Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common, debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting about 10 percent of people over the age of 65 and one third of people aged 85 and above. Besides environmental factors, the genes have a strong influence on whether or not a person develops AD during their lifetime. Through genome sequencing of DNA from large groups of healthy people and people with AD, some naturally occurring small changes in the DNA, known as genetic variants, were found to be more frequent in AD patients than in healthy people. As more and more of these AD-associated genetic “risk” variants are discovered, it is now possible to calculate a person’s individual polygenic risk score (PRS), meaning the likelihood of the person to develop AD, with high accuracy. Despite this progress, it is still largely unknown how genetic risk variants, or combinations thereof, cause AD in individual patients and more specifically, how risk variants impact the health and function of brain cells.
To address this, researchers in the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University, UK, have now generated the first large-scale stem cell bank from over 100 individuals selected for extremes of AD PRS, which had previously been determined by genome sequencing. The results of the work are published today in Stem Cell Reports. About two thirds of the donors had been diagnosed with AD and had a relatively high PRS while one third were cognitively healthy, age-matched individuals with a low PRS. Blood cells from these individuals were genetically engineered to turn them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are immature cells capable of generating all cell types of the body. The new “iPSC Platform to Model Alzheimer’s disease Risk” (IPMAR) resource will be made available to researchers worldwide to facilitate studies on the impact of risk variants in iPSC-based cellular models of AD in the lab. Ultimately, the resource can be used to increase our understanding of genetic risk factors linked to AD, and may inform the design of new, individualized treatments or prevention strategies.
Source:
International Society for Stem Cell Research
Journal reference:
Maguire, E., et al. (2025). Modeling common Alzheimer’s disease with high and low polygenic risk in human iPSC: A large-scale research resource. Stem Cell Reports. doi.org/10.1016/j.stemcr.2025.102570.
If you’re like me, you depend on a lot of systems and services, even within your home LAN. Because I work from home, that’s amplified to the point where I need certain applications available to me that aren’t hosted by a third party, for flexibility, ease of use, reliability and security.
Thankfully, Docker is there to make deploying those apps and services considerably easier; otherwise, I’d wind up having to first deploy a collection of virtual machines (VMs), keep them running and worry about upgrading/managing them efficiently.
Yeah, Docker makes this entire process easier. Even better, I can spin up those apps and services in seconds, instead of having to go the traditional route, which can often take quite a bit longer to deploy.
But what are the apps and services that I depend on for my LAN to keep me productive? Surprise, surprise: I have a list, and here it is.
Nextcloud
Nextcloud has essentially become my Google services for my home LAN. I began using Nextcloud in earnest on my LAN when I started fearing that Google would use my documents within Drive to train its AI. After that thought danced across the synapses of my mind, I pulled those documents and moved them to a Nextcloud deployment on my home network. Problem solved.
But Nextcloud isn’t just a document server; it’s much more. Nextcloud is an entire suite of applications that can be used for just about every need you have for a home office. There’s audio/video chat, calendars, email, whiteboard, AI assistant and agentic AI, file sharing, collaboration, file access control, versioning, machine learning (ML), tons of integrations, monitoring/auditing and so much more.
There’s even an app store, where you can extend the feature set to meet your exact needs.
Nextcloud is free to use and can be deployed with Docker from Docker Hub as simply as:
Grocy
If you need to manage things in your home, Grocy is the way to go. As you might have suspected from the name, Grocy is all about groceries and meal planning. If you’re as busy as I am, planning meals isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but this handy Docker app makes it considerably easier. Not only can you keep track of the items you have in your kitchen or pantry, but you can also categorize them by location (e.g., fridge, freezer, pantry, garage, basement, etc.) and even keep track of recipes. On top of all this, Grocy even lets you keep track of chores you need to take care of around the house. You can even keep track of batteries, charging cycles and warranties so you can take the guesswork out of when you replaced those batteries in your smoke detectors.
Grocy can be deployed with a docker-compose and a Dockerfile that looks like this:
Tududi
If you want a task manager that can be accessed from any machine on your network, consider Tududi. Tududi can help manage those tasks and even projects with a well-designed, user-friendly UI. The Tududi feature list includes comments, due dates, project names, status, priorities, hierarchical structure for tasks and projects, smart recurring tasks, areas, notes, tags and Telegram integration.
With the Telegram integration, you get the ability to create tasks directly through Telegram messages, receive daily digests of your tasks and quickly capture ideas and to-dos on the go. You also get smart parent-child relationships such that when a recurring task generates a new instance, each generated task maintains a link to the parent, those tasks are displayed as a Recurring Task Instance (with inherited settings), users can edit the parent recurrence pattern from the child task and changes to the parent settings affect all future instances within a series.
