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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 hours ago

Menopause May Temporarily Alter Your Brain's Normal Aging, Scans Reveal

The female brain does something unexpected in the transition to menopause.

It's entirely natural for gray matter in the brain to gradually shrink as a person ages.

But when menopause arrives, the brain's normal aging seems to be temporarily altered.

The first brain scan study of its kind has now found that when the transition to menopause begins, the gradual loss of cortical volume that occurs with age inexplicably slows.

No one yet knows why that is.
repeatedly scanned the brains of more than 1,000 participants at various stages in life, including those undergoing puberty, and those before and after pregnancy and menopause.

Each phase of life came with distinct brain changes.

During puberty and pregnancy, for instance, cortical gray matter loss was accelerated. Brain scans revealed widespread reductions in volume during these key transitional life phases.

That might sound concerning, but it signals that the brain is reorganizing its finite tissue for a new phase of life.

Menopause was different.

It showed a distinct pattern of brain changes that was in direct opposition to puberty and pregnancy.

When the transition to menopause first began, natural losses in total cortical volume and gray matter curiously came to a halt.

"Menopause, in other words, is defined not by what changes, but by what does not."
During puberty and pregnancy, the female body experiences profound hormonal changes, and there is an especially steep rise in estrogens and progesterone, which can bind to receptors in the brain.
At this time, the loss of cortical gray matter also accelerates.

When menopause begins, however, sex steroid hormones decline, as do gray matter losses.

Perhaps these two synchronous changes are somehow linked.

For now, however, that's just speculation. Brain scans can only reveal associations between neurological volume and the different stages of life.

They can't show that hormonal changes are causing brain remodeling, or vice versa.
In their brain scans, the transitional group of meno-pausers did not show the same declines in gray matter as women pre-menopausal throughout the study, or those who were post-menopausal throughout.
These results were consistent regardless of a person's age, whether they were using hormone replacement therapy, or how many children they had.

Their brain patterns largely stayed the same.
During the menopause transition, changes tended to occur in parts of the brain known to be influenced by estrogen, though estrogen receptors are widespread.
The researchers conclude that menopause seems to show a distinct degree of brain plasticity.

What that means for the female brain as it ages remains a mystery.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-76755-2

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 3 hours ago

Chinese Scientists Say They've Detected A Quantum State Inside Living Cells
Every cell in your body is running on tiny power stations.

Mitochondria turn energy from food into ATP, the molecule that powers almost everything cells do. How they achieve such efficiency remains unclear.

Now, researchers in China think part of the answer may involve quantum physics.

In experiments involving living cells, mouse tissues, and isolated mitochondria, the team detected an unusual vibration that appeared only while mitochondrial structures remained intact.

A model linked the vibration to a possible quantum interaction. When researchers illuminated cells with selected infrared frequencies, the cells produced 10 percent more ATP.

Together, the results suggest mitochondria may contain a quantum state that influences cellular energy production.

The study has been posted on bioRxiv as a preprint, which means it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.750628v1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 3 hours ago

Relapses can become increasingly severe, requiring many patients to cycle through an array of treatments including chemotherapy, stem-cell transplants, and various immunotherapies.

Teclistamab belongs to a newer class of immunotherapy drugs, bispecific antibodies, that can simultaneously bind to two different targets. It works by linking the body's T cells with specific proteins found on myeloma cells, thus helping the immune system identify and fight the cancer.

Although teclistamab is still relatively new, it has yielded results that rival or even surpass those of existing treatments.

In one recent study, patients with relapsed multiple myeloma who received teclistamab survived longer and stayed in remission longer than patients who received standard therapies.

After 18 months, nearly 70 percent of teclistamab recipients showed no disease progression, versus about 27 percent of subjects given conventional treatment.
Yet while teclistamab has shown clinical promise in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma, "the durability of disease control remains limited in this advanced-disease setting," the authors of the newer paper write.
Teclistamab induced a complete response – the disappearance of all cancer markers following treatment – in 77.8 percent of patients, the study found, compared with 0 percent in patients treated with Rd.
At a median follow-up of 24.5 months, the rate of survival without disease progression was 92 percent among patients who received teclistamab and 49 percent among those given Rd.

"Overall, response rates, duration of response, and time to progression were significantly improved in teclistamab compared to Rd," the researchers write.

While further research is needed, these findings point to teclistamab as a "highly active immune-interception strategy" for HR-SMM, they add.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04642-w

Part 2

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 3 hours ago

A Drug Wiped Out All Cancer Markers in 78% of High-Risk Patients – Before They Even Got Cancer
A new clinical trial reveals intriguing results about a potential treatment for high-risk smoldering multiple myeloma, a pre-cancerous bone marrow condition that brings an elevated risk of multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer.

The study focuses on teclistamab, a monoclonal antibody already used for treating later stages of multiple myeloma – namely once a patient has relapsed after initial treatments, or once the disease has become refractory, meaning it's resistant to previously effective therapies.

Teclistamab was approved in both the European Union and the United States in 2022 to treat relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identified it as a first-in-class drug.

Multiple myeloma develops in plasma cells, a category of white blood cells that play key roles in the adaptive immune system. Under normal circumstances, plasma cells produce proteins called antibodies that help us fight infections.
In multiple myeloma, however, abnormal plasma cells appear in the bone marrow and churn out abnormal antibodies known as myeloma proteins.
Symptoms can be sparse and subtle in the early stages, potentially delaying diagnosis.

