A team of international experts has published a roadmap for creating a digital twin of the immune system. Patterned after digital twins used in industry to test innovations on a model, the digital twin would create a virtual immune system tailored to individuals. Physicians could use this model to develop precision treatments based on a person's genetics and personal history. It could answer questions why some people react differently to COVID-19 infection, for example, or design precise immunosuppressant therapy for transplant patients, or allow pharmaceutical companies to more quickly bring drugs to market.

A new materials database compiled by researchers at MIT and elsewhere reveals more than 90,000 known “topological” materials with persistent electronic properties.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, a nationwide study found that increasing green vegetation in large, metropolitan areas could have prevented between 34,000-38,000 deaths, based on data from 2000-2019. The study also showed that overall greenness in metro areas has increased in the past 20 years, by nearly 3 percent between 2000-2010 and 11 percent between 2010-2019.

In the first study of its kind, Penn researchers and an international team of collaborators found that a person’s genetics and the environment in which they live contribute to how socioeconomic status shapes the architecture of the brain.

University of Central Florida researchers are developing new photonic materials that could one day help enable low power, ultra-fast, light-based computing. The unique materials, known as topological insulators, are like wires that have been turned inside out, where the current runs along the outside and the interior is insulated. In their latest work, published in the journal Nature Materials, the researchers demonstrated a new approach to create the materials that uses a novel, chained, honeycomb lattice design.