Tududi can be installed from Docker Hub with the command:
Bitwarden
Bitwarden is one of the finest password managers on the market. The app/service enjoys one of the best feature lists of all password managers and uses industry-standard encryption. Even so, there are certain highly sensitive bits of information that I would prefer to retain on my home LAN. For that, I make use of the Bitwarden server, which can be easily deployed via Docker. The Bitwarden server acts almost identically to the standard service, only it’s housed privately, so it doesn’t have to be available beyond your LAN. With that in mind, you could house highly sensitive information, and (as long as your network is secure), you shouldn’t have to worry about anyone stumbling upon your vault or the items contained within.
Bitwarden can be deployed with Docker with the command:
Portainer
If you want to manage all of your containers with the help of a powerful, web-based GUI tool, Portainer is hard to beat. Portainer allows you to see all running containers, view all container logs, get quick console access to containers, deploy code into containers using a simple form and turn your YAML into custom templates for easy reuse. Oh, and you can deploy, stop, run and remove containers. In fact, there’s very little you can’t do with Portainer.
Portainer is considered one of the most popular container management systems in the world and does require a bit of work to get up and running. You can check out the official Portainer documentation and get up to speed on the process.
Although this is a short list of containers I regularly use on my LAN, there’s always room for more. Make sure to check out Docker Hub to see if there’s another app/service you could benefit from.
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Jack Wallen is what happens when a Gen Xer mind-melds with present-day snark. Jack is a seeker of truth and a writer of words with a quantum mechanical pencil and a disjointed beat of sound and soul. Although he resides…
Poke around a British rockpool and you may spot a shell shuffling over the sand. Inside is a hermit crab – an animal that spends much of its life testing the outside world before deciding whether it is safe to venture forth.
New research from the University of Plymouth reveals that the speed of that decision, a trait biologists call boldness, hinges on a crab’s built-in sensory toolkit.
The study focuses on microscopic hair-like structures called sensilla that pepper the claws of Pagurus bernhardus, a common UK species.
By counting those hairs on dozens of individuals and matching the totals to behavior in the lab, the team discovered a clear pattern: more sensilla equals faster recovery from a startle response.
Hermit crabs so equipped are not only bolder, they are also more predictable – showing similar, rapid emergence times across repeated tests.
Measuring crab response times
The experiment began with a simple but telling ritual. Researchers placed each crab in a small tank and gently startled it with a puff of water or a light tap on the shell.
That cue mimics the sudden pressure wave generated by a predator or rolling wave, prompting the animal to yank its legs and antennae inside its borrowed shell. The team then timed how long it took for eye stalks and claws to reappear.
About a third of a second is considered lightning fast in hermit-crab terms; several minutes, positively timid. Over repeated trials, certain individuals consistently clocked shorter hideouts, indicating a stable personality trait rather than random chance.
“I was especially intrigued by how they used their claws and other sensory appendages, such as their antennae, in their explorations and when re-emerging from their shell,” said lead author Ari Drummond, a PhD student at the University of Plymouth.
That curiosity led to the hunch that claws might act as information-gathering probes, letting crabs “sniff” the water for chemical cues or feel subtle currents that betray lurking threats.
Claw molts reveal sensors
Linking behavior to anatomy required patience. Hermit crabs, like all crustaceans, periodically molt. During this process, they shed the outer exoskeleton, including the thin cuticle covering each sensillum.
Drummond and colleagues waited for each test subject to molt naturally, collected the discarded claw tissue, and examined it under a scanning electron microscope.
The high-resolution images looked like alien landscapes – ridged terrain studded with evenly spaced bristles. Each bristle is a sensillum, connected to nerve cells that detect touch, water movement, or dissolved chemicals.
By tracing and counting every sensillum in the images, the team created a detailed sensory map for each crab. This noninvasive method marked a major advance over earlier studies, which often required removing limbs.
Analysis revealed striking variation: some claws sported 50 percent more sensilla than others of similar size. When the researchers plotted those numbers against startle data, the trend became unmistakable. Bolder hermit crabs have more sensilla on the claw surface.
Bolder crabs have more hairs
Why would extra sensory hairs translate into courage? The authors propose that better input reduces uncertainty. With richer information about water chemistry or microcurrents, a crab can judge threats more accurately and resume foraging sooner.
That efficiency, in turn, may feed back into survival and reproductive success, favoring individuals who “invest” in sensory hardware.
