The Robert A. Winn Excellence in Clinical Trials Award Program (Winn Awards) is pleased to announce that AstraZeneca has joined as a funding partner. AstraZeneca will support five medical students in the 2026 Winn Clinical Investigator Pathway Program (Winn CIPP), a six-week immersive summer program that prepares future physicians and clinical researchers to expand access to clinical trials and engage medically underrepresented communities. This partnership strengthens the Winn Awards’ mission of Better Science For All by providing opportunities for medical students from all backgrounds to explore community-engaged clinical research opportunities.

In a multicenter retrospective Chinese ICU cohort (5 hospitals, 2012–2023; 9,221 pediatric suspected-infection admissions; 13.4% mortality), the Phoenix Sepsis Score showed only moderate discrimination for in-hospital death (AUROC 0.60). Using XGBoost/SHAP-guided, clinically feasible predictors, the authors created PSS+, presented as a logistic regression nomogram, improving discrimination in internal (AUROC 0.75) and external (AUROC 0.71) validation versus PSS-4/8 and pSOFA.

Nanofilm electrodes capable of detecting stress in plants through bioelectric potentials could pave the way for more resilient agriculture, report researchers from Institute of Science Tokyo. Thanks to the electrode’s small thickness, leaf surface hairs can easily pierce through it, enabling stable and long-term electrical contact without compromising the leaf’s natural processes. This work could help improve crop yields by enabling early detection of stress in plants.

A new study shows that systems designed to capture methane from cow manure, called dairy digesters, are highly effective. But on the rare occasions they fail, the leaks are large enough to offset their climate benefits.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have created a groundbreaking physics‑informed machine‑learning model that can run molecular simulations for unprecedented lengths of time, even at temperatures as high as 1000 Kelvin.