Two studies have received funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) as part of an £8 million initiative supporting AI projects aimed at reducing NHS waiting times and improving patient care. Through its Invention for Innovation (i4i) programme, the NIHR awarded £8,136,409 to six projects testing a range of AI and […]
Europe’s extreme heat is shutting down power plants
Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to fans and air-conditioning to try to stay cool. Some power plants won’t be online to help handle the load.
On June 23, France saw its hottest day since record-keeping began in 1947. Temperatures climbed to over 44 °C (111 °F), and overnight temperatures remained unusually high. This prolonged hot weather warmed up the water in some rivers across the country, a problem for the many nuclear plants that rely on those bodies of water for cooling. One reactor has already shut down, and others are being ramped down or will see limitations later in the week.
Unit two at the Golfech nuclear power plant in southern France shut down at about 11:45 p.m. on June 22 when the river used to cool the plant got too hot. The move was a precautionary measure, according to Brid Nelligan, a spokesperson for EDF, the plant’s owner and operator.
The power plant takes in water from the Garonne River and then returns most of it to the river at slightly higher temperatures after using it to cool equipment. French regulations limit the temperature of that return stream, so the warm water (it was expected to reach 28 °C, or around 82 °F) forced the operator to shut down the plant.
EDF, which operates France’s entire nuclear fleet, is also limiting the output of other reactors across the country—one reactor at the Nogent-sur-Seine power plant was ramped down as of Tuesday, and more will follow later in the week, Nelligan says.
Extreme heat has affected France’s nuclear industry before. At least seven gigawatts’ worth of nuclear energy was forced to shut down across the country during a heat wave in July 2025, according to data from Ember Energy. That’s more than the entire grid of Ireland.
This time, power plant outages and limitations aren’t expected to be drastic enough to affect the ability to meet demand in France, according to RTE, operator of the national electric grid.
Nuclear power has made most of the headlines during this heat wave, but other forms of electricity generation face similar challenges. Hydropower plants frequently run into problems when dry conditions lower the amount of water available to generate energy and force them to decrease or shut off operations. In the first five months of 2025, high temperatures and low water conditions cut hydropower supplies in Europe by 13% compared with the year before.
Even established coal and natural-gas plants can be challenged by high temperatures. Hot weather can stress equipment and limit the efficiency of cooling towers. Five gas plants across the UK have reported output reductions due to the conditions, cutting a total of about 2.5 gigawatts from the power supply.
Increased demand, largely driven by cooling, is the main factor stressing Europe’s power grid, says Jean-Paul Harreman, director of Montel, an energy intelligence provider, via email. Even countries that haven’t historically relied much on cooling technologies are turning to them now—the number of UK homes that use air-conditioning has roughly doubled since 2022.
Around the world, the challenges heat presents for the grid are only expected to get worse as climate change brings more frequent and intense heat waves. Globally, energy use for cooling is set to double by 2050 relative to 2023 levels, according to the International Energy Agency.
“Utilities can adapt by planning for summer peaks, making cooling demand more flexible, reinforcing grids for high temperatures, deploying batteries and demand response, and climate-proofing power plants’ cooling systems,” says Simone Tagliapietra, senior fellow at Bruegel, an economic and policy think tank, via email.
But those changes could be expensive. Earlier this year, EDF shared a climate-change vulnerability assessment for its business, including nuclear and hydropower operations across France. Upgrades are expected to cost about €600 million per year (about $680 million) over the next 15 years.
Meanwhile, high temperatures are expected to continue across much of Europe through the end of the week.
National NHS leaders join Summer Schools 2026 speaker line-up
Three national NHS leaders shaping the future of digital health have been confirmed for Summer Schools 2026, which takes place on 16-17 July.