They call the concept the “sensory investment syndrome.” It’s a hypothesis linking an animal’s personality – here, boldness – to the resources it allocates to senses. If confirmed across other species, it could reshape how biologists think about behavioral diversity in nature.
“We’ve known for a long time that individual animals of the same species can show consistent behavioral differences from one another,” said senior author Mark Briffa, a professor at Plymouth.
“Our new research suggests that in hermit crabs, some of this variation may be linked to how individuals sense the world around them.”
In his opinion, similar mechanisms might operate in insects, fish, or even mammals, where variation in eye size, whisker density, or olfactory receptors could underpin consistent behavioral tendencies.
Crab survival starts with sensing
Hermit crabs face mounting challenges: coastal pollution, rising temperatures, and habitat disturbance all alter the sensory landscape of rockpools. Understanding how these creatures sense and decide may reveal which populations are most at risk from environmental change.
“In a world where environments and species are increasingly at risk from human impacts, it is essential that we gain a better understanding of what information animals detect, how they use that information and then respond to stay alive,” Drummond said.
Future work will test what each sensillum detects and whether diet, growth, or shell choice affects hair abundance.
For now, the takeaway is clear: in the miniature dramas playing out between tide and shore, knowledge is power – delivered through a forest of microscopic hairs on a tiny claw.
The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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Researchers have discovered a class of light-sensitive proteins found exclusively in microbes adapted to cold environments, which they believe hold the potential to revolutionize cellular engineering.
The rare, obscure group of blue proteins known as cryorhodopsins was reportedly unlike anything researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) had seen before.
Kirill Kovalev, PhD, a structural biologist at EMBL Hamburg’s Schneider Group and EMBL-EBI’s Bateman Group, who had spent years studying rhodopsins – light-sensitive pigments that convert light into electrical signals – believes cryorhodopsins could serve as prototypes for molecular on-off switches in cells.
“In my work, I search for unusual rhodopsins and try to understand what they do, Kovalev said, adding that he thought he knew rhodopsins inside out before the discovery. “Such molecules could have undiscovered functions that we could benefit from.”
Completely out of the blue
Kovalev was discovered by chance while browsing online protein databases. He was stunned when he spotted an unusual feature shared by microbial rhodopsins found only in extremely cold environments, such as glaciers and high mountain regions.
Reflecting on the fact that rhodopsins are typically found in seas and lakes, he was struck by how these cold-climate variants were almost identical, despite having evolved thousands of miles apart. Considering how crucial they seemed to survive in the cold, he doubted it was a coincidence and named them ‘cryorhodopsins’.
The image shows the light-detecting protein rhodopsin in five different species, as well as an overlay to reveal how the protein structure has changed with evolution. Credit: Qian-Yuan Tang
Since color is a defining feature of rhodopsins, most of which are pink-orange and activated by green and blue light, Kovalev was eager to examine the newly discovered variants.
To his surprise, the cryorhodopsins revealed a striking range of colors, including the highly sought-after blue type, which is activated by red light that penetrates tissue more deeply and non-invasively.
By applying advanced structural biology techniques, Kovalev discovered that the secret to their blue color is the same rare structural feature he originally spotted in the protein databases. “Now that we understand what makes them blue, we can design synthetic blue rhodopsins tailored to different applications.”
Nature’s built-in UV shield
The team then tested cryorhodopsins in cultured brain cells and found that exposure to UV light induced electric currents within the cells. When they illuminated the cells with green light, their excitability increased. Meanwhile, exposure to UV or red light reduced their excitability.
“New optogenetic tools to efficiently switch the cell’s electric activity both ‘on’ and ‘off’ would be incredibly useful in research, biotechnology, and medicine,” Tobias Moser, PhD, a group leader at the University Medical Center Göttingen, said.
Despite their potential, Kovalev stated that cryorhodopsins aren’t ready to be used as tools. But he emphasized that they’re an excellent prototype. “They have all the key features that, based on our findings, could be engineered to become more effective for optogenetics,” he noted.
By using advanced spectroscopy, the team then discovered that cryorhodopsins not only detect UV light but also respond more slowly to light than any other known rhodopsins. This suggested they may help microbes sense and respond to harmful UV radiation, a rare trait among related proteins.
Kovalev also noticed that the cryorhodopsin gene consistently appears alongside a gene for a tiny, unknown protein, hinting at a possible functional link. Using the AI tool AlphaFold, the team predicted that five copies of a small protein form a ring and interact with cryorhodopsin inside the cell.
