Researchers at the University of Lancashire found that taking 100 microliters of peppermint oil twice a day for 20 days reduced systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure reading) by an average of 8.5mmHg.

The findings, published in PLOS One, suggest peppermint oil could provide a simple, inexpensive, and well-tolerated option for people with slightly elevated blood pressure.

A Potential Low-Cost Approach to Blood Pressure

Lead author Dr. Jonnie Sinclair, Reader in Sport and Health Sciences, said: “High blood pressure is one of the biggest causes of heart disease and death worldwide, and it costs a huge amount of money to treat. Although medicines are commonly used to treat it, it’s not always clear how well they work in the long-term, and they can cause unwanted side effects.”

Peppermint naturally contains compounds including menthol and flavonoids. To investigate its possible effects, researchers enrolled 40 adults between the ages of 18 and 65 and randomly assigned them to two groups.

Participants with prehypertension or stage 1 hypertension in one group received a small daily amount of peppermint oil. The comparison group received a peppermint-flavored placebo without the active oil. Blood pressure improved in the peppermint oil group, while the placebo group showed no meaningful change.

Researchers Tracked More Than Blood Pressure

Although systolic blood pressure was the main focus, the researchers also examined several other measures. These included body measurements, blood test results, diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number in a blood pressure reading), heart rate, mental well-being and sleep quality.

Dr. Sinclair added: “Our findings were very positive and they have significant clinical implications, especially given arterial hypertension is the most common preventable risk factor for cardiometabolic disease and the greatest single risk factor for global mortality.

“Peppermint oil is low in calories and price so it’s proved to be a very simple and cost-effective solution to potentially treat millions of people around the world.”

Alongside counting calories or eating smaller portions, many people add exercise into the equation when trying to lose weight to help tip the balance. Yet research shows that exercise may only have modest effects on weight loss.

But before you ditch your workouts, it’s important to note that exercise still plays a really important role when it comes to health – perhaps especially in keeping the pounds off after reaching your goal weight.

There are several processes that help explain why exercise doesn’t always result in huge amounts of weight loss.

Exercise can stimulate appetite, leading to increased food intake. People may also subconsciously move less throughout the rest of the day after doing a workout, which means exercise may have less impact on their overall calorie deficit.

The body also becomes more efficient over time – burning fewer calories while doing the same activity. This process, sometimes called “metabolic adaptation”, reflects the body’s tendency to defend against weight loss.

From an evolutionary perspective, conserving energy during periods of intense physical activity probably protected our ancestors from starvation. But in today’s world, metabolic adaptation is one of many factors that can make weight loss difficult.

The importance of exercise

Although exercise may not be the main driver of weight loss, it seems it might play a role in maintaining weight loss.

In a study of over 1,100 people, physical activity was shown to have little effect on the amount of weight a person initially lost. However, doing higher levels of activity after losing weight was strongly linked to maintaining the weight loss.

It’s worth noting that exercise was also associated with measurable health improvements – including better cholesterol, lower inflammation, better blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity, all of which are associated with lower risk of health problems, such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

These many health benefits show just how important it is to exercise both while losing weight and maintaining weight loss.

Evidence also suggests that combining exercise with weight loss drugs (such as Saxenda), may help people maintain their weight loss better than using the drug alone.

Why exercise works

It may seem confusing that exercise isn’t especially effective for losing weight but can help prevent regain. The reasons behind this paradox aren’t fully understood, but several mechanisms may offer an explanation.

The first has to do with our resting energy expenditure (the amount of calories our body burns when doing nothing).

When we lose weight, our resting energy expenditure decreases by more than you would expect for the amount of weight lost. This is thought to contribute to weight regain. But exercise raises total daily energy expenditure, which can help to partially offset this.

A second factor relates to muscle mass.

Weight loss usually results in the loss of both fat and muscle. Losing muscle lowers resting energy expenditure, which can contribute to weight regain.

But exercise, especially resistance training (such as Pilates or lifting weights), can help preserve or even rebuild muscle mass. This can boost our metabolism, which may aid in long-term weight maintenance.

Physical activity also helps our body to maintain its ability to burn fat. After losing weight, the body often becomes less efficient at using fat for energy.

