A new Northwestern Medicine study has found patient navigators — trained guides who help patients access care and resources while working alongside the healthcare team — can ease the often challenging transition to motherhood for low-income pregnant individuals, leading to better health in their postpartum period and more consistent primary care for years to come. The goal is to increase patients' independence and comfort with engaging with the healthcare system. In cancer care, patient navigation has received widespread adoption, and is even funded by Medicaid, but has been largely underused and understudied in postpartum care. These findings lay the groundwork for future research and potential funding for patient navigation.

The human longevity field is rapidly expanding, with companies developing interventions intended to slow or reverse cellular aging, prolong life, and extend healthspan. However, there are growing concerns that longevity interventions fall in a gray area for regulators. In a Policy Forum, Camila Strassle and colleagues argue that longevity products in the United States generally fall within existing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, despite claims to the contrary. They suggest that the more fundamental obstacle is instead the difficulty in measuring whether an intervention provides meaningful clinical benefits, which can take decades to establish. Strassle et al. argue that longevity products claiming to prevent or reverse aging should follow established FDA approval pathways and be supported by rigorous evidence of effectiveness, and safety. “Legitimate industry should welcome such enforcement, and the public should demand it,” Strassle et al. write.

As communities across the U.S. grapple with the rapid spread of Flock cameras and questions about who can access the data they collect, a new study from a University of Massachusetts Amherst public policy researcher reframes the debate to ask a more basic question: Does the technology serve the public? The study, published in the journal Cities, examines facial recognition technology in Portland, Oregon and autonomous vehicles in Tempe, Arizona to show how communities can weigh the promised benefits of emerging technologies against risks to values such as privacy, equity, transparency and civil liberties. The researchers employ “public value mapping”—a way for governments and the people they serve to look at what a technology is designed to accomplish and weigh it against what else it may change. The approach takes on added significance as Flock cameras—automated license plate readers used by law enforcement and communities—have become a flashpoint over privacy, surveillance and policing.

The Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC) has received an $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance research on the health effects of environmental exposures. SCEHSC, which is based at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and has been continuously funded by NIH for more than 30 years. The center has supported research on air pollution that has been highly influential in development of regulatory standards, on extreme heat and wildfires, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and on environmental effects on cardiorespiratory health, neurodevelopment and cognitive aging, kidney, liver and metabolic disease, and diabetes. The new grant ensures the center can continue backing these and other efforts through pilot funding, service cores providing expertise in exposure assessment, study design, biostatistics and data science, community engagement, research translation and science communication, and additional resources. Central to SCEHSC’s impact is its pilot program, which provides funding and support to help investigators turn promising ideas into established research programs. The program has generated a 30-to-1 return on its investments, with pilot funding helping researchers attract additional support, primarily from NIH. The new NIH funding will also allow SCEHSC to expand its work in two new areas in environmental health: artificial intelligence (AI) and cancer. SCEHSC is also expanding its work on environmental exposures linked to cancer in children and adults, in collaboration with the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

New research suggests that poultry litter-based soil amendments and weather conditions, specifically extreme weather events, may influence how long bacteria survive in agricultural soils used to grow sweet onions. The findings could help inform food safety risk management for produce growers.

In September 2026, the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSL, CAS) and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) formally signed a Memorandum of Understanding on jointly advancing the Open for Science 10 (OS10) Programme. Building on their respective strengths in open science infrastructure, open science publishing policies and practices, data resources, and services, the two parties will work together to promote the open sharing and innovative use of scientific knowledge and data, contributing to a more open, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable global open science ecosystem.