They believe that when cryorhodopsin senses UV light, the small protein detaches to relay the signal deeper into the cell. “It was fascinating to uncover a new mechanism via which the light-sensitive signal from cryorhodopsins could be passed on to other parts of the cell.”
Cracking the code
To study cryorhodopsins in such detail, the team used a 4D structural biology approach, combining X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, and light activation techniques. And since cryorhodopsins are extremely light-sensitive, the researchers had to adapt by handling the samples in near-total darkness to avoid triggering unwanted reactions.
“We suspect that cryorhodopsins evolved their unique features not because of the cold, but rather to let microbes sense UV light, which can be harmful to them,” Kovalev highlighted.
He explained that the small proteins consistently spotted near the cryorhodopsin gene are also found in organisms lacking cryorhodopsins, hinting they may have broader roles beyond UV sensing. However, their unique dual function and why they evolved only in cold environments remain a mystery.
“In cold environments, such as the top of a mountain, bacteria face intense UV radiation,” Kovalev concluded in a press release. He believes cryorhodopsins might help microbes detect UV radiation, allowing them to activate protective responses.
The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.
FIFA’s decision to drop messages explicitly challenging racism and discrimination at the Club World Cup “signals a human rights risk” for next year’s men’s World Cup finals in the United States, according to a coalition of 15 human rights groups.
The Athletic reported on June 16 that no videos, signage or marketing assets referencing anti-racism and anti-discrimination slogans would be displayed in U.S. venues hosting the FIFA Club World Cup, despite such promotional content being developed ahead of the tournament.
The Dignity 2026 Coalition — via Human Rights Watch, a founding member — said FIFA, world football’s governing body, should publish the reasons for doing so and should reinstate the messaging for the rest of the tournament, as well as for next summer’s World Cup.
FIFA did display the messaging on Wednesday, June 18, to mark International Day for Countering Hate Speech, but that has not been replicated throughout the competition.
Earlier this week, supporters at Monterrey’s Club World Cup last-16 game against Borussia Dortmund were warned by FIFA that the game could be suspended after homophobic chants were heard repeatedly during the second half. The match finished before any further action was taken.
There have not been any announcements from FIFA within stadiums explaining the organisation’s anti-racism protocols or its “universal anti-racism gesture” which was rolled out in September last year and was supposed to be applied to all competitions.
The lack of messaging stands in contrast to recent FIFA-run tournaments when messages were displayed on in-stadium screens and across social media, such as at the 2023 Women’s World Cup held in Australia and New Zealand and the 2022 men’s World Cup in Qatar.
The Dignity 2026 coalition contains 15 national-level human rights groups, labour unions and worker networks, along with fans, athletes’ organisations and migrant rights groups, which represent the interests of affected communities around next summer’s men’s World Cup.
(Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
FIFA’s decision not to carry such messaging for this summer’s tournament has been described as an “inexplicable and inexcusable step backward” by Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch.
Bailey Brown, president of the leading North American alliance of fan groups the Independent Supporters Council, said FIFA were risking “normalising discrimination and undermining the progress made in soccer in recent years” by scaling back on their messaging.
“FIFA’s retreat from basic anti-discrimination commitments sends a chilling message that discrimination will be tolerated,” said Andrea Florence, executive director of the Sport & Rights Alliance.
FIFA’s decision was criticised as “a shocking setback for efforts to end homophobia and transphobia in sport” by Hudson Taylor, executive director of Athlete Ally, which fights for equal access, opportunity, and experience in sports.
FIFA was asked to “clarify the reasons for this sudden reversal and to reaffirm its commitment to human rights, anti-racism, and equality,” by Jamal R. Watkins, senior vice president of strategy and advancement at the NAACP, an American civil rights organization for African Americans.
In its statement to The Athletic last month, FIFA did not explain why they have reduced their in-tournament messaging for this competition in the United States, if competing clubs had been consulted on the matter or if the slogans would return for the 2026 men’s World Cup, which will be held across the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
A FIFA spokesperson said: “FIFA has a firm, zero-tolerance stance against all forms of discrimination and racism. This commitment was recently reinforced through the unanimous approval by the FIFA Council of the revised FIFA Disciplinary Code, which introduces new measures to fight racist abuse — including increased minimum bans for racist incidents and enhanced financial penalties as duly informed to the 75th FIFA Congress in Asuncion in May 2025.”
FIFA also said its three-step anti-discrimination procedure is in effect should incidents occur, while adding that a social media protection service is available to players and match officials, which helps hide abuse from their social media channels.
(Top photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties.
A fully autonomous robotic system developed by MIT researchers could speed things up.
