Scientists in the laboratory of Shashank M. Dravid, PhD, in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Texas A&M University Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine are working to understand the link between chronic pain and autophagy, the cell’s cleanup crew.

A major contribution of the study is the structural determination of a protein involved in the virulence of a medically important bacterium. Findings contribute to the search for new targets against hospital infections.

A recent study investigates the role of sonic vibrations in improving pollination efficiency and fruit size in tomatoes. 

Tea bud size is closely tied to both yield and processing suitability in tea production. 

In bustling megacities worldwide, smart trains and railways are emerging as heroes in the fight against gridlocked traffic and choking pollution. Powered by cutting-edge tech like IoT and digital connectivity, these systems promise faster, greener, and more personalized travel—think seamless real-time updates and automated operations. Yet, this digital evolution brings a dark side: heightened vulnerability to cyberattacks that could derail operations, compromise passenger safety, or expose sensitive data. As railways go "smart," the need for robust cybersecurity isn't just a tech add-on—it's essential to unlock the full potential of a connected world without inviting chaos. This study dives into the cybersecurity maze of smart railways, mapping out threats, vulnerabilities, and defenses to ensure these vital infrastructures remain resilient in an increasingly hostile digital landscape.

Space manipulators play an important role in the on-orbit services and planetary surface operation whose reliability is a key issue. In the extreme environment of space, space manipulators are susceptible to a variety of unknown disturbances. Since it is difficult for the manipulator to be repaired immediately, once it fails, it will mean that it cannot complete the mission as expected, which may cause serious losses and dangers. How to have a resilient guarantee, i.e., the manipulator’s ability to resiliently recover and continue to complete tasks, in failure or disturbance is the core capability of its future development. The motion planning unit is used as the computing terminal of the manipulator’s joint motion trajectory. Compared with traditional motion planning, learning-based motion planning has gradually become a hot spot in current research. However, no matter what kind of research ideas, the single robotic manipulator is studied as an independent agent, making it unable to provide sufficient flexibility under conditions such as external force disturbance, observation noise, and mechanical failure.

Therapeutic cancer vaccines have experienced a remarkable resurgence over the past decade, representing a paradigm shift in oncology toward harnessing the immune system's intrinsic ability to combat malignancies. These innovative immunotherapeutic approaches are fundamentally designed to enhance specific stages of the cancer-immunity cycle, a conceptual framework that describes the sequential events required to mount effective anti-tumor immune responses. By strategically targeting critical phases including antigen release, presentation, T-cell priming, trafficking, infiltration, and cytotoxic execution, cancer vaccines aim to overcome immune resistance mechanisms and promote durable tumor regression.

Understanding how the brain learns and applies rules is the key to unraveling the neural basis of flexible behavior. A new study from the University of Toyama, Japan, reveals that our ability to follow procedural rules is encoded in the evolving dynamics of neuronal activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).

Our study profiled the dynamic epigenomic landscape, annotated regulatory DNA elements, and identified and validated BCL6B as a new transcription factor for EC differentiation and arterial-venous bifurcation. Our findings provide a valuable resource to study the epigenetic regulation of EC development.

Qing Wei and colleagues from the College of Engineering, China Agricultural University, systematically elaborated on the innovative applications of neural networks in agricultural product drying, offering new insights to address industry pain points. The related article has been published in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2025620).