Latest News Releases 16 April

A new study in the peer-reviewed journal Human Gene Therapy describes a machine learning (ML) model that can be used as a surrogate for laborious in vitro experiments. This in silico approach aims to increase the fitness of clinical adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsids to make gene therapies more economically viable for patients.

SAN ANTONIO — April 17, 2025 —The Southwest Research Institute-led Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, mission collected its first images following its March 11 launch into polar orbit around the Earth. The mission’s four small suitcase-sized spacecraft will act as a single virtual instrument 8,000 miles across to image the solar corona, the Sun’s outer atmosphere, as it transitions into the solar wind that fills and defines our solar system.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest computing society, has joined India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative through a transformative new read-and-publish agreement with the ACM Open program.

Robert B. Hallock, distinguished professor emeritus of physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and pioneer in working with superfluid and solid helium, was recently awarded the top international honor in low-temperature physics: the Fritz London Memorial Prize.

Shawn Demehri, MD, PhD, a physician-investigator in the Cutaneous Biology Research Center and Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Associate Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School in the senior author of a new study in Cell Reports, Epigenomic Regulation of Stemness Contributes to the Low Immunogenicity of the Most Mutated Human Cancer.

A team of researchers have developed an AI model predicting post-concussion injury risk in athletes with 95% accuracy, analyzing more than 100 variables. The machine identifies subtle deficits and has potential beyond sports.

Keeping up with scientific advances and practice changes can be one the biggest challenges in managing a complex disease like multiple sclerosis (MS). The Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers (CMSC) regularly publishes Best Practices statements on aspects of MS care. This month, a new “Best Practices in Multiple Sclerosis Therapies: 2025 Update” has been released on the organization’s website [https://www.mscare.org/best-practices-in-multiple-sclerosis-therapies/] and will be distributed at the upcoming CMSC Annual Meeting, May 28-31, 2025, in Phoenix, AZ. [www.mscare.org/2025]

 

A new study published in PNAS investigated how the relationship between mean annual precipitation (MAP) and grassland biomass changes when one or more nutrients are added. The authors show that precipitation and nutrient availability are the key drivers of plant biomass, while the effects of plant diversity are minimal.

An international collaboration between four senior scientists from Mainz, Valencia, Madrid, and Zurich has published groundbreaking research in the journal PNAS, shedding light on the most significant increase in complexity in the history of life's evolution on Earth: the origin of the eukaryotic cell.