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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 16, 2026 at 12:35pm

Gut bacteria cause rare alcohol syndrome
Researchers have found more evidence that ethanol-producing gut bacteria are the main drivers of auto-brewery syndrome (ABS) — a rare and poorly understood condition in which people become drunk when they haven’t consumed alcohol. A team found that strains of Klebsiella bacteria and Escherichia coli that produce ethanol were much more prevalent in the gut microbiomes of people with ABS than in those of people who didn’t have the condition. One person with ABS was successfully treated with a faecal microbiota transplant, but the authors say a targeted intervention, such as disrupting the metabolic pathways the bacteria use to produce ethanol, might be more effective.

Gut microbial ethanol metabolism contributes to auto-brewery syndro...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 16, 2026 at 11:03am

How small mammals shrink their brains to survive the cold

An international team of researchers has conducted a study that explains the evolutionary origins of the Dehnel phenomenon, a unique seasonal adaptation in small mammals that involves the ability to reduce and recover brain volume and function. The study is published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

The Dehnel phenomenon is a case of extreme plasticity through which some mammals reduce and regenerate their brains according to the season. This mechanism allows species such as the common shrew to reduce the size of their brain, skull and other organs by up to 30% during the winter to save energy in conditions of extreme cold and food scarcity.

In the spring, these tissues regenerate, making this phenomenon an exceptional example of physiological plasticity. Furthermore, comparative studies show that it is not exclusive to shrews: European moles and mustelids (such as weasels) also exhibit seasonal brain reductions, which extends the evolutionary framework of this strategy to mammals with high metabolisms.

Through comparative genomics and gene expression analysis in key tissues, such as the hypothalamus, the team identified genes associated with several fundamental processes, such as energy homeostasis and calcium signaling, essential for adjusting energy balance in demanding environments; the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, which ensures efficient control of molecules accessing the brain during the seasonal cycle; and water regulation, involved in reversible brain volume loss without cell death, a key finding for understanding how this adaptation is achieved.

The plasticity reflected by the Dehnel phenomenon influences survival, reproduction, and resilience to climate variability. According to the research team, even though these species are not human, understanding the mechanisms that allow reversible reductions in brain volume without permanent damage could inspire new lines of research in neurology and metabolism.

The role of genes related to energy homeostasis and the blood-brain barrier points to possible biomarkers and therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases, always with the necessary caution when extrapolating to humans.

William R Thomas et al, Genomic comparisons shed light on the adaptive basis of brain size plasticity and chromosomal instability in the Eurasian common shrew, Molecular Biology and Evolution (2026). DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msag006

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 15, 2026 at 11:55am

Your voice gives away valuable personal information!

Human voices carry extensive personal information, including health, background, and emotional state, which can be extracted by advanced speech analysis technologies. This raises privacy risks such as misuse by insurers, employers, or malicious actors. New metrics now quantify how much information a speech recording contains, aiding the development of privacy-preserving tools and user interfaces.
You can probably quickly tell from a friend's tone of voice whether they're feeling happy or sad, energetic or exhausted. Computers can already do a similar analysis, and soon they'll be able to extract a lot more information. It's something we should all be concerned about, according to experts in the field.
Personal information encoded in your voice could lead to increased insurance premiums or to advertising that exploits your emotional state. Private information could also be used for harassment, stalking or even extortion.
When someone talks, a lot of information about their health, cultural background, education level and so on is embedded in the speech signal. That information gets transmitted with the speech, even though people don't realize it.
For example, even subtle patterns of intonation or word choice can be a giveaway as to your political preferences, while clues in breathing or voice quality may correlate with certain health conditions.
One important risk is that medical information inferred from voice recordings could affect insurance prices or be used to market medication.
The fear of monitoring or the loss of dignity if people feel like they're constantly monitored—that's already psychologically damaging.
And employers might extract personal information from voice recordings which could be used against employees or to screen candidates, or exes might use such tools for stalking or harassment.
So how can engineers tackle these problems?
Protecting against abuses means ensuring that only the information that's strictly necessary is transmitted and that this information is securely delivered to the intended recipient. One approach is to separate out the private information and only transmit the information needed to provide a service. Speech can also be processed locally on a phone or computer rather than sent to the cloud, and acoustic technologies can be used to make sure that sounds are only recorded from (or audible in) a specific place.