But intense exercise can improve fat burning and metabolic flexibility – the ability to switch between burning carbohydrates and fat depending on what’s available. This helps the body continue burning fat even when calorie intake is low or weight is lost.

Exercise improves insulin sensitivity as well. This reduces the amount of insulin required to regulate blood sugar. This is beneficial as higher insulin levels can promote fat storage and reduce fat breakdown.

Exercise has many indirect effects on us that can aid in weight maintenance. For instance, exercise can improve sleep, mood and reduce stress levels. These all reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which could lower the amount of fat the body stores.

Regular activity can also help regulate appetite and blood glucose, which may help reduce cravings and limit overeating.

It’s important to acknowledge that everyone is different. This means we all respond differently to exercise in terms of how many calories we burn or whether a workout makes us feel hungrier later in the day.

Different types of workouts also confer their own benefits when it comes to health and weight maintenance.

Aerobic exercise (such as brisk walking, cycling or running) burns calories and, at higher intensities, may also enhance the body’s ability to burn fat for fuel.

Resistance training, on the other hand, helps build and preserve muscle mass. This supports a higher resting energy expenditure, aiding long-term weight maintenance.

Exercise may not be the most powerful tool for losing weight, but it could help sustain hard-earned weight loss. Perhaps most importantly, it offers many physical and mental health benefits that go far beyond the numbers on the scale.

The discovery, made by an international team that included Penn State researchers, adds to a growing challenge for theories about how the first galaxies formed and evolved. The findings were published in Nature Astronomy.

JWST Uncovers Faint Stars in Ancient Galaxies

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers examined nine massive, mature galaxies that stopped producing new stars billions of years ago. They combined JWST observations of the distant universe with earlier ground-based data from the Very Large Telescope.

For the first time, the team was able to reliably estimate the relative numbers of small, faint stars and much larger, brighter stars in galaxies at such great distances.

“These galaxies are different,” said Joel Leja, the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross Mid-Career Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and coauthor of the paper. “They’re different in the way that is really challenging to understand, because they are more massive than we expected — like a lot more massive, they have three or four times more mass than we expected.”

Astronomers made the measurements by separating each galaxy’s light into a spectrum. Small variations in color within that spectrum can reveal which kinds of stars are present.

The difficulty is that large, luminous stars dominate the light, while smaller stars are far dimmer and much harder to identify. Penn State researchers contributed expertise and guidance for modeling the light detected from the galaxy systems.

Bright Stars Can Hide Vast Stellar Populations

“If a galaxy were a city, the brightest stars would be the skyscrapers that immediately catch your eye from afar,” said lead author Chloe Cheng, a recent doctoral graduate of Leiden University. “Our models demonstrate that a far more numerous population of low-mass stars is concealed by those rare, bright stars, like houses hidden between skyscrapers. As a result, this galaxy turns out to be much more massive than previous estimates suggested.”

Traditionally, astronomers estimating the mass hidden in small, faint stars have assumed that stars formed in roughly similar proportions throughout the universe. The new findings challenge that long-standing assumption.

The researchers found that the most massive galaxies in the early universe appear to contain a much greater share of low-mass stars than smaller galaxies such as the Milky Way.

One galaxy stood out in particular, according to coauthor Martje Slob, a doctoral candidate at Leiden University. It likely formed less than one and a half billion years after the Big Bang and could be as much as four times more massive than previous calculations suggested.

“Until recently, measurements like these were simply impossible,” Slob said. “We needed not only a telescope capable of magnifying very distant galaxies, but also spectra of exceptional quality and new analysis techniques to reliably detect the subtle signatures of faint, low-mass stars hidden within these cosmic titans.”

An Even Bigger Early Universe Puzzle

The findings could have major consequences for scientists trying to understand how galaxies developed in the young universe.

Since JWST began observing the cosmos, astronomers have repeatedly identified unexpectedly massive and mature galaxies that existed relatively soon after the Big Bang. Those discoveries have already put pressure on existing models of galaxy formation.

“This discovery has crucial implications for our understanding of the early universe,” said Leja, who is also affiliated with The Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. “Since the launch of JWST, astronomers have found surprisingly massive and mature galaxies that already existed shortly after the Big Bang. These very early galaxies are thought to evolve into the type of galaxies studied in this work; adding up to four times more stars to these massive, early-forming galaxies sharpens these tensions further.”