Global research landscape, knowledge structure, and emerging trends in adverse childhood experiences and personality disorders: a bibliometric analysis
BackgroundThe relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and personality disorders (PDs) has attracted sustained attention in psychiatry, psychology, and public health. Existing studies have mainly examined epidemiological associations, specific PDs diagnoses, or mechanisms, whereas bibliometric evidence mapping the field’s knowledge structure and thematic evolution remains limited. This study aimed to characterize trends, contributors, collaboration networks, core themes, and frontiers in ACEs–PDs research.MethodsEnglish-language publications on ACEs and PDs were retrieved from Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and PubMed from inception to December 31, 2025. After year screening, document-type filtering, and deduplication, 5,084 records were included. Bibliometric analyses were performed using R, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace. The merged dataset was used to examine annual trends, countries/regions, institutions, authors, journals, and keyword co-occurrence, while WoSCC records were used for co-citation analysis, keyword clustering, and burst detection.ResultsACEs–PDs research showed sustained growth, with a marked increase after 2000. The United States occupied a central position in publication output, citation impact, and international collaboration, while the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia also showed strong influence. Harvard University, the University of London, and Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg were leading institutions; Zanarini M, Fonagy P, Schmahl C, Paris J, and Kleindienst N were key contributors. Influential journals mainly covered psychiatry, personality disorders, child maltreatment, trauma, and developmental psychopathology. Keyword analyses identified childhood adversity, personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, childhood sexual abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder as core themes. VOSviewer and CiteSpace analyses indicated that hotspots have expanded from childhood abuse, PDs diagnosis, and psychiatric comorbidity to emotion dysregulation, non-suicidal self-injury, social support, functional connectivity, early intervention, and mechanism validation. Highly cited publications revealed a knowledge base centered on childhood abuse/trauma, borderline personality disorder, psychiatric comorbidity, emotion regulation, and neurobiological mechanisms.ConclusionThis study maps development and knowledge structure of ACEs–PDs research. Findings suggest a shift from exposure–outcome association studies toward comorbidity, intermediate phenotypes, neurobiological mechanisms, and clinical translation. Future research should strengthen longitudinal and cross-cultural designs, consider ACE type, timing, duration, and severity, and integrate neuroimaging, inflammatory, epigenetic, and clinical-course phenotypes.
Yasmeen: ‘We’ve made sense of the 10 year plan’s vision’
The absence of a delivery chapter in the NHS 10 year plan drew criticism when it was launched last summer, but it hasn’t been a problem for Salma Yasmeen.
More Daylight Exposure Could Lower Dementia Risk
Time spent in daylight could lower the risk of dementia and offer extra benefits for people at particularly high risk, new research suggests. The findings, published in General Psychiatry, could provide a low-cost way to support brain health.
Having less than 0.7 hours of bright daytime light per day was a stronger predictor of dementia than six traditional risk factors. Moderately bright natural light exposure—equivalent to an overcast day outdoors—was linked with a 16% reduction in the risk of dementia.
“Daytime light exposure may serve as a novel indicator of dementia risk,” said researcher Hongliang Feng, PhD, from Guangzhou Medical University in China. Natural cycles of darkness at night followed by bright light during the day are fundamental to entrain circadian rhythms. These regulate physiology, behavior, and cognition, with circadian disruptions common among people with dementia.
Noting that modern lifestyles limit daytime exposure to natural light, the researchers investigated exposure to day- and nighttime light using actigraphy devices that track body movements with built-in light sensors.
The study included 87,577 UK Biobank participants who wore accelerometers on their wrists to measure physical activity and natural light exposure for seven days. Over a median follow-up of 8.1 years, 741 of these people (0.85%) developed dementia.
Higher daytime light, both in terms of average exposure and the duration in bright light, was significantly associated with a lower dementia risk. Daytime light exposure above 1000 lux—a moderately bright light level equal to an overcast day outdoors—was associated with a hazard ratio of 0.84 for dementia. Longer exposure to brighter light of at least 0.70 hours with at least 5000 lux was linked with a further risk reduction, and a hazard ratio of 0.83.
In exploratory analyses, circadian rest-activity rhythms (CRAC) and brain structures mediated up to a third of this association, supporting the idea that improvements in circadian rhythms may have contributed to these results. Dementia protection from light exposure was stronger in people with high levels of nighttime light exposure, those with a “night owl” evening chronotype, or who carried the APOE ε4 allele, with a risk reduction of up to 41%.
Having more than 0.7 hours per day of bright daytime light of at least 5000 lux outperformed the established dementia risk predictors, including alcohol consumption, obesity, air pollution, hearing loss, use of vitamin D supplements, and traumatic brain injury.
However, nighttime light showed no significant association with dementia risk.
The findings point to the importance of higher daytime light exposure in reducing the chances of dementia and offer a simple, cost-free way to reduce this risk.
“Practical implementation pathways could include optimizing indoor lighting at home, community‐based outdoor activity promotion programs, and workplace lighting modifications designed to increase daytime light exposure, such as ensuring adequate illumination and access to natural light,” the researchers suggested.