Their system utilizes a robotic probe to measure an important electrical property known as photoconductance, which is how electrically responsive a material is to the presence of light.
The researchers inject materials-science-domain knowledge from human experts into the machine-learning model that guides the robot’s decision making. This enables the robot to identify the best places to contact a material with the probe to gain the most information about its photoconductance, while a specialized planning procedure finds the fastest way to move between contact points.
During a 24-hour test, the fully autonomous robotic probe took more than 125 unique measurements per hour, with more precision and reliability than other artificial intelligence-based methods.
By dramatically increasing the speed at which scientists can characterize important properties of new semiconductor materials, this method could spur the development of solar panels that produce more electricity.
“I find this paper to be incredibly exciting because it provides a pathway for autonomous, contact-based characterization methods. Not every important property of a material can be measured in a contactless way. If you need to make contact with your sample, you want it to be fast and you want to maximize the amount of information that you gain,” says Tonio Buonassisi, professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of a paper on the autonomous system.
His co-authors include lead author Alexander (Aleks) Siemenn, a graduate student; postdocs Basita Das and Kangyu Ji; and graduate student Fang Sheng. The work appears today in Science Advances.
Making contact
Since 2018, researchers in Buonassisi’s laboratory have been working toward a fully autonomous materials discovery laboratory. They’ve recently focused on discovering new perovskites, which are a class of semiconductor materials used in photovoltaics like solar panels.
In prior work, they developed techniques to rapidly synthesize and print unique combinations of perovskite material. They also designed imaging-based methods to determine some important material properties.
But photoconductance is most accurately characterized by placing a probe onto the material, shining a light, and measuring the electrical response.
“To allow our experimental laboratory to operate as quickly and accurately as possible, we had to come up with a solution that would produce the best measurements while minimizing the time it takes to run the whole procedure,” says Siemenn.
Doing so required the integration of machine learning, robotics, and material science into one autonomous system.
To begin, the robotic system uses its onboard camera to take an image of a slide with perovskite material printed on it.
Then it uses computer vision to cut that image into segments, which are fed into a neural network model that has been specially designed to incorporate domain expertise from chemists and materials scientists.
“These robots can improve the repeatability and precision of our operations, but it is important to still have a human in the loop. If we don’t have a good way to implement the rich knowledge from these chemical experts into our robots, we are not going to be able to discover new materials,” Siemenn adds.
The model uses this domain knowledge to determine the optimal points for the probe to contact based on the shape of the sample and its material composition. These contact points are fed into a path planner that finds the most efficient way for the probe to reach all points.
The adaptability of this machine-learning approach is especially important because the printed samples have unique shapes, from circular drops to jellybean-like structures.
“It is almost like measuring snowflakes — it is difficult to get two that are identical,” Buonassisi says.
Once the path planner finds the shortest path, it sends signals to the robot’s motors, which manipulate the probe and take measurements at each contact point in rapid succession.
Key to the speed of this approach is the self-supervised nature of the neural network model. The model determines optimal contact points directly on a sample image — without the need for labeled training data.
The researchers also accelerated the system by enhancing the path planning procedure. They found that adding a small amount of noise, or randomness, to the algorithm helped it find the shortest path.
“As we progress in this age of autonomous labs, you really do need all three of these expertise — hardware building, software, and an understanding of materials science — coming together into the same team to be able to innovate quickly. And that is part of the secret sauce here,” Buonassisi says.
Rich data, rapid results
Once they had built the system from the ground up, the researchers tested each component. Their results showed that the neural network model found better contact points with less computation time than seven other AI-based methods. In addition, the path planning algorithm consistently found shorter path plans than other methods.
When they put all the pieces together to conduct a 24-hour fully autonomous experiment, the robotic system conducted more than 3,000 unique photoconductance measurements at a rate exceeding 125 per hour.
In addition, the level of detail provided by this precise measurement approach enabled the researchers to identify hotspots with higher photoconductance as well as areas of material degradation.
“Being able to gather such rich data that can be captured at such fast rates, without the need for human guidance, starts to open up doors to be able to discover and develop new high-performance semiconductors, especially for sustainability applications like solar panels,” Siemenn says.
The researchers want to continue building on this robotic system as they strive to create a fully autonomous lab for materials discovery.
This work is supported, in part, by First Solar, Eni through the MIT Energy Initiative, MathWorks, the University of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Launched in early preview last May, Gemma 3n is now officially available. It targets mobile-first, on-device AI applications, using new techniques designed to increase efficiency and improve performance, such as per-layer embeddings and transformer nesting.