Tom Bäckström, Privacy in Speech Technology, Proceedings of the IEEE (2025). DOI: 10.1109/jproc.2025.3632102

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 15, 2026 at 11:15am

The aggressive use of antibiotics could fuel mood disorders and anxiety

Antibiotics (ABs) are among the most used pharmaceutical drugs worldwide, as they are currently the most effective medicines for the treatment of bacterial infections. An excessive use of these drugs, however, can damage the gut microbiota, the population of microorganisms living in the intestines that help us to digest food.

Bacteria and other microorganisms in the gut are known to also communicate with the brain via a communication pathway that is referred to as the gut-brain axis. Recent research suggests that some gut bacteria help to reduce inflammation and support the healthy functioning of the brain.

Researchers have carried out a study exploring the possibility that the effects of ABs on gut bacteria could also facilitate the development of mental health disorders, particularly increasing anxiety. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that ABs do in fact damage gut bacteria that help regulate mood, linking their excessive use with higher levels of anxiety.

When they analyzed the data they collected, the researchers found that the use of ABs was linked to anxiety-like behaviors in mice and higher levels of anxiety in humans. Moreover, the drugs appeared to reduce the amounts of some helpful gut bacteria, particularly those in the Bacteroides group.

In addition, the team found an association between the intake of ABs and a reduction in the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, a chemical that supports communication between nerve cells. Mice and human patients who had received ABs were found to have lower levels of acetylcholine both in the gut and brain compared to those who had not taken ABs.

"In both AB-treated mice and patients, co-occurrence analysis indicated that the Bacteroides-acetylcholine pair may play an important role in AB-induced anxiety," wrote the researchers in their paper.

Ke Xu et al, Consistent decline of acetylcholine in microbiota-gut-brain axis mediates antibiotic-induced anxiety via regulating hippocampus microglial activation, Molecular Psychiatry (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-025-03431-0.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 14, 2026 at 3:28pm

The global water cycle and how is it amplifying climate disasters

The global water cycle, involving evaporation, precipitation, and runoff, is intensifying due to rising temperatures. This leads to faster evaporation, increased atmospheric moisture, and more frequent extreme events such as floods, droughts, and heatwaves. These amplified fluctuations, sometimes termed "climate whiplash," are destabilizing ecosystems and societies worldwide.

 original article.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 14, 2026 at 3:26pm

Tibetan Plateau-Himalayan uplift shaped Asian summer monsoons

The uplift of the Tibetan Plateau, particularly when it exceeded 3.5 km elevation around 27–38 million years ago, was crucial in intensifying and expanding the Asian summer monsoon. This topographic change shifted rainbelts northward and increased rainfall over South and Southeast Asia, with tectonic uplift playing a more dominant role than atmospheric CO2 in shaping monsoon evolution.

S. Abhik et al, A brief history of Asian summer monsoon evolution in the Cenozoic era, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41612-025-01259-7

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 14, 2026 at 3:22pm

Spaceflight causes astronauts' brains to shift, stretch and compress in microgravity

Spaceflight takes a physical toll on astronauts, causing muscles to atrophy, bones to thin and bodily fluids to shift. According to a new study published in the journal PNAS, we can now add another major change to that list. Being in microgravity causes the brain to change shape.

Here on Earth, gravity helps to keep the brain anchored in place while the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds it acts as a cushion. Scientists already knew that, without gravity's steady pull, the brain moves upward, but this new research showed that it is also stretched and compressed in several areas.

The study authors found significant differences between the brains of astronauts and those of the volunteers. While both groups experienced a shift, the astronauts' brains moved further upward. And the longer they stayed in space, the more pronounced these changes became. The supplementary motor cortex (which helps to control movement) moved upward by about 2.5 millimeters in astronauts on one-year missions.
The brain movement isn't uniform. The team discovered that as the brain moves, it becomes compressed at the top and the back while other areas stretch. This has a noticeable effect on balance and coordination. In tests, astronauts who experienced the largest brain shifts struggled the most to stay steady on their feet after returning to Earth.

