October 2025

Mosquitoes have been discovered in Iceland in a first for the island nation, which has long been one of the world’s mosquito-free places, a researcher told AFP Monday. Three Culiseta annulata mosquitoes, two females and one male, were sighted around 30 kilometres (20 miles) north of the capital Reykjavik, according to Matthias Alfredsson, an entomologist at the

The COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines that saved 2.5 million lives globally during the pandemic could help spark the immune system to fight cancer. This is the surprising takeaway of a new study that we and our colleagues published in the journal Nature. While developing mRNA vaccines for patients with brain tumors in 2016, our team, led by pediatric oncologist Elias Sayour, discovered that mRNA can train

Water may seem boring, but it’s way weirder than it looks. Scientists in Japan have now shown that when confined to tight spaces, water molecules can behave like both a solid and a liquid simultaneously. The differences between liquid water and ice that we experience at the macro scale start at the micro. In ice, molecules are

Removing lymph nodes during cancer surgery has saved countless lives in many tumour types. Yet recent research is challenging parts of this long-standing practice. Imagine your body’s immune defences as a city, and lymph nodes as the hubs where police and firefighters gather fresh intel to launch their attack on criminals. What happens if you remove too