While virtual-reality path integration (VR-PI) may reveal subtle changes that precede the onset of clinical cognitive symptoms, the association between PI performance and structural brain changes remains unclear. Now, researchers have demonstrated that poor PI performance is linked to accelerated cortical thinning in several brain regions and is tied to key blood biomarkers of neurodegeneration. The findings suggest that VR navigation tasks may offer a non-invasive approach for early detection of neurodegenerative diseases.

Flaky tests—automated checks that produce inconsistent results—are a persistent issue in software development, wasting time and computational resources. Researchers from Kyushu University analyzed 649 projects in the OpenStack ecosystem and found that over half were affected by flakiness that often spreads across projects. They identified cross-project flakiness caused by an unstable test affecting multiple projects and inconsistent flakiness as key phenomena.

Light traveling through living cells is shaped by two interlinked processes—refraction from inhomogeneous structure and attenuation from absorption and scattering. Conventional phase-imaging methods can describe only one at a time. A new study from the Exploratory Research Center on Life and Living Systems (ExCELLS) of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences introduces a unified transport model that captures both processes simultaneously, defines exactly where the model can be applied, and confirms that biological tissues preserve a fundamental symmetry of light propagation across three orders of magnitude in optical depth. The model's outputs may further be translated into intracellular physical properties such as fluid viscosity, density, and local temperature, opening a route toward reading cellular environments quantitatively through light.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope observed a large group of galaxies which had been discovered in the early Universe by the Subaru Telescope. The observations show that even as early as 1.2 billion years after the birth of the Universe, the local environment was already influencing galaxy growth. These results provide new insights into the development of galaxies throughout the history of the Universe.