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1,190 news posts in Mind and body

Health

06 Jun 2025

Statins may reduce risk of death by 39% for patients with life-threatening sepsis

It has been suggested that statins could boost the chances of survival of patients with sepsis because of their multipronged effects on inflammation. Here, researchers from China used the MIMIC-IV database to perform a retrospective cohort study on two large, matched groups: critically ill patients with sepsis in the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who received standard of care with or without statins. The 28-day all-cause mortality was 39% lower in relative terms [an absolute reduction from 23.4% to 14.3%] in the statin group, suggesting a protective effect. Previous randomized controlled trials that didn’t find any such benefit might have been too small or have had other weaknesses. The present results need to be confirmed in a large, well-designed randomized clinical trial.

Humanities

05 Jun 2025

Survival of the greenest: why world’s oldest organizations are surpassing young upstarts in environmental sustainability

In a new article published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, Daria Haner, Dr Yilei Wang, Dr Deniz Ones, Dr Stephan Dilchert, Dr Yagizhan Yazar, and Karn Kaura unveil surprising new findings: the world’s most sustainable businesses are the world’s most long-lived businesses, too. In this guest editorial, they explain their results, discuss the potential underlying reasons for their findings, and underline the importance of sustainability to the future of business.

Life sciences

21 May 2025

Biodiversity in Antarctic soils may be greatly underestimated after surprising discovery

Researchers used high-throughput DNA sequencing to measure biodiversity along a transect – a succession from recently exposed to mature soil – in front of a glacier in Antarctica. To capture a detailed ecological ‘time sequence’ they distinguished between intracellular and extracellular DNA from living versus dead or locally extinct species. They found an abundance of previously unsuspected interactions between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, eg, algae with heterotrophic bacteria and fungi with actinobacteria. The results imply that novel mutualistic interactions play an essential role in shaping this system, and that biodiversity in Antarctica may be much greater than previously thought.