Gemma 3n uses Per-Layer Embeddings (PLE) to reduce the RAM required to run a model while maintaining the same number of total parameters. The technique consists of loading only the core transformer weights into accelerated memory, typically VRAM, while the rest of the parameters are kept on the CPU. Specifically, the 5-billion-parameter variant of the model only requires 2 billion parameters to be loaded into the accelerator; for the 8-billion variant, it’s 4 billion.
Another novel technique is MatFormer, short for Matryoshka Transformer), which allows transformers to be nested so that a larger model, e.g. with 4B parameters, contains a smaller version of itself, e.g. with only 2B parameters. This approach enables what Google calls elastic inference and allows developers to choose either the full model or its faster but fully-functional sub-model. MatFormer also support a Mix-n-Match method to let developers create intermediate-sizes versions:
This technique allows you to precisely slice the E4B model’s parameters, primarily by adjusting the feed forward network hidden dimension per layer (from 8192 to 16384) and selectively skipping some layers.
In the future, Gemma 3n will fully support elastic inference, enabling dynamic switching between the full model and the sub-model on the fly, depending on the current task and device load.
Another new feature in Gemma 3n aimed at accelerating inference is KV cache sharing, which is designed to accelerate time-to-first-token, a key metric for streaming response applications. Using this technique, which according to Google is particularly efficient with long contexts:
The keys and values of the middle layer from local and global attention are directly shared with all the top layers, delivering a notable 2x improvement on prefill performance compared to Gemma 3 4B.
Gemma 3n also brings native multimodal capabilities, thanks to its audio and video encoders. On the audio front, it enables on-device automatic speech recognition and speech translation.
The encoder generates a token for every 160ms of audio (about 6 tokens per second), which are then integrated as input to the language model, providing a granular representation of the sound context.
Google says they have observed strong results translating between English and Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. While Gemma 3n audio encoder can process arbitrarily long audios thanks to its streaming architecture, it will initially be limited to clips of up to 30 seconds at launch.
As a final note about Gemma 3n, it is worth highlighting that it supports resolutions of 256×256, 512×512, and 768×768 pixels and can process up to 60 frames per second on a Google Pixel device. In comparison with Gemma 3, it delivers a 13x speedup with quantization (6.5x without) and has a memory footprint that is four times smaller.
CINCINNATI, July 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists learned that the critical path to infection started with the SARS-CoV-2 virus invading the nasal tissues of its victims, then causing millions of deaths by spreading through the body and robbing the sickest people of their ability to breathe.
While the traditional way to administer protection has been to inject vaccines into the bloodstream, many experts called for developing a nasally delivered vaccine as a potentially more-effective approach. Now, encouraging results are in from the first human clinical trial to be conducted in the United States of a nasal COVID vaccine. Findings from the study led by an expert at Cincinnati Children’s were published July 4, 2025, in Science Advances.
“A single dose of this vaccine (CVXGA) was well tolerated. It generated a wide spectrum of specific immune responses including mucosal and systemic immune responses. Those who received the highest dose of the vaccine showed significantly lower rates of symptomatic COVID-19 infection,” says the study’s lead author, Paul Spearman, MD, a long-time leader in vaccine research and vice chair for clinical and translational research and education at Cincinnati Children’s.
The vaccine is made by the Georgia-based company CyanVac LLC, which also funded the clinical trial. Based on the promising data generated from this phase 1 trial, two larger clinical studies involving more people are underway (NCT05736835 and NCT06742281).
If these trials also prove successful, the CVXGA vaccine could join four other nasal COVID vaccines approved in other countries: two in China, one in Russia, and another in India.
Why is a nasal vaccine needed?
While the total number of deaths from COVID has declined far from the peak pandemic years, the virus has not disappeared. In fact, 663 Americans died of COVID in the 28 days ended June 15, 2025. Those deaths (which in one month exceeded the combined deaths of the three deadliest plane crashes since 2022) accounted for 67% of the 987 total deaths worldwide reported to the World Health Organization.
India (101 deaths) was the only other nation reporting more than 100 COVID deaths in this timeframe, and its population is more than four times larger than the US. The wealthy Western nation Sweden reported 22 deaths.
Since the pandemic began, the virus has mutated several times. This has required adjusting the vaccine and suggests that annual re-vaccination may be needed to prevent another pandemic. A nasal vaccine could prove both more effective medically and more tolerable for young children and adults who may fear needles.
“There is a need for improved COVID vaccines that offer more complete and durable protection,” Spearman says. “A nasal vaccine has the potential to block SARS-CoV-2 at its mucosal entry site and to reduce transmission of the virus to others.”