If galaxies like these contained substantially more stars than researchers previously estimated, theories of galaxy formation must account for how such enormous numbers of small stars could have appeared so early in cosmic history.

Hidden Stars Could Also Mean More Early Planets

The implications may extend beyond galaxy formation.

“This result shows that much more mass than previously thought is hidden in low-mass stars,” said Mariska Kriek, who led the research and serves as professor of extragalactic astronomy at Leiden Observatory. “That has consequences for many areas of astronomy. For example, as many planets orbit low-mass stars, this could even indicate that more planets formed in the early universe than we had previously assumed.”

Over the next several years, the researchers plan to use the same technique to study galaxies from even earlier periods. Their goal is to push observations closer to the time when the universe’s first generations of stars and galaxies began to emerge.

Researchers at Rockefeller University compared how the body responds to exercise performed at different intensities. They found that six 30-second, all-out sprints changed nearly one-quarter of the proteins measured in the blood immediately after exercise. By comparison, 90 minutes of continuous moderate cycling altered less than one-quarter of one percent. Moderate treadmill running affected more proteins than cycling, but still far fewer than the brief sprint session.

Sprinting Triggers a Rapid Molecular Surge

The sprint workout also altered more than 200 metabolites and rapidly increased levels of proteins involved in blood vessel growth, tissue remodeling, and hormonal signaling.

Some of these proteins appeared to reach the bloodstream through a fast cell-signaling process called ectodomain shedding — rather than being newly produced and released, pieces of proteins already located on the surface of cells were cut away and rapidly sent into circulation.

The researchers also tested how human fat cells responded to blood collected after sprinting. Those cells showed widespread changes in gene activity, including shifts in how they processed fuel, reacted to hormones, and detected nutrient availability.

Moderate Exercise Produces a Slower Response

Moderate exercise led to a much less dramatic immediate reaction. A substantial rise in fatty acids and liver-derived proteins associated with the demands of endurance exercise did not appear in the bloodstream until three hours after the workout.

Human fat cells exposed to blood collected after moderate cycling also showed only small changes in gene activity.

Links to Metabolic Health and Biological Aging

The researchers then compared the proteins that responded to exercise with health information from more than 53,000 participants in the UK Biobank. Many of those proteins were associated with lower risks of cardiovascular and metabolic disease.

The pattern was especially notable for obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other metabolic disorders. Among 33 proteins associated with lower risk, 32 were altered by sprinting, while only three were affected by moderate exercise. More than one-quarter of those proteins were also linked to slower biological aging.

“What’s exciting here is that just a few minutes of intense exercise can trigger a significant molecular response,” says Cohen. “And we still see it after eight weeks of training, which tells us this response isn’t simply a product of the body struggling to keep up with unfamiliar stress. It may be that the responses we observed are intrinsic to intense exercise.”

Why Exercise Intensity May Matter

The findings suggest that exercise intensity may strongly influence the proteins and metabolites released into the bloodstream and, in turn, the way tissues throughout the body respond.

“It’s well appreciated that different intensities of exercise stimulate distinct body-wide adaptations,” notes Luke Olsen, the postdoctoral fellow who conducted the studies. “However, the molecular mechanisms linking these intensity-dependent adaptations have remained largely elusive. Our work suggests that exerkines-proteins and metabolites released into the bloodstream following exercise-are highly sensitive to exercise intensity and may be the key mediators of the health-promoting effects of short bursts of vigorous exercise.”

Materials can behave in unexpected ways after absorbing light. In some cases, light pushes them into photoinduced states with properties that are very different from those they display under ordinary conditions. These states give researchers another way to alter material behavior beyond conventional approaches such as heating or cooling. Learning exactly how they form could be important for developing future photoresponsive materials and advanced optical technologies.

Capturing a Transformation in Femtoseconds

One of the biggest challenges is speed. The first steps in forming a photoinduced state can unfold on the femtosecond (fs) timescale (a millionth of a billionth of a second), making them exceptionally difficult to observe.

To investigate these earliest moments, a team led by Assistant Professor Tadahiko Ishikawa from the Department of Chemistry, School of Science, Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo), Japan, worked with then doctoral student Samiran Banu (currently a Special Postdoctoral Researcher at RIKEN) and collaborators at Tohoku University and Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan.

