critical way to protect the brain from age-related decline, including dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. During sleep, the brain activates a cleanup network that helps remove accumulated waste. A review led by Victoria University (VU) researcher Dr. James Broatch examined whether exercise could strengthen this glymphatic [...]
An outbreak of parasitic illness linked to iceberg lettuce is affecting nine U.S. states, federal health officials have announced. That's up from the five affected states that were identified in earlier stages of the officials' investigation.
This lettuce-related outbreak is one of several in the U.S. that are being caused by the parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which can enter the body when someone consumes food or water contaminated with the organism. The federal government has not officially identified a source of contamination in the other Cyclospora outbreaks yet, although some state officials have mentioned potential culprits. (North Carolina officials have pointed to cilantro and parsley, for example.)
The nine-state outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce includes cases in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To date, 1,947 people have been infected across these states and reported eating Taco Bell before they got sick. There have been 98 hospitalizations and no deaths.
Specifically, the infections have been linked to lettuce sourced from central Mexico, prompting Taylor Farms to remove all of its iceberg lettuce from that region from the U.S. market. The company has also issued a recall. A complete list of recalled products can be found on the FDA's website.
The recall affects products that were distributed in the nine states listed above, as well as additional states, all of which are listed on the FDA's website. Consumers, restaurants and retailers that purchased or received recalled lettuce are advised to discard it immediately and not consume it.
"We also expect to continue to see the number of confirmed cases rise, despite the recall, due to the fact that it can take as long as six weeks for CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and state officials to determine if a sick person is part of this outbreak," the FDA's latest update notes. "FDA will continue to work with federal and state partners to investigate this multistate outbreak and ensure products implicated in this outbreak have been removed from the market."
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
New PET imaging findings suggest that some of long COVID’s most disabling symptoms may stem from disruption of the brain’s dopamine system. For many people with long COVID, the infection ends but the exhaustion, slowed thinking, memory problems, and loss of motivation do not. Researchers have struggled to explain why these symptoms persist because the [...]
In a six-month study, people with obesity who ate an avocado each day lowered their blood levels of “bad” cholesterol particles. Adding one avocado to a person’s daily diet may modestly improve a blood marker linked to heart disease. In a study of adults with obesity, researchers at the Penn State Department of Nutritional Sciences [...]
In a widely expected move, a committee organized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has voted to endorse removing restrictions on the manufacture of peptides for human use. Thursday's panel meeting saw a sharply divided group recommend lifting limits on four peptides; votes on three additional peptides are scheduled for today. The move comes despite a continuing lack of evidence regarding their safety and effectiveness.
The move had been telegraphed months earlier as peptide enthusiast and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took steps to ensure this outcome.
Like proteins, peptides are composed of amino acids that are chemically linked into a chain. Peptides differ merely by length; they're often 10–20 amino acids long, in contrast to proteins, which can be hundreds or thousands. Some of them, such as insulin, are specifically made by targeted processing of a protein into shorter fragments, and the resulting peptide interacts with receptors that have evolved to send signals to cells based on its levels.
A 6-year-old girl was given a first-of-its-kind gene therapy in a hospital in China for a nonlethal condition. Within a week, she was dead.
Her death was never publicly disclosed by the scientists who developed and administered her experimental gene therapy. But now, more than a year after her death, her parents are telling her story in the hope that others will be spared the same fate.
A new joint investigation from Science and Retraction Watch, published July 23, details the case of "Mei," a young girl given gene therapy in March 2025 at Xinhua Hospital, which is affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. (Mei's parents asked that the family's names be changed for the report. Her name was changed to Mei, which is Chinese for "beautiful," and they are referred to as "Jason" and "Linda.")
Mei's trial was led by Zilong Qiu, a neuroscientist at the university's brain center. Live Science has contacted Qiu for comment.
Mei had a rare genetic disorder called Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, which is caused by mutations in the gene CHD3. The gene carries instructions for a protein that helps control how DNA is packaged in cells, which in turn, affects how genes can be switched on and off. The gene plays an important role in early brain development. In people with the syndrome, this process is disrupted, leading to brain changes that can cause speech problems and intellectual disability.
