Science

In 1930, CV Raman won the Nobel Prize for discovering how light can show a molecule's composition. Now in 2025, a new MIT device is using the same methods to measure blood sugar without touching a drop of blood. Early tests show it can match the accuracy of today’s finger prick tests by shining near-infrared light on the skin - no needles, no implants. It could replace painful glucose monitors for 400 million diabetics. Here’s how👇 ▶ A glucose reading without breaking the skin ↳ A beam shines on the skin and detects glucose from the reflected signal. ↳ It uses Raman spectroscopy - a light-based method that reads the chemical makeup of tissue. ▶ A complex lab machine shrunk into a wearable ↳ Traditional Raman machines are huge and expensive. MIT shrunk it into a cell-phone sized wearable currently being tested. ▶ Proven head-to-head against invasive monitors ↳ In an MIT trial, a volunteer drank two glucose drinks. The device scanned every 5 minutes. Results matched commercial glucose monitors worn in parallel. ↳ The team is now preparing a larger study with diabetes patients at a local hospital. They’re now trying to: - Reduce the device to watch size - Ensure accuracy across different skin tones - Optimise it for day-long wear Diabetes affects over 400 million people worldwide, and finger-prick pain is still a daily reality. So if MIT’s work holds up in larger trials, I think noninvasive glucose monitoring could become one of the biggest breakthroughs in diabetes care since insulin. If this becomes real, do you think it will replace finger-prick tests? #entrepreneurship #healthtech #innovation

Today, I’m thrilled to share what I believe is the biggest breakthrough in microbiome science for a decade. Nature Magazine, the world's most influential scientific journal, has just published a scientific paper by ZOE's scientists, establishing the first reliable, repeatable, global way to measure the health of an individual’s gut microbiome. It represents the culmination of eight years of work at ZOE. Scientists have been trying to solve this puzzle for more than 20 years, right back to when they first discovered how important our gut microbes are for our health. It’s been achieved only because more than 34,000 ZOE members took part in this research. We’ve known for a long time that the microbiome is linked to cholesterol, inflammation, blood sugar control and even how we store fat. But we’ve never had a clear, evidence-based way to measure how healthy a microbiome actually is. This analysis finally delivers it, revealing a global ranking of microbes that works across populations, diets and environments. The insights are remarkable. Among the top 50 “good microbes” linked with better health, 22 were completely unknown to science until today, and most of the others have never been successfully grown in a lab. We also discovered clear links between these good microbes and health outcomes: healthy individuals carry around 3.6 more of these beneficial species, and people at a healthy weight carry about 5.2 more than those living with obesity. We also found a strong connection to diet. People eating healthier diets consistently have microbiomes that score better on this ranking. What we eat shapes our gut health, and now we can measure this relationship with unprecedented clarity. ZOE was created to enable microbiome research at a scale that traditional science has been unable to fund, and use this research to create actionable advice that can transform our gut health. This is a major milestone in that journey. I’m delighted to say that as a result, this breakthrough science is immediately available for the public to investigate their own microbiome through ZOE’s new Gut Health Test in the UK, and this is coming soon in the US. You can now receive not only a reliable measurement of how healthy your microbiome is as you change their diet, but also discover the health of clusters of gut microbes in your gut affecting metabolism, inflammation and more. To all our amazing ZOE members who have participated in our science: you made this possible. You are transforming our understanding of the microbiome. Thank you so much. I hope you feel as proud and excited as I do. I should note that your research is now published in Nature, which is the ultimate scientific accolade, and you can definitely brag about that with your friends! If you think this science could help others understand their health, I’d love for you to share it. You’ll find links to more details from our findings and access to the paper in the comments.