The researchers focused on a metal-organic framework (MOF), a material constructed by connecting metal ions with organic molecules. Their goal was to determine exactly how a photoinduced hidden state develops. The findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“We found that the photoinduced hidden state forms within 30 fs through a previously unknown intermediate electronic state,” says Ishikawa.

Ultrafast Lasers Reveal a Hidden State

To follow the transformation, the researchers used time-resolved reflectance spectroscopy and ultrashort laser pulses lasting only six fs. The method allowed them to measure how the light reflected by the material changed almost immediately after the MOF absorbed a laser pulse.

With this extremely fine time resolution, the team tracked rapid changes in the material’s electronic behavior. Within 30 fs, its reflectance spectrum shifted dramatically and developed features linked to the appearance of a new optical absorption band. Those changes indicated that the photoinduced hidden state had formed.

Experiments alone, however, could not fully explain what was happening. The researchers therefore combined their measurements with theoretical calculations to reconstruct the sequence of events inside the material.

A Fleeting Electronic State Comes First

The analysis showed that immediately after absorbing light, the material briefly entered an intermediate electronic state. During this moment, electronic bonds between neighboring sites alternated between stronger and weaker in a repeating pattern. This configuration is known as a bond-order wave state.

The state existed only briefly. It was followed by small movements in the positions of atoms within the material, and those structural changes ultimately produced the photoinduced hidden state.

Theoretical calculations also suggested that the newly formed state may be polar. In such a state, positive and negative electrical charges are distributed unevenly across the material. If these photoinduced polar states can be reliably created and controlled, they could provide new ways to manipulate electronic properties using light.

“By revealing intermediate states, our method could help design materials that can be efficiently controlled using light,” explains Ishikawa.

Toward Materials Controlled by Light

Beyond showing how a photoinduced hidden state develops, the research points to a possible strategy for manipulating material properties with extremely short pulses of light. Being able to create and control these temporary states could contribute to new photoresponsive materials designed for high-speed electronics, optoelectronic devices, and other technologies that require precise control over how materials behave.

Future research could extend the same experimental and theoretical approach to other types of materials. By exposing the previously invisible steps that occur during ultrafast transformations, scientists may move closer to designing materials whose properties can be deliberately and efficiently controlled with light.

A new study published in Frontiers in Materials is helping fill that gap. Researchers in France and Croatia analyzed the protective coating on the Roman Republic shipwreck Ilovik-Paržine 1, which sank about 2,200 years ago off the coast of what is now Croatia.

“In archaeology, little attention is paid to organic waterproofing materials. Yet they are essential for navigation at sea or on rivers and are true witnesses of past naval technologies,” said first author Dr. Armelle Charrié, an archaeometrist at the Laboratory of Mass Spectrometry of Interactions and Systems in Strasbourg. “Studying the coatings, we found two different kinds on this vessel: one made of pine tar, also called pitch, and the other of a mixture of pine tar and beeswax. Analysis of pollen in the coating made it possible to identify the plant taxa present in the immediate environment during the construction or repairs of the ship.”

Pine Tar and Beeswax Protected the Hull

The wreck was discovered in 2016, and both the vessel and its cargo have been investigated several times since then. This study is the first to combine molecular and pollen analysis to identify the ship’s coatings and reconstruct the vegetation present when those materials were produced and applied to the hull.

The research was carried out through a collaboration between the Department for Underwater Archaeology of the Croatian Conservation Institute and the ‘ADRIBOATS’ program of the Centre Camille Jullian at Aix-Marseille University in France.

“Some regions throughout the Adriatic have particular characteristics that led local populations to develop a specific shipbuilding style,” said Charrié. “Only studies like ours offer an overview of these traditions which bear witness to genuine know-how and diverse traditions.”

To investigate the coatings, the researchers performed structural, molecular, and pollen analyses. They used methods including mass spectrometry, which can identify and measure unknown substances within complex organic mixtures.

The team analyzed 10 coating samples to determine the biological origins of the natural materials used on the vessel. Molecular fingerprinting revealed compounds associated with pine trees, showing that every sample was dominated by heated coniferous resin or coniferous tar, also called pitch.

One sample, however, contained a different formulation made from beeswax and tar. This mixture – known to Greek shipbuilders as zopissa – improves the adhesive’s flexibility and is easier to apply when hot.