Mei's parents had sought further tests after their daughter was diagnosed with global developmental delay in 2023; this broad diagnosis is given to young children who show delays in several areas, such as speech and motor skills. Genetic sequencing following her diagnosis revealed she had the syndrome.
People with the condition typically have normal life expectancy, although symptoms can range in severity, with severe cases coming with seizures and heart problems. Mei's case was mild, and her parents secured her speech and occupational therapy alongside special education support to help manage her symptoms.
Jason worried about her future, though, anticipating that she'd continue to trail behind in school and may never live independently. On WeChat (the instant messaging, social media and mobile payment app), Jason and Linda joined a group of parents of kids with autism and similar disorders. There, they learned about Qiu, the neuroscientist, who has a gene-therapy company called Lanqi Xintu Gene Technology. Qiu had been developing a gene therapy for Rett syndrome, another genetic disorder that disrupts brain development.
Jason contacted Qiu about possibly creating a gene therapy for Mei, and Qiu immediately arranged a meeting. He explained that such a therapy would require delivering viruses into Mei's spinal fluid; modified viruses are often used as vehicles to deliver gene therapies into the body. The viruses would then travel to her brain, where they'd make the desired edits. To get a big enough dose into the brain, hundreds of trillions of viruses would be needed.
Qiu planned to use a base editor, a CRISPR-based approach that swaps out just one letter in DNA's code for another. (The technique was famously used in the case of a U.S.-based baby, called KJ, whose life-threatening genetic disease was successfully treated.)
Because Mei's condition was not life-threatening, the approach would need to clear a high bar to pass the university's ethics board, Qi said. It would need to be trialed in mouse and monkey experiments first. Qiu insisted, though, that the university could ensure Mei's safety, although it couldn't guarantee the treatment would work. The possibility of death wasn't discussed — and it would not be in the years to come.
Xinhua Hospital, affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, treated Mei. (Image credit: c1a1p1c1o1m1 via Getty Images)
Jason and Linda agreed to the plan. They would ultimately put the equivalent of $860,000 toward the cost of developing, testing and deploying the therapy; those costs included informal payments made directly to various members of the research team. Charging for an unproven therapy is forbidden under Chinese law, but Qiu explained this away by saying the parents were paying into his gene-therapy company, which then paid for the procedure.
In January 2025, Qiu submitted a manuscript describing the team's lab-animal experiments to the journal Nature. (A revised version of the manuscript was published in February 2026 and contains no mention of the family nor its financial contributions.) Science had several experts review the manuscript, who expressed concerns about how well the monkey study was conducted.
Live Science contacted Nature for comment, and a spokesperson said "We are looking into the matter carefully following an established process. We are unable to provide further information at this time."
The next month, a toxicology study conducted by the team found that four monkeys given the treatment developed moderate to severe liver damage, and one also had kidney damage. This should have prompted additional safety studies, experts told Science, and hinted that the therapy was triggering a dangerous inflammatory response — a known risk of virus-based gene therapies.
The hospital's ethics committee did not review this data before giving the OK for Mei's procedure. Her parents were told about the results of the animal studies, but they said the scientists seemed unconcerned about them. Under China's regulatory system, the trial did not need to be cleared by the country's equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration before proceeding.
On March 24, 2025, after giving her a steroid to dampen potential immune reactions, Dr. Yongguo Yu injected gene therapy-laden viruses into Mei's spinal fluid. Although some virus-based gene therapies in the U.S. can be given with steroids, as of late, doctors often opt for more aggressive immune-suppressing drugs for safety.
Within days, Mei developed a range of symptoms; she got a fever, wasn't urinating, and her platelet levels plummeted. She was taken into an intensive care unit for treatment, but she died seven days after receiving the injection.
