The FIFA World Cup 2026 kicks off at a stadium in Mexico City today in what could be the most high-tech edition of the tournament yet. Every team will have access to an artificial-intelligence tool that can analyse its players' movements, and digital avatars of the players, created from scans of their bodies, will help referees to model match action and spot illegal moves. To understand the role science will have in football's biggest tournament and where the field is heading, Nature spoke to the editor-in-chief of the journal Science and Medicine in Football, which publishes research on various forms of football, including association football ' also known as soccer ' American football and rugby. Franco Impellizzeri, also a sports scientist at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia, once competed for Italy's national taekwondo team. But he admires football ' 'I'm Italian, so football is part of our culture' ' and has since collaborated on studies with football organizations including FIFA (the International Federation of Association Football) and elite clubs....
Peptides have become the latest cure-all trend on social media ' a way to eliminate wrinkles, build lean muscle, boost metabolism, clear brain fog, heal torn ligaments and more. Influencers rave about their peptide-fuelled glow-ups on TikTok. Bodybuilders exchange information about their favourite combinations at the gym. US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is a proponent. 'I'm a big fan of peptides,' he told US podcaster Joe Rogan in February. 'I've used them myself, and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries.' Peptides are made of the same building blocks as proteins, but are shorter ' typically less than 50 amino acids long. And they can be powerful medicines. The hugely successful GLP-1 diabetes and weight-loss drugs, for example, are peptides; as is the hormone insulin. But when wellness gurus and fitness enthusiasts talk about peptides, they're often referring to an alphabet soup of chemicals: BPC-157, MOTS-c and TB-500. These compounds come in vials labelled 'for research use only' because they are not approved for use in humans. It's a 'completely unregulated industry', says Vikas Patel, an emergency-medicine physician at Elmhurst Hospital in Illinois....
MIT researchers have demonstrated a low-cost design of specialized electronic nozzles, called triaxial electrospray emitters, that could be used to manufacture time-release drug-delivery particles or self-healing materials efficiently and at scale. Triaxial electrospray emitters use electricity to precisely dispense three liquids from microscopic nozzles to generate a steady stream with three distinct fluid layers. The liquid forms multilayered droplets, which can solidify into layered microparticles. For instance, an array of triaxial electrospray emitters can be used to make three-layer drug-delivery nanoparticles. The outer layer might slowly erode in the stomach, revealing a second material that controls the release of a core material, which delivers medicine to a specific area of the intestines. Developing a tiny array of electrospray emitters typically requires expensive and time-consuming microfabrication processes inside semiconductor cleanrooms, which limits their use. To overcome these drawbacks, the MIT researchers 3D-printed arrays of triaxial electrospray emitters that have 16 nozzles in an area of about one square centimeter. Each device contains an intricate network of three-dimensional microchannels that uniformly supply liquid to the nozzles....
Stuart H. Orkin '67 shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Swee Lay Thein for their research transforming sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia from incurable to treatable conditions through gene editing therapy. Their work identified the master switch controlling fetal hemoglobin, leading directly to the development of Casgevy ' the first CRISPR-based medicine approved for any disease. Orkin, a graduate of the MIT Department of Biology, is currently a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Shu-Heng Shao, assistant professor of physics at MIT and a researcher in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics ' a Leinweber Institute, was recognized with a 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize. Shao shared the honor with Clay Cordova from the University of Chicago, Thomas Dumitrescu from the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yifan Wang PhD '16 from New York University. The four were recognized for 'discover[ing] and develop[ing] the theory of 'generalized symmetries' in quantum field theory.'...
