It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, August 29, 2026
The brain health movement just got bigger with BrainHealth.com
American Academy of Neurology launches new public website
MINNEAPOLIS — TheAmerican Academy of Neurology (AAN) has launched BrainHealth.com, a new public resource offering expert-reviewed information, tools and stories to help people improve and protect their brain health. BrainHealth.com is designed for people living with neurological conditions, supporting a loved one or just looking for ways to embrace brain health in everyday life.
“Brain health is essential throughout our lives, yet many people may not know where to turn for trustworthy, easy-to-understand information,” said American Academy of Neurology President Natalia S. Rost, MD, MPH, FAAN, FAHA. “With BrainHealth.com, the American Academy of Neurology is bringing together evidence-based guidance and practical resources to help people make informed choices for their brain health at every stage of life.”
“We are excited to introduce BrainHealth.com, a resource curated by neurologists to help people find reliable, evidence-based information about brain health,” said BrainHealth.com Editor-in-Chief Sarah Song, MD, FAAN. “We’re building on a trusted foundation while creating a destination where people can explore brain health through expert-reviewed articles, a podcast, books and personal stories.”
BrainHealth.com builds on the American Academy of Neurology’s long-standing commitment to public education, expanding the legacy of Brain & Life® with expert-reviewed articles, the Brain Health Podcast and Brain Health Books. The website features trusted information on brain health and neurological conditions, including the latest neuroscience research, wellness recommendations, caregiving guidance and patient resources. It includes personal stories that inform, inspire and empower people to navigate brain health with confidence.
The website offers multiple ways for people to engage with the growing brain health movement:
The American Academy of Neurology is the leading voice in brain health. As the world’s largest association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals with more than 44,000 members, the AAN provides access to the latest news, science and research affecting neurology for patients, caregivers, physicians and professionals alike. The AAN’s mission is to enhance member career fulfillment and promote brain health for all. A neurologist is a doctor who specializes in the diagnosis, care and treatment of brain, spinal cord and nervous system diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, stroke, concussion, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, headache and migraine.
The academic team from Imperial contributed to the development by Thomson Reuters of a frontier AI model named Thomson that has been found to rival the performance of the big foundation models, even though its $40 million development cost was just a fraction of the billions invested in building the leading models.
The technology company, which specialises in supporting professions such as law and accountancy, says the approach could allow organisations to build and deploy frontier AI systems without the resources of the major frontier labs.
This would help meet a well-recognised need for governments and companies around the world to build their own highly capable ‘sovereign’ AI systems that would help ensure vital interests are not in the hands of external organisations.
Thomson Reuters developed Thomson by building on an open-source model named Qwen, aided by techniques it developed in partnership with Imperial.
While open-source models have been available to build on for a few years, it has been an open question until now whether organisations other than the biggest AI companies can substantially improve them while retaining their general capabilities. The research has provided evidence that they can: Drawing on the multinational’s proprietary data and its deep domain expertise in fields such as law, Thomson is particularly adept at specialist professional tasks but also performs well as a general-purpose large language model.
Dr Jonathan Richard Schwarz, Head of AI Research at Thomson Reuters and Associate Director of the Thomson Reuters–Imperial Frontier AI Research Lab at Imperial College London, said: “Building a sovereign AI originally meant training your model from scratch. With a billion dollars, that might just produce something that is competitive. But our alternative approach changes that.”
Addressing technical challenges
The model is based in substantial part on work at the Thomson Reuters–Imperial Frontier AI Research Lab, a recently launched partnership between the two organisations, which identified solutions to some of the key obstacles to successfully improving on open-source foundation models.
One of the biggest obstacles is catastrophic forgetting, a tendency of foundation models to lose many of their existing skills in the process of acquiring new ones.
A team from the lab led by Dr Schwarz tested several different approaches to preventing this from happening. One of the most successful, they found, was to train the model intensively enough to substantially improve its performance on new tasks, and then to blend the weights (numerical parameters that determine how a model behaves) from the newly trained model with those from the original to yield a model that combines old and new skill sets.
To judge how well each approach worked, the researchers used an evaluation methodology developed at their lab known as CapTrack, a compute-efficient evaluation method that tracks whether a model can perform a task, whether it will do so by default, and how it carries it out, helping researchers spot divergence in general capabilities during training.
The team also addressed the challenge of re-training a foundation model to adhere to ethical principles such as safety and impartiality, drawing on the Public AI Constitution, an open-source governance framework devised by experts from several countries and designed to reflect universal values such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
To this end, they identified patterns in the open-source model’s internal activations associated with unwanted behaviour and used an optimisation algorithm to find weight adjustments that weakened those patterns while preserving its useful abilities. They then reinforced desired behaviours by training the model to favour responses that followed the AI Constitution.