The hospital determined her death was directly related to the treatment and caused by thrombotic microangiopathy. This is an immune reaction that causes blood clots and can arise from virus-based gene therapies.
The hospital was later fined the equivalent of about $3,600 for failing to properly oversee the trial and not registering it as commercially sponsored research in China's national database. The hospital required that the doctor involved receive verbal counseling.
The family asked Qiu to withdraw his Nature paper, worried that other families might be tempted to try the same therapy, and he initially agreed, although it was later published. The paper was covered positively in the press at the time, and parents in the WeChat group began expressing interest. Seeing that, Jason and Linda submitted a complaint to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, calling for a retraction and investigation. The university took no action.
They also sent a letter to Nature after the publication; at the time, the journal said that the ethical issues raised "fall outside our purview in terms of data integrity" and that the matter should be handled by the university.
Regarding the investigation, neither Qiu, Lu, the university or the hospital responded to Science's requests for comment. Nature told Science that it was not aware of the issues surrounding the clinical trial before it published the group's paper.
This week, I covered a fascinating effort to preserve organs outside the body. There’s a huge shortage of donor organs, and one of the main reasons is time—they survive only a matter of hours outside the body, even when they’re kept on ice.
Doctors dream of organ banks—stores of human organs that can be preserved for days, weeks, months, or even longer. That would allow them to run tests on organs, find the best matches for them, and transport the organs to those recipients.
In new research, one team has been able to supercool the kidneys of pigs—animals whose organs are of a similar size to human ones—and preserve them for days. The kidneys survived being stored at −4 °C (25 °F) and eventually reimplanted back into pigs. And that’s just the latest development in a field that is positively buzzing.
It has proved super difficult to freeze organs. Once ice forms in them, they’re done. The ice crystals create all kinds of damage and render the organs unusable. That hasn’t stopped many researchers from trying.
Some have focused on cryopreservation—rapid extreme cooling that essentially leaves cells in a glasslike state. This process is now routine for eggs, sperm, and embryos, which are cooled to −196 °C in less than two seconds and can be used even after decades in storage.
No one has managed to cryopreserve and thaw human organs for transplantation. But plenty of human bodies and brains have been stored at ultra-low temperatures in the hope that they might one day be rewarmed and brought back to life. (You can read more about why some people opt for cryonics here.)
In March, I wrote about Stephen L. Coles, a gerontologist who had opted to cryopreserve his own brain. After the scientist died in 2014, his body was taken to Alcor, a cryonics facility in Arizona. A team at the facility removed Coles’s head, perfused his brain with cryoprotective chemicals (which work like antifreeze), removed the brain from the skull, and cooled it to −146 °C.
When Coles’s friend Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist, studied pieces of his brain years later, he found that the brain cells, which had shrunk, “bounced back” once they were rewarmed. But that doesn’t mean the cells are alive, or that it might one day be possible to reanimate the brain. As Matthew Powell Palm of Texas A&M told me at the time: “There are so many ways those neurons could be toast.”
Powell Palm is working on other ways to preserve organs. It was he, along with his colleagues, who managed to store supercooled pig kidneys and successfully transplant them, in a study described as “a landmark achievement.” Those organs did better than kidneys stored on ice, he says.
His approach didn’t require cryoprotectants. But other teams are exploring potential chemical cocktails that might allow them to store organs at lower temperatures, potentially for longer periods of time. (More on this in The Checkup soon!)
Another way to prolong the lifespan of an organ is to use a machine that perfuses it with nutrients, mimicking what happens inside the body. Machine perfusion devices have become more commonly used over the last decade or so and are typically used to maintain livers and kidneys for up to about 24 hours.
Researchers are now adapting this protocol for a growing list of organs, even eyeballs—a recent feat that might enable whole-eye transplants. In March, I went to visit scientists in Valencia who had developed a perfusion system for uteruses. They had used their device—which they nicknamed “Mother”—to keep a human uterus alive for a day.
It’s an exciting time for organ preservation. Keep an eye out for more coverage from MIT Technology Review in the coming weeks.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
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