This peer-reviewed invited review recasts traumatic brain injury not as a single bruise to the head but as a system-wide disorder that ripples through the lungs, heart, kidneys, and gut. Synthesizing evidence from rodents, swine, and nonhuman primates through early human case reports, the authors examine mesenchymal stromal cell-derived extracellular vesicles, the tiny membrane-bound parcels cells shed to talk to one another. The synthesis reveals that these vesicles can quiet inflammation, blunt cell death, and coax new vessels and neurons. The authors map cargo engineering, delivery routes, and artificial intelligence-guided design while flagging the standardization gaps that still separate promise from practice.

Why do nearly all animals sleep? A new Perspective in Brain Medicine gathers evidence from neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and machine learning to propose an answer that sits above the familiar ones. The authors synthesize existing research to argue that sleep operates as a system-level resilience mechanism, stabilizing large-scale brain dynamics, curbing maladaptive over-specialization, and preserving efficient information flow. NREM and REM stages emerge as coordinated phases of repair and reconfiguration. The same logic, the authors suggest, may extend to artificial neural networks, where structured offline phases could ease catastrophic forgetting. Sleep, in this reading, is active maintenance rather than passive rest.

Aquifer-based geothermal systems, known as aquifer thermal energy storage, could help ease the environmental stress stemming from artificial intelligence data centers in the United States. Researchers at the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are proposing a new way to keep those facilities cool by using the naturally stable underground temperatures and groundwater as a giant natural “thermal battery.”

A nanosatellite designed and built almost entirely by USC students is set to launch in July aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, carrying technologies that could shape the future of autonomous space operations.

New research from the University of Kansas uses network science to determine why people make mistakes when lip reading. The results appear in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Findings could improve training for lip readers and boost the capacity for artificial intelligence to read lips and provide transcription and other digital services.