How effective was the nasal vaccine?
The clinical trial included 72 people who received vaccinations, with ages ranging from 12 to 53. A total of 61 participants completed the entire trial. During the period of the trial from September 2021 to May 2023, various waves of SARS-CoV-2 variant infections emerged in the US.
Participants were divided among four groups. One group received a low dose of the vaccine, which served as a control group. The other three higher dose groups included one group of adults that had never been infected or had not been vaccinated recently; a group of adults that had been recently vaccinated with a previous mRNA vaccine; and a group of teens that also had been vaccinated.
Overall, about 25% of recipients reported having a runny nose after the vaccine; 8% reported nausea. None had a fever.
The researchers found evidence that the vaccine was absorbed in the nasal tissues, and that it generated statistically significant antibody responses, as intended.
CVXGA1 produced a combined 51.9% mucosal antibody response rate across the three higher dose groups, compared to just 21.4% in the lower dose group.
The low-dose group (Group 1, enrolled from September 2021 to February 2022) had the highest overall COVID-19 infection rate: 73.3%. The other three groups had infection rates ranging from 11.1% to 22.2%. None of those found to be infected required hospital care.
The results suggest that the vaccine reduced the risk of infection by at least 67% compared to never being vaccinated before. However, definitive proof of efficacy will require larger trials designed specifically for this purpose.
What’s next?
By design, a phase 1 clinical trial involves low numbers of participants. However, the results were encouraging enough to recommend moving ahead with larger clinical trials.
The largest of the two ongoing trials (NCT06742281) seeks to enroll up to 10,016 participants by mid-2026 with the study completed by mid-2027.
SOURCE Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
In the front of Cardiff’s Spillers Records – the oldest record shop in the world – there is a three-by-three vinyl display of records by artists “playing locally soon!”, announced by an orange paper slip inside the plastic sleeve. Despite the mass hoopla outside in the Welsh capital – where the main drag, St Mary’s Street, is a racket of bars blasting Britpop anthems and spontaneous singalongs of Champagne Supernova are breaking out – it is still somehow astonishing to see a copy of Oasis’s 1998 compilation The Masterplan in the top left corner of the shelf.
The band’s reunion may finally be starting on Friday at the city’s Principality Stadium, but after 16 years apart, it still feels so unlikely.
Spillers’ owner, Ashli Todd, has worked at the shop for almost 30 years (and on her first day sold Robbie Williams a copy of Super Furry Animals’ debut album, Fuzzy Logic). “They [Oasis] have never gone anywhere, as far as we’re concerned, in terms of sales,” she says. “Through various phases of their career, they’ve never dwindled. I can’t think of a time where we haven’t had them in the racks. And from an industry perspective, their team do a fantastic job of keeping their records in print.”
Todd says it is “exceptionally exciting to have their tour kicking off here”, adding: “It’s bringing a lot of fans to the city, which is wonderful. I just had a father in his 50s in, who saw them in their heyday, telling me he’s taking along his teenage child, which is beautiful.”
Families are almost as prevalent as the anticipated groups of lads. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images
On Friday afternoon in the city centre, there are dozens of stories like these. Families are almost as prevalent as the anticipated groups of lads. In the St David’s Dewi Sant shopping centre, a queue has formed for photographs in front of a specially installed 230-sq-ft (23-sq-metre) mural of Noel and Liam Gallagher made entirely of black and white bucket hats.
Lottie, 11, wearing a Definitely Maybe T-shirt and “Cardiff Live 25” bucket hat, is a big fan. “My dad introduced me to them,” she says “We bond over their songs.”
Her aunt Rebecca chimes in. “I first saw them here 31 years ago, at the Cardiff Astoria, while I was pregnant with him,” she says, pointing at her adult son.
Her partner recalls the ticket price, £7.50, a figure that may smart a little for reunion tour ticketholders stung by Ticketmaster’s controversial dynamic pricing policy. (Daniel and Laura, drinking outside the Traders Tavern, defend the cost of tickets. “A lot of people are making a big thing about it but hotels tonight are also £800, £900,” says Daniel. “I don’t think it’s just a Gallagher thing – it’s this day and age, unfortunately.”)
The Wonder Wall, a mural by the Welsh artist Nathan Wyburn made out of 3,000 black and white bucket hats. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA
At an official pre-party at the Blue Bell pub thrown by Pretty Green, the fashion label that Liam Gallagher founded in 2009 (but no longer runs), William is wearing an Oasis Adidas T-shirt. He says has come down from the north-east of England with his dad, Steven, to celebrate his 10th birthday on Friday. For his birthday present, he is hoping they play Acquiesce, the B-side to Some Might Say. “I like the hype of it,” William says. “They both sing on it.”
