Therapy at your fingertips: new Reichman University study led by Prof. Anat Shoshani of the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology finds AI could transform mental health care
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 26-May-2026 09:15 ET (26-May-2026 13:15 GMT/UTC)
A new study from Reichman University, published in the prestigious journal JAMA Network Open, has found that an AI-based conversational support platform can significantly reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, form a meaningful therapeutic alliance with users, and provide round-the-clock emotional support.
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.
Giving whole blood or the component parts of blood are equally effective options for paramedics and emergency medical technicians to use in treating patients with severe, traumatic bleeding before arriving at the hospital, according to a large, nationwide trial directed by University of Pittsburgh and UPMC clinicians and scientists.
Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in collaboration with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has launched a research study, the COACH trial, to test different ways to help children and their families improve their health through lifestyle changes delivered by primary care clinics in communities in Louisiana and Tennessee.
The COACH trial is enrolling 900 children ages 5 to 17 with obesity, which is classified as a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for their age and sex. Patients and their parents are being recruited through urban, suburban and rural doctor’s offices in Tennessee and Louisiana.
Davis Joseph was awarded the 2025 Ciechanover International Biology Award at the Sustainability through Science and Technology Summit 2025 (FLOGEN SIPS 2025) in Cebu, Philippines, for a breakthrough cancer discovery proposing organ-agnostic treatment strategies. His work identifies three universal cancer types based on dysfunctions in p14ARF/p53, DINO lncRNA, and MDM2 activity, and introduces a universal apoptosis network flowsheet built from the analysis of 174 scientific publications. The discovery supports a unified therapeutic framework for treating cancers regardless of the organ in which they originate and is presented as an example of Sustainable Medicine under the FLOGEN Sustainability Framework.