Professor Alessandra Russo, Director of the Thomson Reuters–Imperial Frontier AI Research Lab and Convening Co-Director of the School of Convergence Science at Imperial College London, said: “To harness the benefits of AI we need more than ever-larger models and ever-greater computing power – we need to combine technical expertise with deep domain expertise and a clear understanding of the real-world contexts in which the technologies will operate. This early result of our work with Thomson Reuters demonstrates the genuinely useful innovations that academic and industry experts achieve when they bring these qualities together in a partnership. It is exactly the kind of collaboration that Imperial’s School of Convergence Science is designed to enable.”
Imperial's School of Convergence Science is an initiative of the university’s Science for Humanity strategy, facilitating research that addresses societal challenges of significant scale that defy conventional approaches through the deep integration of disciplines and cross-sector partners.
The Thomson Reuters–Imperial Frontier AI Research Lab is the first strategic partnership within the School of Convergence Science and aims to tackle foundational challenges in AI safety, reliability and societal impact.
New philosophical framework reframes moral distress in healthcare
Researchers propose a new understanding of moral distress that links ethical awareness with clinician well-being, organizational culture, and patient care
This type of suffering arises when professionals recognize the ethically appropriate course of action but are prevented from acting because of external constraints.
Credit: nenadstojkovicart from Openverse Image source:https://openverse.org/image/746dee95-211a-4b74-a42f-126e10bc5b42?q=healthcare+professionals&p=64
Nurses and physicians often recognize what kind of care a patient deserves in a given moment, be it more time at the bedside, a change in pain management, or a detailed conversation about the goals of a specific treatment. However, these healthcare professionals sometimes find themselves unable to follow through due to external factors, ranging from understaffing and resource shortages to institutional policies and regulations. This gap between what clinicians believe is right and what they are able to do is called “moral distress” in the field of healthcare ethics. Moral distress has been associated with burnout, staff turnover, and challenges in delivering ethically responsive patient care.
First introduced by ethicist Andrew Jameton, the concept of moral distress has been studied for over 40 years. Most existing research has assumed that clinicians already recognize what they ought to do, without fully examining how that recognition is formed. Far less attention has gone to a more basic question: How do healthcare professionals come to recognize that a situation is ethically significant in the first place? By overlooking this issue, the concept of moral distress remains somewhat blurry and hard to distinguish from ordinary workplace stress occupational burnout, disagreements about the appropriate course of care, or conflicts over professional roles.
Seeking to address this gap, a research team consisting of Professor Tomohide Ibuki from the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo University of Science, Japan, and Dr. Keiichiro Yamamoto from the Department of Clinical Research Management, Center for Clinical Sciences, Japan Institute for Health Security, Japan, revisited the foundations of moral distress from a philosophical perspective. Their study, published online in Nursing Ethics journal on July 9, 2026, draws on the work of philosopher John McDowell to propose a new way of understanding how healthcare professionals develop moral sensitivity and why moral distress arises.
Drawing on McDowell’s account of perception, second nature, and the space of reasons, including his discussion of Bildung, or ethical formation, the authors argue that moral sensitivity in healthcare is a cultivated capacity to perceive ethically significant features of a clinical situation as reasons for action. Through education and clinical experience, professionals learn to perceive a patient’s pain, compromised dignity, or need for care as ethical reasons for action rather than neutral facts. On this basis, the paper philosophically reconstructs moral distress not merely as psychological stress or frustration at being blocked from acting, but as a form of normative suffering that occurs when a morally sensitive professional recognizes ethically significant reasons for action but is prevented by external constraints from responding to them. Unlike general psychological distress, moral distress specifically arises when clinicians recognize ethical reasons for action but are unable to respond because of institutional or organizational constraints.
This reframing leads to one of the main points of the paper, which the authors call the “paradox of moral distress.” As the authors explain: “Paradoxically, healthcare professionals with greater moral sensitivity may be more likely to recognize ethical problems and, under organizational and institutional constraints, more likely to experience moral distress.” Thus, moral distress may sometimes be a sign of strong ethical awareness rather than personal weakness or an inability to cope.
