Machine Learning Speeds Analysis and Design in All-Atom Molecular Dynamics Simulations - Spectroscopy Online

A drug designed to remove aging, damaged cells may help older skin recover from wounds more quickly, according to research published in Aging (Aging-US). The study, titled "Topical ABT-263 treatment reduces aged skin senescence and improves subsequent wound healing," examined a drug called ABT-263 and its effects on wound repair in older mice.

Artificial intelligence is saving scientists substantial amounts of time, but a new study involving Google, Google DeepMind and MIT FutureTech finds that researchers are giving some of those gains back by checking the technology's work. The findings add a scientific-workflow dimension to a much broader debate over unreliable, misaligned and increasingly autonomous AI systems -- without establishing that the more dramatic forms of AI misbehavior are occurring in scientific research. Rather than the current, raging debate about "rogue AI" systems deliberately escaping control, deceiving scientists or sabotaging experiments, the researchers are documenting something more immediate: AI output that requires auditing and verification, concerns about growing quantities of low-quality research, and a research pipeline in which faster hypothesis generation can run ahead of human and physical capacity to validate the results. The paper cites worries that AI-generated content, hallucinations and what prior researchers have called illusions of understanding could strain peer review and validation.

The fundamentals of light continue to fascinate scientists and reveal new secrets – including how its effects can be counterintuitive. Conventional wisdom suggests that light adds energy to heat up particles or set them in motion. But scientists just caught light doing the opposite: acting as an invisible brake at scales almost too small to imagine. In a new study published in Nature, researchers led by a team from Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany found that fluorescent carbon-mesh nanotubes move much more slowly when irradiated with light in an aqueous solution. How the experiment was set up. (Kistwal et al., Nature, 2026)The brighter the light, the slower the movement, or specifically, the lower the diffusion constant, a measure of how freely a particle moves through a liquid. This is at least partly due to 'quantum friction', the researchers determined. Quantum friction is a recently discovered phenomenon, and scientists are only just beginning to understand what it can do. "This discovery of light-induced quantum friction fundamentally changes our understanding of interfacial processes," says physical chemist Sebastian Kruss, from Ruhr-University Bochum.

"What makes SPRIZ so unexpected is that it uses a familiar mechanism—a tether—to do something different: it connects the two mitochondrial membranes while acting as a rigid pillar that holds them a set distance apart, so the room between them keeps a defined height," explains Dr. Luca Pellegrini, full professor at the University of Ottawa, who led the study. Credit: Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa Mitochondria are the tiny powerpacks that supply most of the energy our cells need. Their ability to generate this energy relies on a distinctive architecture: two membranes, one tucked inside the other, separated by a narrow gap called the intermembrane space (IMS). This tiny space helps sustain the chemistry of energy production, making its organization critical to how these cellular powerpacks function.