While the brain mostly returns to its normal position after several months back on Earth, scientists still need to know more to ensure safer conditions for longer missions, such as those to Mars.

Tianyi Wang et al, Brain displacement and nonlinear deformation following human spaceflight, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2505682122

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 14, 2026 at 3:19pm

Immune stress during pregnancy changes how fetal brain cells communicate

Research has found that immune-related genes vary by location and cell type across the developing mouse brain before birth. Maternal immune activation and maternal microbiome depletion shifted parts of that immune signaling pattern, with differences observed between male and female embryos.

Immune molecules, including cytokines, chemokines, and cognate receptors, are critical regulators of synapse development, cellular communication, and neural precursor cell migration in the developing brain. During development, nerve cells are born in one area, move to their destinations, and settle into stacked layers, especially in the cortex. Those layers line up in an ordered way, with different types of neurons ending up in different layers.

Changes to the maternal immune system and microbiome have been linked to abnormal fetal neurodevelopment, influencing neurogenesis, cell fate, and precursor cell migration. Knowledge of immune signaling networks within the developing brain is needed to understand the mechanisms of how the mother's stressors impart influence.

In the study, "Spatial transcriptomics of the developing mouse brain immune landscape reveals effects of maternal immune activation and microbiome depletion," published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers used multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) to measure immune activity in embryonic mouse brains during mid and late gestation to see how maternal immune activation and maternal microbiome depletion altered those patterns.

Embryonic mouse brain single-cell RNA sequencing data supported identification of spatially restricted cell populations, followed by cell clustering, differential gene expression analyses, and ligand–receptor analyses.

The research connects maternal immune activation and maternal microbiome depletion with sex-specific shifts in immune gene expression, ligand–receptor signaling, and cell spacing within the embryonic brain. Specifically, CXCL12 and CXCR7 signaling stood out as an important mediator of abnormal neural differentiation and migration after maternal immune activation and maternal microbiome depletion.

Bharti Kukreja et al, Spatial transcriptomics of the developing mouse brain immune landscape reveals effects of maternal immune activation and microbiome depletion, Nature Neuroscience (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02162-3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 13, 2026 at 12:54pm

AI shows bias against some Indian castes

Popular large language models (LLMs) often reproduce harmful stereotypes about Indian castes — hereditary groups traditionally associated with specific occupations and social status. Researchers used a custom-designed tool to detect ‘caste bias’ in LLMs and found that every model they tested exhibited some bias. GPT-4o and GPT-3.5, created by OpenAI, had some of the highest bias scores. Information on minority groups might be less likely to appear in prestigious journals or other outlets, and might be written in local languages, which could result in it being filtered out of AI training data who studies cultural biases in LLMs.

[2508.03712] How Deep Is Representational Bias in LLMs? The Cases o...

[2510.02742] IndiCASA: A Dataset and Bias Evaluation Framework in L...

[2505.14971] DECASTE: Unveiling Caste Stereotypes in Large Language...

AIs are biased toward some Indian castes — how can researchers fix ...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 13, 2026 at 12:15pm

Tire rubber decays into a potentially dangerous chemical cocktail, research shows

Crumb rubber from recycled tires, commonly used in artificial turf, generates hundreds of transformation chemicals as it decays under sunlight and environmental conditions. Some of these chemicals, such as 6PPD-quinone, are highly toxic to aquatic life, while others are known human health hazards. The long-term effects of most transformation products remain unknown.

The small, spongy black beads used as fill material in most artificial turf fields are called crumb rubber, which has long been touted as a major win for recycling. However, conflicting studies have alternately identified crumb rubber as either safe for people to play atop or dangerous to human health.

New research out of Northeastern University investigated the decay cycle of crumb rubber, which is fashioned out of old tires. By simulating the conditions in which the rubber decays, like strong sunlight, they discovered that crumb rubber is highly reactive, generating hundreds of previously untracked chemicals as it decays, some of which are hazardous to humans.

The work is published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Madison H. McMinn et al, From the Road to the Field: Decoding Chemical Transformation in Aging Tire and Artificial Turf Crumb Rubber, Environmental Science & Technology (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5c08260

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