Ancient Pollen Preserved in Sticky Pitch

Because pitch is naturally sticky, it can capture pollen from nearby vegetation and preserve it for long periods. By studying the types of pollen trapped in the coatings and measuring their relative abundance, the researchers were able to narrow down where some of the pitch may have been produced or reapplied during repairs.

The pollen recovered from Ilovik-Paržine 1 pointed to a wide range of environments. Some came from landscapes typical of Mediterranean and Adriatic coasts and valleys, including forests of holly oak and pine as well as matorral – a kind of Mediterranean shrubland – where olive and hazel trees grow.

Alder and ash pollen indicated vegetation associated with riverbanks and seashores, which occur along the coast and in the nearby hinterland. Small amounts of fir and beech were also present. These trees are associated with mountainous terrain and are characteristic of the north-eastern Adriatic coast, where the mountain ranges of Istria and Dalmatia lie relatively close to the sea.

Evidence of Repeated Repairs Across the Adriatic

The analysis also suggests that the vessel received four to five separate batches of coating over time. The stern and central section appear to have been covered with the same material, while researchers identified three distinct coating batches at the bow.

That pattern may indicate that the ship was repaired repeatedly, with materials obtained from different locations around the Mediterranean.

Earlier research on the vessel’s ballast pointed to Brundisium – today Brindisi – on the south-eastern coast of Italy as the place where the ship was built. The new pollen evidence suggests that some of its coatings may also have been applied in that area.

Other layers, however, may have been added along the north-eastern Adriatic coast, close to where the wreck was ultimately found.

“While it seems obvious that ships sailing long distances need repairs, it’s simply not easy to demonstrate this,” concluded Charrié. “Pollen has been very useful in identifying different coatings where the molecular profiles were identical.”

The study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, was led by senior authors Avram Holmes, associate professor of psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and core faculty member of the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research within the Rutgers Brain Health Institute, and Rajiv Radhakrishnan, associate professor of psychiatry and radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale University. First author Sidhant Chopra, formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Holmes Lab, is a McKenzie Research Fellow at Orygen, Australia’s Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, and the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Measuring the Brain’s Synaptic Connections

Synapses are tiny junctions that allow brain cells to communicate with one another across neural circuits. Problems involving these connections are believed to play a role in the cognitive and emotional symptoms of schizophrenia. Until now, however, scientists have had a limited understanding of exactly where synaptic loss occurs in the brains of living people because conventional imaging methods such as magnetic resonance imaging cannot specifically measure synapses.

The research involved 122 people, including 29 diagnosed with schizophrenia, making it one of the largest synaptic density PET imaging studies conducted so far. Compared with healthy participants, people with schizophrenia showed a pronounced and widespread reduction in synaptic connections across several parts of the brain. These included frontal and temporal regions as well as areas involved in memory and emotion. The loss was also considerably greater on the left side of the brain than on the right.

Researchers found that this synaptic pattern did not match the changes in brain volume typically seen with standard MRI scans. That distinction suggests synaptic loss and changes in brain volume may reflect separate biological processes rather than two imaging methods capturing the same underlying change.

A Molecular Pattern Behind Synaptic Loss

The team also discovered that the brain regions showing the greatest synaptic losses tended to contain high concentrations of receptors for important neurotransmitters, including serotonin, gamma-aminobutyric acid and glutamate. The finding suggests that the molecular characteristics of individual brain regions may influence how vulnerable they are to changes associated with schizophrenia.

To explore how synaptic loss might move through the brain, the researchers used computer simulations based on the brain’s structural connections. Their modeling identified an area in the left frontal lobe as a likely starting point from which synaptic loss could spread into connected regions.

“These findings suggest that in schizophrenia, synaptic loss is not random,” Chopra said. “Rather, it follows the brain’s molecular and connectivity architecture, which could eventually help identify where and how to intervene.”

“This detailed mapping of synaptic vulnerability could eventually help identify where and how to intervene to preserve or restore brain function, such as emerging therapies to prevent and regrow synapses,” Holmes added.

Toward More Precise Schizophrenia Treatments

The researchers said future work will build on these results by investigating how synaptic loss changes over time and how it responds to clinical treatments. A better understanding of that progression could ultimately help researchers develop more precise and personalized approaches to schizophrenia care.