This relationship is a conceptual proposal that remains to be examined empirically, but the framework offers a clearer foundation for future research. If supported by future studies, this work could reshape how healthcare organizations approach moral distress. Rather than focusing only on helping individuals become more resilient or better able to cope with stress, healthcare systems should also examine whether clinicians are given the opportunity, resources, and institutional support to act on the ethical concerns they identify. Rather than discouraging healthcare professionals from recognizing or expressing ethical concerns, hospitals should combine ethics education with organizational support, including opportunities for ethical discussion, accessible ethics consultation, responsive leadership, adequate staffing and resources, and decision-making processes, that ensure clinicians' ethical concerns are heard and addressed. Similarly, ethics education should cultivate the ability to recognize ethically significant situations while being paired with organizational cultures that encourage ethical discussion and shared decision-making.
Ultimately, the researchers hope their work will encourage healthcare institutions to rethink moral distress and see it as a sign that organizational conditions might be standing in the way of ethical care. “Our framework could help create workplaces where healthcare professionals can more readily express ethical concerns and could inform educational and organizational improvements that support better patient care.” The authors also suggest that addressing moral distress requires greater attention to organizational ethics and institutional reforms, rather than relying solely on individual coping strategies.
About The Tokyo University of Science Tokyo University of Science (TUS) is a well-known and respected university, and the largest science-specialized private research university in Japan, with four campuses in central Tokyo and its suburbs and in Hokkaido. Established in 1881, the university has continually contributed to Japan's development in science through inculcating the love for science in researchers, technicians, and educators.
With a mission of “Creating science and technology for the harmonious development of nature, human beings, and society," TUS has undertaken a wide range of research from basic to applied science. TUS has embraced a multidisciplinary approach to research and undertaken intensive study in some of today's most vital fields. TUS is a meritocracy where the best in science is recognized and nurtured. It is the only private university in Japan that has produced a Nobel Prize winner and the only private university in Asia to produce Nobel Prize winners within the natural sciences field.
Website: https://www.tus.ac.jp/en/mediarelations/
About Professor Tomohide Ibuki from Tokyo University of Science Professor Tomohide Ibuki obtained a PhD degree from The University of Tokyo in 2014. He currently serves as Full Professor at the Institute of Arts and Sciences of Tokyo University of Science, Japan. He specializes in bioethics, research ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics. Prof. Ibuki has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers. He is a member of the Japan Association for Bioethics.
About Dr. Keiichiro Yamamoto from the Japan Institute for Health Security Dr. Keiichiro Yamamoto is the Director of the Department of Clinical Research Management at the Center for Clinical Sciences, Japan Institute for Health Security, Japan. He specializes in bioethics, clinical ethics, research ethics, and moral philosophy. His research focuses on ethical issues in healthcare practice, including moral distress, clinical research governance, and the ethical implications of emerging medical technologies. He also serves on the Editorial Board of BMC Medical Ethics.
Funding information This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) under Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), “A Comprehensive Study on Moral Distress” [Grant number 23H00005].
We report a closed-loop strategy that upcycles toxic PH3 emissions into Ni2P/Ni5P4 heterostructures, realizing both deep purification and efficient hydrogen evolution.
Industrial emissions of phosphine (PH3), a highly toxic and flammable gas from phosphorus chemical industries and semiconductor manufacturing, demand urgent mitigation to protect public health and the climate. While traditional methods focus on capturing and disposing of these pollutants, a collaborative research team led by Professors Lijuan Jia, Shuo Cui, and Jiayu Feng at Yunnan Minzu University has introduced a "closed-loop" strategy. They have successfully upcycled PH3 waste into high-value electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), a critical process for the global transition to a hydrogen economy.
The team’s research, published in the journal Nano Research on June 24, 2026, details the use of spherical nickel oxide (NiO) as a highly efficient scavenger. The NiO precursor achieves a PH3 removal efficiency of 99.2% and a record-breaking adsorption capacity. Crucially, the process does not end with a "spent" adsorbent; instead, the captured phosphorus reacts with the nickel host to form a unique Ni2P/Ni5P4 heterostructure. “Converting hazardous industrial waste into high-value energy materials represents a sustainable strategy for environmental management. Our work demonstrates that we can turn an environmental burden into a powerful asset for green energy,” said Prof. Lijuan Jia, a senior author of the study.
The resulting catalyst demonstrates exceptional performance in water splitting. The secret to this efficiency lies in the atomic-scale engineering of the "spent" material. By precisely controlling the phosphidation kinetics, the researchers created an intimate interface between two different nickel phosphide phases Ni2P/Ni5P4. To understand the underlying mechanism, the team performed Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations. “The heterojunction creates a built-in electric field that optimizes the electronic structure of the nickel active sites” explained Dr. Shuo Cui, co-author of the paper. “This modulation fundamentally changes the chemistry of water dissociation—usually a difficult, energy-consuming step—making it spontaneous and thermodynamically favorable. It essentially clears the 'bottleneck' for hydrogen production.”