Steven first saw Oasis in 2000. “I was 17 or 18,” he says. “My dad took me, so it’s come full circle.”
There is a festival atmosphere in the city, the bars overflowing with fans and blaring with Oasis anthems, creating a sonic effect down the high street that sounds like being stuck in an exhaust pipe.
Outside the Principality, Donna, a Big Issue vendor, is holding up the magazine’s dual-cover edition, Liam on one, Noel on the other, and asking buyers who they prefer. It is a trick question: the answer is in fact Donna, AKA the Queen of Cardiff, who is this month’s “My Pitch” profile on the magazine’s back page.
Bars blast out the anthems and spontaneous singalongs of Champagne Supernova fill the streets. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
Phil is selling copies of the Socialist Worker newspaper, which is leading on a defence of Kneecap and Bob Vylan. He isn’t getting much interest from Oasis fans. “I don’t think there’s anything rock’n’roll about them,” he says. “Beatles rip-off band from the 90s.” The Gallaghers’ dalliances with New Labour were “runaway great branding” for both sides, Phil says.
Where, say, Bruce Springsteen concerts are a parade of fans proudly wearing vintage merchandise from gigs they saw in the 70s or 80s, most Oasis fans in Cardiff on Friday are kitted out in box-fresh items from the two official stalls the band have set up in the city, showcasing their own products and a bespoke tour collaboration with Adidas.
The vintage shops Hobos and Beyond Retro report a run on old-school Adidas track jackets (though shop staff at both independently say demand is nothing like for Lana Del Rey’s gig here last month, when white blouses and boho skirts sold out). There are warring street stalls selling knockoff bucket hats bearing the band’s song titles. “You look like a supermodel,” one vendor tells a woman umming and ahhing over a blue hat, then sings “would I lie to you?” at her.
Molly, 16, is getting a glittery transfer of Oasis on her cheek from another high street stall. After discovering Don’t Look Back in Anger, “that was it from there”, she says, citing Bonehead’s Bank Holiday as an unlikely favourite song. “I love Liam. He’s so funny. No filter.”
Most Oasis fans in Cardiff on Friday are kitted out in box-fresh items from the two official stalls. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA
Inside St David’s Dewi Sant, Asad, 24, is one of the staff at the official shopping centre popup, but he’s been drafted out of the shop by security to help manage a queue that snakes around an entire concourse. “It’s been very hectic but surprisingly well behaved,” he says. The shop has been playing non-stop Oasis. “Some songs I didn’t know they were by them,” he says. “I’ve been interacting with people coming from Italy, Miami, Canada – they touch this many people, it’s crazy.” Sadly, he does not have a ticket. “I wish I did.”
In the queue, Trevor, 43, and Michelle, 52, are wearing homemade Oasis T-shirts but waiting to buy some official Adidas jackets. Trevor has an immaculate version of Liam Gallagher’s most famous haircut: long sideburns, a bit spiked on the top. “I’m contractually obliged to have this haircut,” he says. “I’m Liam in a tribute band.”
It turns out that Hemel Hempstead’s own Oh-aces have their own turbulent history. “The first lineup failed,” says Michelle. “Me and Noel fell out,” says Trevor. “It’s been this lineup since January.”
It is when he puts on his stage gear and glasses and has a couple of beers that he starts to feel like Liam. Tonight, he says, “I’ll definitely be looking for some tips, but not judging.”
Fans have come from as far away as Tokyo to attend the first gig of the reunion tour. Photograph: Adam Vaughan/EPA
Outside the stadium there is another merchandise booth, where Marina, 36, and Shun, 29, are waiting holding a Japanese flag. They have flown 16 hours from Tokyo to see Oasis for the first time. It is personal for them, too. Marina translates for Shun: “He has a brother and it was not a good relationship, similar to Oasis. But they are in a band: Shun plays drums and his brother plays guitar, and they have a good relationship now. The music helps.”
At least a few fans seem to have travelled from even further away. Back in Spillers, a group of three friends are wearing T-shirts that say: “We live in desert looking for Oasis – 2025.7.5 – From Shanghai to Cardiff – 8,100km”. The trio travelled to the UK last month for their first Glastonbury and to finally see Oasis live after 20 years of being fans.
Teresa, 37, has loved the band since she was 13. “When I feel sad, their songs make it better,” she says. “The songs mean a lot – their spirit gives me the hope to meet difficult things and it can become the energy for me. I think the concert will become very important for me in my future life.”