As the cancer progresses, it may reveal itself via complications such as bone weakness, kidney damage, anemia, hypercalcemia, and increased vulnerability to infections.

About 188,000 new cases of multiple myeloma were diagnosed globally in 2022, and an estimated 121,000 deaths were attributed to the disease.

Multiple myeloma is treatable, although treatments may become less effective over time, resulting in relapse. New patients often take a combination of drugs such as daratumumab, dexamethasone, or lenalidomide.
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 4 hours ago

​How metformin works
Metformin, primarily used to treat or prevent type 2 diabetes, is one of the most prescribed drugs, but how it works has been something of a mystery. In a recent study, researchers discovered that the drug essentially transforms a person’s gut cells into a sugar sink, resulting in lowered levels of glucose in the blood. The mechanism: At high-enough levels, metformin blocks oxygen use in the mitochondria, prompting gut cells to switch to a different metabolic pathway that uses much more sugar to produce energy.

Why this is interesting: The result is counterintuitive. Who would expect that blocking oxygen use in mitochondria, essentially inhibiting the body’s power centers, could end up enhancing health? A 1989 study was on the right track, but it was long overlooked. At the time, French metabolic researcher Jean Girard and his colleagues described how metformin increased the amount of glucose absorbed in the intestines of rats.
The broader lesson is that inhibiting mitochondria may be beneficial when it is done in the right cells, for the right amount of time, without exposing the whole body to the broad toxicity of a mitochondrial inhibitor.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-026-01530-y

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

A 3-year-old boy with malignant liver cancer has experienced complete disease regression after receiving an experimental treatment.

The immunotherapy technique took the patient's own immune cells and turned them into potent cancer hunters.

It’s called Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, or CAR T therapy for short.

But while it’s shown great promise for blood cancers, solid tumors are harder to penetrate.

This new case is a success story.

The young boy received two doses of an experimental treatment that was made from his own T cells.

After 12 months, the boy was still disease-free.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2605958

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

The revival of bacterial drug delivery
To minimize the off-target effects of cancer therapies, researchers need to find ways to deliver drugs to tumours accurately. Some species of bacteria are attracted to the low-oxygen environment in tumours, which makes them ideal candidates to shuttle drugs directly to their target. Results from early clinical trials that used Salmonella to deliver the immunotherapy IL-2 in people with pancreatic cancer were positive. But many bacterial cancer-delivery systems trialled in the 2000s and 2010s failed — a long shadow that could be hard for new treatments to step out of.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02657-4?utm_source=Live+...

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Not all antimicrobials are antibiotics Several common pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals can have antibacterial properties despite not being classified as antibiotics. The antimicrobial activity of these compounds can disrupt the gut microbiome, which has knock-on effects for both infectious and non-communicable diseases. A detailed understanding of these interactions “could transform how we assess drug safety and efficacy”, write microbiome researchers Jacobo de la Cuesta-Zuluaga, Kiran Patil and Lisa Maier in their review. “Incorporating microbiome-based assays into drug development and environmental toxicity testing might uncover both hidden risks and untapped therapeutic potential.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41575-026-01258-w.epdf?sharing_tok...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Anthropic report sparks AI bioweapon fear
Last week, artificial-intelligence company Anthropic released a report that revealed five attempts by scientists in unnamed countries outside the United States to use the chatbot Claude to conduct “concerning” research into harmful viruses and toxins. The cases are suspicious because the scientists found workarounds to Claude’s inbuilt restrictions that block such requests, and could suggest the use of the chatbot to design bioweapons, the company says. Some researchers say that Anthropic overreacted, but biosecurity specialists say that the report highlights the potential for AI to be misused in biology.

https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026...

‘Chilling’ warning or overreaction? AI bioweapons report divides experts

Anthropic describes five cases where scientists in unnamed countries tried to use its Claude software for potentially nefarious work on viruses or toxins

https://www.science.org/content/article/chilling-warning-or-overrea...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Scientists treat bleached corals with bacteria as oceans heat up

Coral reefs are under growing heat stress, but a new field test suggests researchers may have another tool to help them cope.

Coral probiotics succeed in real-world trial
One of the first real-world tests of coral probiotics shows that the treatment can help the organisms withstand a marine heatwave. Researchers found that treating heat-stressed Acropora cf. valida corals with a mixture of four or six bacterial strains isolated from healthy corals helped keep algae alive in the organism’s tissues. This enabled them to continue photosynthesizing as normal and prevented bleaching. Four-strain mixtures still had a beneficial effect if the bacteria were dead, which suggests the treatment could be delivered as a postbiotic by restoration crews.

Live probiotics and inactivated postbiotics protect corals during a heatwave • Treatment preserved photosynthetic efficiency in bleached corals in situ • Beneficial and treatment-derived bacteria were enriched in treated corals • Microbiome and metabolomic profiles showed treatment-specific signatures

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(26)00917-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2211124726009174%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.earth.com/environment/coral-probiotics-heatwave/?utm_so...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Infections send protectors from gut to brain
Immune cells that fight stomach bugs can migrate from the gut to the brain, where they establish a lasting ‘memory’ of previous infection, according to a study in mice. After an infection, gut-trained T cells journey to the meninges, a protective membrane that shields the brain. Once there, the cells become residents that can respond to later infections. The findings could shed light on how gut infections might affect neurological disorders, and could help to develop therapies that harness the relationship between the gut and the central nervous system.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02428-4?utm_source=Live+...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02891-w?utm_source=Live+...

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