To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/ArtemKirsanov. You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
=====
My name is Artem, I’m a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University.
🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/
📥 \
Head to https://squarespace.com/artem to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ARTEMKIRSANOV
=====
My name is Artem, I’m a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University.
🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/
📥 \
The LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has discovered a new particle consisting of two charm quarks and one down quark, a similar structure to the familiar proton, but with two heavy charm quarks replacing the two up quarks of the proton, thus quadrupling its mass. The discovery, presented at the ongoing Moriond conference, will help physicists better understand how the strong force binds protons, neutrons and other composite particles together.
Quarks are fundamental building blocks of matter and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine in groups of twos and threes to form mesons and baryons, respectively. Unlike the stable proton, however, most of these mesons and baryons, which are collectively known as hadrons, are unstable and short-lived, making them a challenge to observe. Producing them requires smashing together high-energy particles in a machine such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These unstable hadrons will quickly decay, but the more stable particles that are produced as a result of this decay can be detected and the properties of the original particle can therefore be deduced.
Researchers have used this approach many times to find new hadrons, and the new particle just announced by the LHCb Collaboration brings the total number of hadrons discovered by LHC experiments up to 80.
Yang et al. identify USP39 as a deubiquitinase hijacked by H5 AIV. USP39 catalytically deubiquitinates PB2 to prevent its degradation and maintain polymerase activity. Meanwhile, it promotes PB2-PB1 association for RNP assembly. The dual-function mechanism facilitates viral replication, enhances pathogenicity, and represents a promising anti-H5 therapeutic target.
It’s well known that alcohol consumption is an age-old method for coping with stress. But recent research led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found that when such self-medication begins in early adulthood, negative cognitive effects start to show up in middle age—even after long periods of total abstinence. The study is published in the journal Alcohol, Clinical and Experimental Research.
These negative effects include a decreased ability to cope with changing situations, an increased likelihood to drink when stressed, and the kinds of cognitive decline associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The new research helps us understand how alcohol rewires the brain’s circuitry and can help suggest new approaches for helping people adapt to the long-term effects of alcohol use.
Researchers have long known that stress and alcohol have a mutually reinforcing relationship: Alcohol can help take the edge off stressful situations, but in so doing it can decrease the brain’s ability to manage stress on its own, meaning one has to keep drinking, and drinking more, in order to relieve stress from a bad day. At the same time, the more one drinks, the more stress can accrue from increasingly poor decision-making. It can be a vicious cycle that gets harder to break the more the brain’s circuitry changes. But what about the long-term effects of stress and alcohol?
Stanford Medicine scientists are launching a clinical trial of prenatal transplants, using stem cells from the mother, to treat a rare genetic disease called Fanconi anemia before a baby is born.
Findings of ZZU team are published online in the journal Nature. [Photo/zzu.edu.cn]
A research team from Zhengzhou University (ZZU) has successfully synthesized bulk pure-phase hexagonal diamond and precisely resolved its crystal structure, revealing a novel phase transition mechanism. The findings were published online in the journal Nature on March 5, 2026, under the title “Bulk hexagonal diamond”
Diamond, renowned for its exceptional hardness, thermal conductivity, and wide bandgap, typically adopts a cubic structure. However, the existence of a hexagonal polymorph was first predicted theoretically in 1962 and later discovered in meteorites in 1967. Yet natural samples exist only as nanoscale grains embedded in meteorites, making isolation and property measurement extremely challenging. Moreover, the high formation energy barrier of hexagonal diamond under laboratory conditions has long hindered its synthesis, fueling debate over whether it can exist as a stable bulk material.