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.