PWFT Is Now Ready For The Inaugural Futsal World Cup

As the host of the first-ever FIFA Women’s Futsal World Cup, the Philippine Women’s National Futsal Team (PWFT) says it is not feeling pressure and is focused on letting performance speak for itself.

The tournament is scheduled from 21 November to 7 December 2025 at PhilSports Arena in Pasig City.

National team mainstays Jaclyn Sawicki and Katrina Guillou said competing on home soil is inspiring.

"I don't think we're going to take that pressure on with us. I think we're going to just enjoy being here in the Philippines and just enjoy the experience and really not take it for granted because it is special to be part of this for the first time ever," midfielder Sawicki said during the 2026 PUMA Philippines x Philippine Football Federation Kit Launch on 15 November.

"So to be able to do that on the world's biggest stage, and in our home country with the crowd physically present this time, is truly special," she added.

Sawicki also noted that representing the country carries significant responsibility, which she described as an honour for every player wearing the red, blue, and white.

Guillou said the team is aiming for victory in the historic event, which has been in planning since 2022.

"I think it's not just me, but I can speak for everyone here that we stay focused, expecting to win, and we're going to give our best," Guillou said.

Tickets for the tournament are available at FIFA.com and range from PhP 499 to PhP 2,999.

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IOC Moves To Ban Transgender Women In Olympics

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is closely edging closer towards implementing of a complete ban on transgender women competing in the female category in time for the Los Angeles Olympic Games.

Multiple sources expect such a ban to come into effect over the next six to 12 months with the new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, making clear she wants to drive through her campaign pledge to protect the female category.

Such a policy would also avoid potential conflict with the US president, Donald Trump, before the LA 2028 Games, after he signed an executive order to prevent transgender women from competing in female sport in February.

The IOC, however, is still facing some internal resistance to a ban on athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD), who were reported female at birth but have male chromosomes and male testosterone levels.

Such athletes, which include the London 2012 and Rio 2016 gold medallist Caster Semenya, have now been barred by World Athletics from the female category. But football’s governing body, Fifa, does allow athletes with a DSD to compete in the women’s game.

However, the majority of insiders expect that Coventry’s campaign pledge will mean any athlete who has gone through male puberty will be banned from the female category.

Speculation that the IOC would introduce a new policy as soon as January intensified recently after it was reported that its director of health, medicine and science, Dr. Jane Thornton, had given a science-based review of the evidence to its members last week, showing there were permanent physical advantages to being born male.

Thornton, a former Canadian rower, also explained how some sports bodies, such as World Athletics, were now using the SRY cheek-swab gene test to determine the biological sex of athletes in what was said by one source to be "a factual and dispassionate presentation".

The IOC, however, quickly denied any decision had been made. It is also understood that its working group on the issue is still continuing its deliberations, and the summer of 2026 is a more realistic timeframe for the new policy.

Yet while the IOC is set on bringing in a new policy, much remains unclear. Will it follow the lead of World Athletics, with its cheek‑swab test? And can it ensure that any new policy does not face a legal challenge?

A statement from the IOC read: "An update was given by the IOC’s director of health, medicine and science to the IOC members last week during the IOC commission meetings. The working group is continuing its discussions on this topic and no decisions have been taken yet. Further information will be provided in due course."

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Vaping Is An Alarming Trend For Teens

The latest data revealed that West Virginia teenagers are leading the nation — not in academics, but in vaping.

As cigarette smoking becomes more taboo, many young people have turned to e-cigarettes, unaware that they may be trading one danger for another. According to The Jackson Star & Harold, nearly 17 percent of middle schoolers and 35.7 percent of high schoolers in West Virginia vape — the highest rates in the country.

"The student doesn't know what was in the vape," said Jody Sperry, Harrison County Schools coordinator of health services. "They're kind of playing Russian roulette with their health."

And the risks aren't limited to the short term. "It hasn't been around long enough to know where we really know what those long-term effects are," explained V.J. Davis, administrator of the Preston County Health Department.

Once marketed as a "safer" alternative to cigarettes, vaping has proved to be anything but harmless. E-cigarettes can contain nicotine, heavy metals, and volatile organic compounds — a toxic mix that damages developing lungs and increases the risk of addiction in young people.

Not only that, but manufacturers pack disposable vapes with single-use plastics, toxic metals, and lithium batteries that often wind up in landfills or scattered on the ground. Those discarded devices can leach heavy metals and other chemicals into soil and water, harming wildlife and contributing to the growing global waste problem.

Public health officials across the state are calling for stronger regulations, school-based education campaigns, and limits on flavored vaping products that appeal to kids. Some schools are using air sensors to detect vaping on campus, while others are pairing education with peer-led prevention programs that address addiction early.

At home, parents and communities can help by talking openly about the risks, properly disposing of old devices at e-waste drop-offs, and supporting brands and policies that prioritize public health over profit.

Because, whether it's our lungs or our landfills, the message is the same: Both deserve a clean breath of air.