Agrivoltaics – combining land for solar and agriculture – is a genuine win-win. It allows a single piece of land to produce both food and clean energy at the same time. Around the world, farmers are finding that solar infrastructure creates microhabitats that boost resilience, improve yields and reduce water stress. For the agriculture: ✅ Shade from the panels lower ground temperatures and reduces evaporation. In arid areas, this has doubled or even tripled crop yields while cutting irrigation needs by half. ✅ Shade-tolerant crops like lettuce, kale, berries and broccoli thrive under reduced heat stress, especially during extreme weather. ✅ Higher soil moisture also promotes healthier pasture, leading to more nutritious forage for grazing animals. For solar operators: ✅ Sheep naturally keep vegetation under control, reducing mowing and maintenance costs and lowering fire risk. They also prevent plants from shading the panels. ✅ Crops underneath the panels help to cool the modules, improving performance on hot days. And the animals benefit too. A 3-year study of 1,700 sheep at the Wellington Solar Farm in NSW found the sheep produced higher quality wool and more of it. The arrays offer shade in summer, shelter during storms and cooler microclimates throughout the day. Economically it's a strong proposition: - Landowners gain a stable income stream while keeping land productive. - Developers access more viable sites with fewer permitting hurdles. - Communities retain agricultural land and benefit from local investment and tax revenue. And in the US, a significant "solar grazing" industry is emerging, where farmers become vegetation managers. They rent out flocks of sheep to solar farm owners and the sheep trim the vegetation. Agrivoltaics is showing that solar and agriculture don’t have to compete for land. They can thrive together – and create more value in the process. Image credit: Enel Green Power #energy #renewables #energytransition

MIT just cleared 50% of Alzheimer's plaques using 40 Hz sound waves. No drugs. No surgery. Just precisely engineered frequencies making immune cells devour toxic proteins. Frequency is becoming medicine's most powerful tool. Think about that. While we've spent decades failing with Alzheimer's drugs, MIT researchers discovered something extraordinary: exposing brains to 40 Hz gamma frequencies activates microglia—the brain's cleanup crew—to clear amyloid plaques naturally. Mice regained memory. Human trials are showing promise. This isn't alternative medicine. It's FDA-approved precision. Traditional Brain Treatment: ↳ Invasive surgery with months of recovery ↳ Drugs that barely slow decline ↳ Blood-brain barrier blocking 98% of medications ↳ Essential tremor requiring skull opening The Frequency Revolution: ↳ 60% tremor reduction in one ultrasound session ↳ Same-day discharge, no incisions ↳ Drug delivery increased 5-fold to brain tumors ↳ 90+ clinical trials transforming neurology But here's what stopped me cold: Focused ultrasound doesn't destroy tissue—it tunes it. Opening the blood-brain barrier for exactly 4 hours to deliver chemotherapy. Synchronizing neurons at 40 Hz to trigger natural healing. Making Parkinson's tremors vanish while patients stay awake, go home that afternoon. We're not attacking disease anymore. We're conducting it away. What changes everything: ↳ Brain surgery without cutting ↳ Alzheimer's clearing without drugs ↳ Tumors targeted without systemic poison ↳ Healing through harmony, not harm The Multiplication Effect: 1 frequency device = surgery avoided 10 hospitals equipped = tremor wards emptying 100 conditions targeted = non-invasive becomes standard At scale = medicine's violent era ends Stanford uses ultrasound for depression. Johns Hopkins for addiction. Mayo Clinic for brain tumors. Each discovering that precisely tuned frequencies can reprogram biology better than any drug. We spent centuries cutting and poisoning disease. Now we're tuning it out of existence. Because when 40 Hz can clear plaques that billion-dollar drugs couldn't touch, and ultrasound can perform brain surgery without a scalpel, we're not just advancing medicine. We're using medical precision. Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld for breakthroughs where physics becomes pharmacy. ♻️ Share if you want other to learn about new possibilities to fight Alzheimer. Resources: Gamma frequency entrainment attenuates amyloid load and modifies microglia" Authors: Li-Huei Tsai et al. NatureDecember 2016 DOI: 10.1038/nature20587. Gamma frequency sensory stimulation in mild probable Alzheimer’s dementia: Phase 2A pilot study" PLOS Biology, November 30, 2022 Evidence that 40Hz gamma stimulation promotes brain health,” Li-Huei Tsai, PLOS Biology, 2025.

