The Hertz Foundation, the nation’s preeminent nonprofit organization committed to advancing American scientific and technological leadership, has announced 19 recipients of the 2026 Hertz Fellowship in the applied sciences, engineering and mathematics. Awarded through a rigorous selection process honed over eight decades, the Hertz Fellowship is the nation’s most competitive doctoral fellowship in science and technology. Hertz Fellows receive up to five years of financial support — a stipend and full tuition equivalent — offering the rare freedom to pursue bold ideas and a community of influential peers dedicated to their success.

Investigators at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center are part of a new multi-institution research effort aimed at improving care and outcomes for patients diagnosed with glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive and difficult-to-treat cancers.

A new study reveals that many older adults start cannabis seeking more effective or non-pharmaceutical options to treat sleep, pain, or mental health conditions, and that many base their decisions on word of mouth rather than discussions with health care providers.

About The Study: In this qualitative study, older adults were motivated to use cannabis as an alternative approach to address health concerns. These findings highlight the importance of physician awareness of older adults’ motivations and concerns to support informed counseling and resources.

About The Study: In this nationwide cohort study conducted in Sweden, bidirectional associations were found between premenstrual disorders and psychiatric disorders and conditions, highlighting the need for sex- and menstrual cycle–informed care in psychiatry. Further research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms shared between premenstrual disorders and psychiatric disorders.

About The Study: In this repeated cross-sectional study of cross-national mortality, the U.S. had substantially higher death rates than other high-income countries between 1999 and 2022, despite having similar access to advanced medical technology. Many of these excess U.S. deaths could likely be avoided by adopting health and social policies that have benefited other high-income countries. These descriptive findings should be interpreted in light of uncertainty arising from differences in death coding, data completeness, and other aspects of data comparability across countries.

About The Study: In this cluster randomized trial of a clinical decision support system for chronic kidney disease in primary care, both the intervention and control groups demonstrated comparable improvements in 6-month outcomes, with no independent effect of the clinical decision support system detected.

A new study in JAMA Network Open found that between 1999-2022, the annual number of excess US deaths—deaths that would not have occurred had the mortality rate in the US been the same as in other HICs—increased steadily through 2019 and then rose rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2022, all-cause mortality rates in the US were 38 percent higher than in other HICs. An estimated 12.7 million US deaths could have been averted during this period if US mortality rates mirrored those of its peers. The authors refer to these excess US deaths as “missing Americans.”