They added: “Our findings underscore a more pronounced protective association of daytime light exposure in individuals with higher average nighttime light exposure, an evening chronotype, or APOE ε4 carrier status.
“In other words, these findings suggest a targeted approach to mitigate dementia risk by increasing daytime light levels for these populations.”
The post More Daylight Exposure Could Lower Dementia Risk appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
University Hospitals Sussex signs EPR contract with Alcidion
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust has signed a contract with Alcidion to deliver an electronic patient record (EPR) system.
Three Subtypes of Severe Pneumonia Might Inform Personalized Therapies
The results of a study headed by researchers at the University of Cambridge suggest that severe pneumonia has three different subtypes, a discovery that could help to explain why some patients in intensive care units (ICUs) recover from their illness faster than others, and for some patients, the disease can be life-threatening. Rather than assessing patients’ symptoms, the Cambridge team analyzed fluid taken from the lungs of patients admitted to the hospital with suspected pneumonia. Their results indicated that although each of the three different “pneumotypes” of severe pneumonia was associated with how the patients recovered, none could be reliably identified using standard blood tests.
The researchers suggest that their findings could in the future help inform personalized therapeutic strategies, allowing individual patients to receive the most appropriate treatment. Andrew Conway Morris, PhD, at the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and an ICU consultant at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, is senior author of the team’s published paper in Nature Communications, titled “Pulmonary inflammation in severe pneumonia is characterised by compartmentalised and mechanistically distinct sub-phenotypes.”
Pneumonia is the commonest infectious cause of death worldwide, responsible for an estimated 2.5 million deaths per year, the researchers noted. In severe cases, patients may need to be admitted to an ICU and given mechanical ventilation. Severe pneumonia accounts for six in 10 infections managed in intensive care, and spread of the infection within ICUs is a significant concern.
Doctors have long struggled to understand why patients whose condition looks similar clinically can have very different recoveries. Some respond quickly to treatment, while others remain critically ill for weeks or even die. “Despite the considerable burden of pneumonia, the syndrome is incompletely understood, and diagnosis is difficult,” the team explained.
Conway Morris said, “Even though we’re able to treat the initial infection, many patients with severe pneumonia still struggle to come off the ventilator and can develop lung failure. Therapies to tackle inflammation in the lungs have had mixed results in clinical trials—some suggest they are beneficial, others that they’re harmful.”
Severe pneumonia is usually diagnosed through a combination of symptoms, imaging, and blood tests. Symptoms typically include fever or hypothermia, low oxygen levels, breathing difficulties, and confusion. “The current approach of classifying patients by their clinical syndromes—sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and so on—without looking at the underlying biology risks missing what’s key,” Conway Morris noted. “Instead of asking ‘Does this patient have pneumonia?’, we should be asking ‘What’s the inflammatory pattern in this patient’s lungs?’”
For their newly reported study, Conway Morris and team recruited 80 patients admitted with suspected severe pneumonia to the ICU at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Instead of relying only on blood tests or scans, however, the Cambridge team analyzed the patient’s immune cells, inflammatory signals, and gene activity in bronchoalveolar lavage samples. “Here, we perform multifaceted assessments of bronchoalveolar transcriptome, cytokines, microbiology, and clinical features to biologically characterise a cohort of patients with suspected severe pneumonia,” they reported in their paper. The researchers discovered three distinct biological types—or pneumotypes (Pn)—of severe pneumonia, none of which could be reliably detected using standard blood tests, even though they were strongly linked to how patients recovered.
“Using bulk RNA sequencing of bronchoalveolar fluid, we have identified three phenotypes in the lungs of patients with lung injury and suspected pneumonia,” they stated. “These phenotypes were reflected in the differential immune cell populations and inflammatory proteins.”
The most common pneumotype—accounting for almost half (49%) of cases—was characterized by immune suppression, significant damage to the lining of the lungs, and bleeding in the alveoli (tiny air sacs within the lungs). There were fewer signs of inflammation, which may explain why treatments targeting inflammation can fail or even harm some patients. “Pn1, the most common, is characterized by low alveolar cytokines, expanded tolerogenic macrophages, and epithelial damage,” the investigators reported.