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The Common Root Cause Of Psychiatric Disorders

Researchers recently discovered that there are eight different psychiatric conditions that share a common genetic basis. There study pinpointed specific variants among those shared genes and shows how they behave during brain development.

The US team found many of these variants remain active for extended periods, potentially influencing multiple developmental stages – and offering new targets for treatments that could address several disorders at once.

"The proteins produced by these genes are also highly connected to other proteins," explained University of North Carolina geneticist Hyejung Won in January.

"Changes to these proteins in particular could ripple through the network, potentially causing widespread effects on the brain."

Back in 2019, an international team first identified 109 genes linked in different combinations with eight psychiatric disorders: autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anorexia.

This may explain why these conditions often co-occur – for example up to 70 percent of individuals diagnosed with autism or ADHD have the other too – and why they frequently cluster in families.

Each of these eight conditions also has gene differences that are unique to them individually, so Won and team compared the unique genes with those shared between the disorders.

They took almost 18,000 variations of the shared and unique genes involved and put them into the precursor cells that become our neurons to see how they could impact gene expression in these cells during human development.

This allowed the researchers to identify 683 genetic variants that impacted gene regulation and to further explore them in neurons from developing mice.

Genetic variants behind multiple seemingly unrelated traits, or in this case conditions, are called pleiotropic. The pleiotropic variants were involved in many more protein-to-protein interactions than the gene variants unique to specific psychological conditions, and they were active across more types of brain cells.

Pleiotropic variants were also involved in regulatory mechanisms that impact multiple stages of brain development. The ability of these genes to impact cascades and networks of processes, such as gene regulation, could explain why the same variants can contribute to different conditions.

"Pleiotropy was traditionally viewed as a challenge because it complicates the classification of psychiatric disorders," said Won.

"However, if we can understand the genetic basis of pleiotropy, it might allow us to develop treatments targeting these shared genetic factors, which could then help treat multiple psychiatric disorders with a common therapy."

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Music Affects Brain's Emotional Flexibility

As emotions rise and fall in everyday life, your brain keeps up, constantly adjusting. These transitions between feelings—like joy, sadness, or fear—aren’t just random reactions. They’re part of a highly organized process that helps guide behavior and decision-making, according to a new research.

Researchers from Columbia University, led by neuroscientist Matthew Sachs, recently explored this complex emotional process using music. Their work, published in the journal eNeuro, looked at how the brain switches between emotions and how past feelings shape present ones.

The findings also shows that not only does the brain actively track these changes in feelings, but it also adjusts its response depending on the emotional situation that came just before.

To study emotional transitions in the brain, Sachs and his team worked with composers to write original musical pieces. These compositions were carefully crafted to move listeners through different emotional states—such as happiness, sadness, and tension—at specific points in the music.

A group of 39 participants (20 male, 19 female) listened to the music while undergoing functional MRI (fMRI) scans. This allowed researchers to capture detailed images of brain activity in real time. As participants moved through the emotional journey of the music, the scientists tracked how the brain responded.

The songs didn’t just stir up feelings—they acted as tools for understanding how emotions work in the brain. By manipulating the emotional context of the music, the team was able to see how brain activity changed depending on what emotion had come just before.

The brain doesn’t just react to an emotion—it maps it out. Sachs and his team used both data-driven analysis, such as Hidden Markov modeling, and theory-based methods to interpret the brain scans. What they found was striking: patterns of activation along the brain’s temporal-parietal axis clearly reflected emotional transitions.

This region of the brain helps with processing sounds and interpreting social signals. When a participant’s emotional state changed in response to music, this part of the brain showed clear changes too. These neural changes weren’t random—they had both spatial and temporal signatures, meaning they could be pinpointed in both location and timing.

Even more fascinating was how timing changed depending on emotional context. When the new emotion was similar in valence—like going from happiness to calm instead of from happiness to sadness—the transition in brain activity happened earlier. That means your brain shifts more smoothly and quickly between similar emotions.

Understanding these emotional transitions isn’t just interesting—it could be life-changing for people struggling with mental health. Many people with mood disorders, such as depression, experience what scientists call emotional rigidity. They get stuck in a single emotional state, unable to shift easily.

Sachs believes this new research might lead to better treatment tools. "We know that people who suffer from mood disorders or depression often demonstrate emotional rigidity, where they basically get stuck in an emotional state," he says. "This study suggests that maybe we could take someone with depression, for instance, and use the approach we developed to identify neural markers for the emotional rigidity that keeps them in a very negative state."

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Targeted Hedgehog Signaling Could Regenerate Teeth

Tooth loss and bone degeneration are problems that modern medicine contnue to struggle addressing. Data from the National Bone Health Policy Institute shows that 10 million Americans over the age of 50 have been diagnosed with osteoporosis, and even more than that have low bone density — even astronauts experience shocking levels of bone loss.

Data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reveals that at least 11 percent of senior adults have lost all of their teeth. But what if that loss could be reversed? What if teeth and bones could regenerate?

The alveolar bone, which anchors teeth and absorbs the pressure of chewing, naturally undergoes heavy wear and tear throughout life. Its degeneration impacts billions worldwide that suffer from periodontal disease. Now, researchers may have found a breakthrough to reverse this loss. It involves two key stem cell types that could unlock the body's ability to regrow teeth and rebuild bone.

