A growing surplus of refinery sulfur could find a new use in asphalt production, reducing reliance on petroleum-based bitumen and lowering costs. But a new academic review highlights unanswered questions about emissions, human exposure and long-term health implications, calling for safer formulations and life-cycle assessment of sulfur-modified asphalt.

ATP-induced cell death (AICD) is an operational conceptual framework describing the associations between pathological extracellular ATP accumulation, excessive purinergic stimulation, disrupted ATP homeostasis and diverse cell-death outcomes. This review summarizes recent evidence on the molecular mechanisms of AICD, including extracellular ATP–purinergic receptor signaling, ionic and membrane disturbances, inflammasome and caspase activation, mitochondrial dysfunction, redox imbalance, and the context-dependent convergence of these pathways on multiple forms of cell death. The directness and strength of gene-level evidence are also assessed using an ordinal evidence-grading framework that classifies the evidence for the 38 AICD-Core genes as direct experimental, indirect, context-dependent, mechanistically supportive, or currently insufficient. These mechanistic analyses, as well as gene-level analyses, are discussed in relation to the existing datasets in ATPexGen, which contains 38 AICD-Core and 216 AICD-Extended genes and provides a searchable and downloadable resource for the field of AICD research. The review also addresses gaps in current evidence, limitations of curation processes, and priorities for experimental validation and database development moving forward.

Johns Hopkins University engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart.

The bots, designed to replace risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV-drug therapy to treat life-threatening heart infections, could also be used to less invasively and more precisely treat other hard-to-reach diseases including cancer.

Background: Scabies, caused by the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, affects more than 200 million people at any one time and can be complicated by severe secondary bacterial disease. The same mite causes sarcoptic mange in companion animals, livestock and wildlife. Population-scale nuclear genomic data spanning diverse hosts and geographical regions remain limited.

Methods: We generated whole-genome sequence data for 106 S. scabiei samples and incorporated 19 publicly available datasets from humans, companion animals, livestock and wildlife. After quality filtering, 83 of 125 sample-level datasets were retained. We assessed ancestry, phylogenetic relationships, nucleotide diversity, genetic differentiation, gene-level variation and candidate selection signals.

Results: We identified 1,568,031 filter-passing nuclear variants, including 698,136 single-nucleotide polymorphisms; sample-level heterozygosity estimates ranged from 0.27% to 11%. ADMIXTURE, principal component and phylogenetic analyses supported seven ancestry clusters broadly corresponding to host-associated groups, with pairwise fixation-index estimates ranging from 0.22 to 0.92. Multi-metric analysis identified 1,600 candidate selection blocks – eight hard-sweep, 486 soft-sweep and 1,106 ancient-adaptation blocks – and six conserved low-diversity blocks. Variable genes showed nominal enrichment for DNA repair, cell adhesion and signalling, whereas invariable genes showed nominal enrichment for ribosomal function, oxidative phosphorylation and mitochondrial processes.

Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) following successful cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is the principal determinant of patient outcomes after cardiac arrest. We performed a comprehensive analysis of clinical data from 44,535 patients with HIE following CPR between 2020 and 2021 across 31 provinces in China. Notable regional variations in both incidence and mortality rates were observed across China. Mortality was significantly higher among patients with multiple comorbidities, complications, use of invasive interventions, delayed tracheotomy, and blood transfusion.