The second pneumotype—accounting for just under a quarter (23%) of cases—was characterized by a balanced immune response and active repair of damage to the lungs. Patients were most likely to recover faster from this pneumotype and require the shortest time on the ventilator, even though they initially looked just as ill as the others. “Pn2 displays the fastest resolution, exhibiting a balanced immune response and epithelial-endothelial repair signatures,” they continued.
Patients with the most dangerous pneumotype—the one that most resembles “classic” pneumonia—spent the longest on mechanical ventilation and had prolonged critical illness. They had severe and persistent inflammation, with a flood of immature immune cells in the lung. This group may be most likely to respond to anti-inflammatory therapies, the team said. “Pn3 is characterized by immature neutrophil infiltration, IL-6-STAT3 activation, and longer duration of mechanical ventilation,” the scientists stated.
First author Dr. Mark Jeffrey, at the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, added, “Even though on the surface, all of the patients seemed to have similar types of pneumonia, with comparable illness severity, oxygen levels, and clinical diagnoses, their outcomes were very different. It was only when we drilled down and looked at patterns of inflammation that the differences became apparent. Severe pneumonia is not a single disease, but several biologically distinct conditions that happen to look alike. This helps explain why ‘one-size-fits-all’ treatments—including some immune-modulating drugs—have often failed in clinical trials.”
Interestingly, the authors added in their report, “Each of the Pneumotypes contained both patients with and without confirmed pneumonia, implying common mechanisms underpinning lung injury arising from different mechanisms.”
The tests used to determine the pneumotypes are too complex to enable rapid classification, but the researchers hope to develop a simplified tool that could help them stratify the patients and ultimately offer tailored treatments.
Co-author Vilas Navapurkar, MBChB, from the John Farman Intensive Care Unit at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, said, “If we know which subtype of pneumonia an individual has, we can potentially tailor their treatment more precisely, boosting the immune response in some, while calming harmful inflammation in others. This has the potential to help critically ill patients, reduce deaths from pneumonia, shorten ICU stays, and cut unnecessary antibiotic use.”
The team also noted that while their study identified three Pneumotypes, it’s likely that others may exist, which might be identified in larger studies. In conclusion, they wrote, “… we have identified and validated three pulmonary confined endotypes in patients with severe pneumonia and lung injury. These phenotypes are underpinned by distinct mechanisms and have differential outcomes. The mechanisms point to different therapeutic options, as well as extending our understanding of the biology of lung inflammation in the context of severe pneumonia.”
The post Three Subtypes of Severe Pneumonia Might Inform Personalized Therapies appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Manchester Met wins funding to boost AI health innovation
Manchester Metropolitan University will promote AI for business and the development of wearable health technologies through funding awarded by UK Research and Innovation’s Local Innovation Partnership Fund (LIPF). The funding will support two initiatives: Grow AI, which aims to accelerate AI adoption among businesses, and GM-WIC, which will bring together the NHS, universities, businesses and […]
Cytomos’ AuraCyt Digital Predictive Cell Analytics Platform Showcased at BIO Conference
Cytomos reports that it is showcasing its flagship cell analytic intelligence platform AuraCyt®, together with its novel Celledonia® benchtop technology, which is designed to boost predictive cell analytics. Current challenges in the bioprocessing space include slow, label-dependent analytical methods that are inefficient to scale-up and provide limited predictive insight, according to Cytomos.
The AuraCyt platform measures intrinsic cell physics to generate AI-ready digital fingerprints that reveal the multi-dimensional state and behavior of the cell. The benchtop cell analytics intelligence system combines the compact Celledonia analyzer with the sensors of the AuraCyt modules to transform complex cellular data into actionable insights, notes a Cytomos spokesperson, who points out that this label-free, single-cell analysis system predicts future productivity, stability, and manufacturability.
This enables earlier insights and real-time decision-making, lowering risk, providing scalable impact, optimizing process and improving product consistency, says the spokesperson. The operation reportedly provides demonstrable value across various applications, such as reducing CLD timelines by up to 40%, saving up to 65% of resources in lentivirus batch production, and reducing CAR T process time by up to 30%, comments Cytomos’ executive chair, Alan Raymond.
The company is showcasing this technology at its pod in BIO Business Forum Zone D (Exhibit Hall 2221 UK Pavillion), from 22-25th of June, 2026.
The post Cytomos’ AuraCyt Digital Predictive Cell Analytics Platform Showcased at BIO Conference appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.