The researchers expect this "waste-to-energy" protocol to have significant implications for the phosphorus chemical industry, particularly in regions with high concentrations of mineral processing. The ultimate goal is to scale up this technology to create dual-functional industrial facilities that simultaneously purify toxic air and produce clean hydrogen fuel.
“This work provides a scalable blueprint for phosphorus resource circularity,” added Prof. Jiayu Feng. “By treating the pollutant as a reagent rather than a waste, we are moving closer to a zero-emission industrial cycle.”
Other contributors include Fang Wang, Haocheng Yang, Yu Cheng, Yikun Li, Rui Cao, and Zibin Pan from Yunnan Minzu University, and Prof. Ping Ning from Kunming University of Science and Technology.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52400190, 52300140), the Basic Research Program of Yunnan Provincial Department of Science and Technology, and the Scientific Research Program of Yunnan Provincial Department of Education.
Nano Research is a peer-reviewed, open access, international and interdisciplinary research journal, sponsored by Tsinghua University and the Chinese Chemical Society, published by Tsinghua University Press on the platform SciOpen. It publishes original high-quality research and significant review articles on all aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology, ranging from basic aspects of the science of nanoscale materials to practical applications of such materials. After 18 years of development, it has become one of the most influential academic journals in the nano field. Nano Research has published more than 1,000 papers every year from 2022, with its cumulative count surpassing 8,000 articles. In 2025 InCites Journal Citation Reports, its 2025 IF is 9.4 (8.3, 5 years), and it continues to be the Q1 area among the four subject classifications. Nano Research Award, established by Nano Research together with TUP and Springer Nature in 2013, and Nano Research Young Innovators (NR45) Awards, established by Nano Research in 2018, have become international academic awards with global influence.
Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) aerobraking for spacecraft on reentry. By generating a magnetic field, the superheated plasma at the surface of a vessel can be pushed further away while generating an increased aerodynamic drag.
Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created a new system to test magnetohydrodynamic aerobraking for spacecraft reentering the atmosphere. Their platform generates intense magnetic fields with a powerful electromagnet as a miniature vessel is hit with a shockwave traveling at over seven kilometers per second. Their magnets reached far higher fields than previous work with permanent magnets and are a crucial stepping stone toward tests with real vessels in the atmosphere.
When spacecraft reenter the atmosphere, they are hit by shockwaves exceeding several kilometers per second which heat up the air at the vessel surface to several thousand degrees. To counter this intense heating, current technologies use heat-resistant tiles and sacrificial material which help dissipate heat and protect the craft. While reliable, this kind of approach has serious limitations, increasing weight, surface wear, cost, and repair times. This is especially limiting when there is an increasing demand for vessels to be reusable.
A promising technology for overcoming these challenges is magnetohydrodynamic aerobraking (MHD). By applying a magnetic field to the weakly-ionized plasma at the shockwave, the ultra-hot shock layer can be expanded and pushed away from the craft surface. Not only does this reduce the flow of heat into the vessel, but it can increase the aerodynamic drag, slowing the craft down. While previous works resoundingly support this method, testing such systems is itself a big challenge. Experiments usually involve putting a permanent magnet inside a small test model and hitting it with a shockwave, but their design makes it difficult to systematically trial different field strengths and shapes.
To enable engineers to trial a wider range of magnetic fields, a team led by Associate Professor Kohei Shimamura of Tokyo Metropolitan University have engineered a new system using a powerful electromagnet mounted inside a small model; the electromagnet is formed by a customizable set of coils and powered by a pulse-forming network (PFN) which hits it with an intense pulse of current, generating a strong field for a short period of time. In a test, the model is hit by a shockwave traveling at over seven kilometers per second for a period of tens of microseconds in a hypersonic expansion tube, a ground-based facility for testing aircraft and spacecraft in extreme environments. The team designed the system to track the arrival of the shockwave and precisely sync the magnetic field to its duration, reaching field strengths significantly exceeding what is possible with a permanent neodymium magnet. A high-speed camera was also synced to the shockwave to record the light given off by the heated shockwave layer (or “self-emission” layer).
To see it at work, the team designed two different models, each with coil configurations specifically tailored for their different shapes. They confirmed that fields of 1.24 and 1.58 Tesla were created, the latter more than double the field strength of conventional neodymium magnets. The self-emission layer was also observed to be more than 15% thicker with the field on.