Big breakthrough: A few months my lab at MIT introduced SPARKS, our autonomous scientific discovery model. Since then we have demonstrated applicability to broad problem spaces across domains from proteins, bio-inspired materials to inorganic materials. SPARKS learns by doing, thinks by critiquing itself & creates knowledge through recursive interaction; not just with data, but with the physical & logical consequences of its own ideas. It closes the entire scientific loop - hypothesis generation, data retrieval, coding, simulation, critique, refinement, & detailed manuscript drafting - without prompts, manual tuning, or human oversight. SPARKS is fundamentally different from frontier models. While models like o3-pro and o3 deep research can produce summaries, they stop short of full discovery. SPARKS conducts the entire scientific process autonomously, generating & validating falsifiable hypotheses, interpreting results & refining its approach until a reproducible, fully validated evidence-based discovery emerges. This is the first time we've seen AI discover new science. SPARKS is orders of magnitude more capable than frontier models & even when comparing just the writing, SPARKS still outperforms: in our benchmark evaluation, it scored 1.6× higher than o3-pro and over 2.5× higher than o3 deep research - not because it writes more, but because it writes with purpose, grounded in original, validated compositional reasoning from start to finish. We benchmarked SPARKS on several case studies, where it uncovered two previously unknown protein design rules: 1⃣ Length-dependent mechanical crossover β-sheet-rich peptides outperform α-helices—but only once chains exceed ~80 amino acids. Below that, helices dominate. No prior systematic study had exposed this crossover, leaving protein designers without a quantitative rule for sizing sheet-rich materials. This discovery resolves a long-standing ambiguity in molecular design and provides a principle to guide the structural tuning of biomaterials and protein-based nanodevices based on mechanical strength. 2⃣ A stability “frustration zone” At intermediate lengths (~50- 70 residues) with balanced α/β content, peptide stability becomes highly variable. Sparks mapped this volatile region and explained its cause: competing folding nuclei and exposed edge strands that destabilize structure. This insight pinpoints a failure regime in protein design where instability arises not from randomness, but from well-defined physical constraints, giving designers new levers to avoid brittle configurations or engineer around them. This gives engineers and biologists a roadmap for avoiding stability traps in de novo design - especially when exploring hybrid motifs. Stay tuned for more updates & examples, papers and more details.

🌍 NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in collaboration with data from the World Meteorological Organization, merges satellite observations, advanced models, and immense computing power to monitor aerosols in our atmosphere. These tiny, invisible solid or liquid particles — including black carbon (orange/red), sea salt (cyan), dust (magenta), and sulfates (green) — travel vast distances, affecting air quality, human health, climate, and visibility far from their source. 🔹 In South America, black carbon from wildfires burning in the Amazon rainforest drifts across the continent. 🔹 Over the Atlantic, massive plumes of dust from Northern Africa journey westward toward the Americas, influencing ecosystems, weather, and even hurricane formation. This striking visualization, powered by NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model and informed by WMO’s authoritative climate data, delivers realistic, high-resolution weather and aerosol insights. These data streams fuel #AI innovation and help provide customized environmental predictions — critical tools for #climateresilience and disaster preparedness #EW4ALL. ➡ A reminder: Every particle tells a story about the planet’s interconnected systems — and our shared responsibility to protect them

Most companies take days to make product decisions. We do it in 10 minutes. At Duolingo, Product Review (PR) is the heartbeat of our product development – and probably our most important meeting (of course, I’m biased!). When I joined Duolingo almost ten years ago, product decisions happened casually, often in informal chats at our desks. It worked for a while, but as we grew, it became a mess – key stakeholders were left out, and sometimes it wasn't clear if decisions were final or just thoughts. Over the years, we’ve transformed Product Review into a structured, efficient process that helps us move fast while also maintaining the bar for quality in our product. Here's how our Product Review works: -Each proposal gets exactly 10 minutes (down from 20, initially). The rationale for this length is because we want people to have clear, concise, and strong convictions. This saves time, but it also ensures what they are presenting is something they believe in. Luis von Ahn, our CEO, attends every single meeting. -We have three review formats based on the development stage: one-pager reviews for initial ideas, 1.5-pager reviews for concepts with rough designs, and spec reviews for fully fleshed-out features. -Reviewers are clearly marked and give feedback in a specific order, creating structure. (We also periodically switch up who the key reviewers are.) The meetings are open to anyone in the company. Beyond transparency, this serves as a training ground for developing product sense. -After each two-hour block of reviews, we hold a 15-minute debrief to evaluate decisions and continuously improve the process itself. The result? Fast decisions – but also enough structure to maintain our standard of quality across the app. Here’s a 1.5-pager from Emilia Cabrera, a product manager on our team, about an improvement for our streak session end screen. #productmanagement