The team’s work is a vital step towards planned tests of real reentry experiments, and the development of a core technology for any future space mission which involves reentry into any atmosphere.
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 21KK0078 and 26KJ1885.
Quasi-Steady Magnetic Field Generated by Pulse Forming Network for Magnetohydrodynamic Aerobraking
No electricity needed for solid-state cooling: Heat becomes cold
Researchers of KIT and the University of Tsukuba have developed – as a world first – a heat-driven, elastocaloric cooling system that leverages waste heat and solar energy for sustainable cooling
The new cooling system combines two nickel-titanium foils: a heat-responsive foil generates motion, which a second foil uses to produce cooling. (Image: Concept by Yi-Ting Hsiau and Jingyuan Xu, KIT; visual design by Ella Maru Studio)
Credit: Image: Concept by Yi-Ting Hsiau and Jingyuan Xu, KIT; visual design by Ella Maru Studio
The basic cooling principle for fridges, A/C systems, or datacenters has been the same for more than a hundred years. An electricity-driven compressor transfers heat carried by a refrigerant from one location to another. Since the cooling demand is constantly on the rise, cooling and heating meanwhile account for almost half of the global energy consumption. This is aggravated by the fact that many common refrigerants contribute to global warming. Elastocaloric solid-state cooling is considered a promising alternative: Shape-memory alloys tend to cool down once a previously applied mechanical load is released. However, even elastocaloric systems have so far relied on an electrically driven actuator to generate the required force – which means that they could not directly use abundantly available heat sources such as waste heat or solar energy.
Driven by Heat instead of Electric Power
This is exactly where the new approach developed by the research team comes into play, coupling two ultra-thin nickel-titanium films that have complementary functions. The first film uses a shape-memory effect: Once it is heated up, it starts to shrink, thereby converting thermal energy directly into mechanical work – without the help of an electric motor. This motion immediately transfers to the second film where cyclic loading and unloading brings about reversible alterations in the crystal structure that generate cold. Thus, heat replaces the electrically driven actuator, which was previously used to drive elastocaloric cooling systems.
“The crucial innovation is that we combine two complementary functions of shape memory alloys, with one film converting heat into mechanical work and the other film converting this work into cold,” said Dr. Jingyuan Xu who leads the Young Investigator Group of the ZEco Thermal Lab at KIT’s Institute of Microstructure Technology (IMT). “This way, we’re establishing a new approach to drive solid-state cooling, thereby opening up exciting possibilities for the use of waste heat and solar energy.”
First Cooling Capacity Values Confirmed in the Lab
At an actuator temperature of 86° Celsius, the prototype of this system achieved a temperature difference of 4° Celsius on the component level, while the temperature change in the elastocaloric refrigerant amounted to nearly 13° Celsius. This way, the researchers were able to prove the feasibility of their concept in experiment for the first time. The setup also worked reliably with an external heat source that provided 130° Celsius, demonstrating that the system is capable to work with real-world heat sources. “The decisive moment for us was when we were able to measure the cold that had indeed been generated by a heat-driven system,” said Yi-Ting Hsiau, lead author of the study and doctoral researcher at the IMT. “This showed us that the principle doesn’t just work in theory.”
The current setup has been designed as a feasibility study and is therefore not optimized for a maximum cooling capacity yet. The team is already working on connecting multiple films in parallel to increase the cooling capacity. Potential applications range from cooling of processors in computers, which could use their own waste heat for this purpose, to cooling of sensitive electronics in automobiles using the heat from the drive train.
The study was conducted in collaboration with the University of Tsukuba in Japan, paving the way for heat-driven solid-state cooling that is fit for use in practice. “We believe that this is only the beginning,” said Xu. “By scaling up this technology we want to develop compact cooling systems that leverage abundantly available heat sources for sustainable cooling.”
Funds for this study came from the Carl Zeiss Foundation (CZS Nexus project), the Baden-Württemberg Foundation (elite postdocs program), and the Hector Fellow Academy.
In close partnership with society, KIT develops solutions for urgent challenges – from climate change, energy transition and sustainable use of natural resources to artificial intelligence, sovereignty and an aging population. As The University in the Helmholtz Association, KIT unites scientific excellence from insight to application-driven research under one roof – and is thus in a unique position to drive this transformation. As a University of Excellence, KIT offers its more than 10,000 employees and 23,000 students outstanding opportunities to shape a sustainable and resilient future. KIT – Science for Impact.