NEW WHOOP RESEARCH ON EXERCISE & SLEEP I am proud to share that WHOOP research has just been published in Nature Portfolio's Nature Communications. Our study analyzed 4.3 million nights of sleep across nearly 15,000 WHOOP members to answer a simple but important question: does working out at night hurt your sleep? Here’s what we found: -Strenuous evening workouts can delay sleep onset, shorten sleep duration, and reduce sleep quality. -Elevated nocturnal heart rate and decreased heart rate variability were observed post high-strain evening exercise. -Importantly, workouts concluding at least 4 hours before bedtime showed no negative impact on sleep. So what? If you're training hard but not sleeping well, *when* you work out may matter just as much as how you work out. This is one of the largest studies ever published on exercise and sleep - and it’s only possible because of continuous WHOOP data and our commitment to research that improves human performance. Congratulations to Emily Capodilupo, our SVP of Research, Algorithms, and Data, and her team, as well as our collaborators at Monash and Harvard. Full article in Nature: https://lnkd.in/e6MXE85u

We’re planting trees — but losing biodiversity. Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent paper published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether. Forest restoration is at the heart of Target 2 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to place 30% of degraded ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030. But the gap between ambition and outcome is wide. "Biodiversity will remain a vague buzzword rather than an actual outcome" unless projects explicitly prioritize it, the authors caution. Restoration has typically prioritized utilitarian goals such as timber production, carbon sequestration, or erosion control. This bias is reflected in the widespread use of monoculture plantations or low-diversity agroforests. Nearly half of the Bonn Challenge’s forest commitments consist of commercial plantations of exotic species — a trend that risks undermining biodiversity rather than enhancing it. Scientific evidence shows that restoring biodiversity requires more than planting trees. Methods like natural regeneration — allowing forests to recover on their own — can often yield superior biodiversity outcomes, though they face social and economic barriers. By contrast, planting a few fast-growing species may sequester carbon quickly but offers little for threatened plants and animals. Biodiversity recovery is influenced by many factors: the intensity of prior land use, the surrounding landscape, and the species chosen for restoration. Recovery is slow — often measured in decades — and tends to lag for rare and specialist species. Alarmingly, most projects stop monitoring after just a few years, long before ecosystems stabilize. However, the authors say there are reasons for optimism. Biodiversity markets, including emerging biodiversity credit schemes and carbon credits with biodiversity safeguards, could mobilize new financing. Meanwhile, technologies like environmental DNA sampling, bioacoustics, and remote sensing promise to improve monitoring at scale. To turn good intentions into reality, the paper argues, projects must define explicit biodiversity goals, select suitable methods, and commit to long-term monitoring. Social equity must also be central. "Improving biodiversity outcomes of forest restoration… could contribute to mitigating power asymmetries and inequalities," the authors write, citing examples from Madagascar and Brazil. If designed well, forest restoration could help address the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. But without a deliberate shift, billions of dollars risk being spent on projects that plant trees — and little else. ���� Brancalion et al (2025): https://lnkd.in/gG6X36WP

If your paper is getting rejected, it isn’t necessarily the science that’s the problem (it’s likely the journal fit that’s off!). Here’s how you can be be strategic about journal selection. How do I choose the right scientific journal? ↳ Analyze your citation list and target relevant publications. Can impact factor really determine journal quality? ↳ Look beyond numbers, focus on specialized audience fit. How to avoid predatory journal publication traps? ↳ Verify journal reputation before submitting your research. Will editors help improve my manuscript? ↳ Follow author guidelines meticulously. Navigating the academic publication landscape can feel like traversing a complex maze. As a professor, I've learned that selecting the right journal is both an art and a science. Here's a game-changing approach I've developed: 1. Conduct a citation audit: Count journals you've referenced most frequently. These are likely your ideal publication targets. 2. Beyond Impact Factor: Don't get fixated on numbers. A lower-ranked journal with a specialized audience might be more valuable than a high-impact generic publication. 3. Beware of predatory journals: If an unsolicited email promises quick publication for a fee, run! Legitimate open-access journals conduct rigorous peer review. 4. Craft a strategic cover letter: Suggest credible reviewers, highlight your paper's novelty, and demonstrate professionalism. 5. Patience is key: Most journals reject approximately 50% of submissions. Don't be discouraged - each submission is a learning opportunity. Pro tip: Always read and follow the journal's specific author guidelines. This shows you're a detail-oriented, professional researcher. Have you ever struggled with selecting the right scientific journal for your research? What challenges have you encountered? #science #scientist #ScientificCommunication #publishing #phd #professor #research #postgraduate