The research methods and findings were published in the journal Nature Communications in 2025 under the title "A Hedgehog–Foxf axis coordinates dental follicle-derived alveolar bone formation."

Researchers discovered that precise on-and-off regulation of the stem cells' signaling pathway is crucial for these cells to develop into bone-forming osteoblasts. This finding could open the door for a future in which we can regenerate both teeth and jawbone tissue.

Stem cell research has always been promising to human health — like the stem cells that helped a paralyzed man stand. And in the case of the 2025 Nature Communications study, in order to trace how certain stem cells contribute to bone formation, researchers used genetically engineered mice that allowed them to track PTHrP-expressing dental follicle cells during tooth development.

By activating these markers early in life and observing the mice weeks later, they found that these cells primarily became osteoblasts and osteocytes. Those are the cells responsible for building and maintaining bone in the alveolar region, and the researchers found that those cells play a specialized role in forming the bone structures closest to the developing tooth.

To understand how signaling influences bone development, the researchers examined the activity of the Hedgehog pathway, which is a key regulator of cell growth. They found that Hedgehog-related genes were highly active early on, when the tooth root and surrounding bone were just beginning to form.

This Hedgehog activity was nearly absent once the tooth root was fully developed. This pattern revealed that alveolar bone formation depends on turning off Hedgehog signaling at the right time to allow proper cell maturation.

Additionally, the researchers compared healthy bone to periodontitis. While the Hedgehog-related genes remained inactive on the healthy bone, there was a change in the unhealthy one. Hedgehog signaling increased during bone loss, revealing that the presence of disease changed the way genes responded.

The researchers noted that mutations in Hedgehog-related genes are already known to cause disorders like Gorlin-Goltz Syndrome, which leads to facial and jaw abnormalities. Encouragingly, treatment with an FDA-approved Hedgehog-blocking drug, LDE225, was shown to restore normal bone cell development and stability without harming healthy tissue. This suggested that targeting Hedgehog signaling could lead to new therapies that help regenerate bone and protect against severe gum disease.

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Watch For The New Dating Tend Called "Throning"

For those that are new to the dating scene, there's a new term called "throning" − which means dating someone to raise your social status. The goal for throners is to land a partner with clout, so their own image gets a boost by association.

Unlike "Shrekking," which involves dating down in the hopes that person will treat you better in return, throning involves dating up − for all the wrong reasons.

"Basically, the date is a throne that is used to elevate the person who is doing the throning," one TikToker explains in a video. "The scenario focuses solely on social influence or status and not on building a real emotional connection."

The TikToker warns: "If a person seems overly focused on your status or social circle and changes their behaviors towards you depending upon whether you're in public or private... this can indicate throning."

Throning has gone by different names in the past ("gold digging," "clout chasing," etc.) What's new, however, is the impact social media has had on throning. Throners aren't just dating people for their money or power; they're also dating people for their followers and online influence.

"People are curating relationships the same way they curate content," says Amy Chan, a dating coach and the author "Unsingle: How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts." "The rise of throning also reflects a growing focus on self-image and external validation. Social media has amplified this, training us to care more about how our relationships look than how they actually feel."

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3D Brain Models Can Be Tailored For Therapies

A few MIT scientists have developed a new 3D human brain tissue model that could change how researchers study neurological diseases.

The platform, called Multicellular Integrated Brains or miBrains, recreates key features of real human brain tissue, offering a more accurate way to test drugs and understand disorders like Alzheimer’s.

The breakthrough comes at a time when neuroscience research is pushing beyond traditional lab models and animal testing to create systems that truly reflect how the human brain functions.

Each miBrain is smaller than a dime, but it brings together the brain’s six major cell types, including neurons, glial cells, and vascular structures, in one living model.

"The miBrain is the only in vitro system that contains all six major cell types that are present in the human brain," said Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor, director of The Picower Professor of Learning and Memory, and senior author of the study.

In their first demonstration, the researchers used miBrains to uncover how a common genetic marker for Alzheimer’s disease alters cell interactions to produce disease-related changes.

Traditional brain research relies on two main approaches: simplified cell cultures and animal models. While cell cultures are easy to produce, they lack the complexity needed to study how different brain cells interact.

Animal models, on the other hand, are more biologically complete but expensive, slow to yield results, and not always reliable for predicting human outcomes.

miBrains combine the strengths of both systems. They are easy to grow and modify, yet complex enough to replicate real brain behavior. Because they are derived from patient-specific stem cells, researchers can create personalized versions that reflect an individual’s genetic makeup.

The six integrated cell types self-organize into functional structures, including blood vessels and immune components, and even form a working blood-brain barrier that filters what can enter the tissue.

"Recent trends toward minimizing the use of animal models in drug development could make systems like this one increasingly important tools for discovering and developing new human drug targets," said Robert Langer, co-senior author of the study.

Creating a model with so many cell types took years of experimentation. One major challenge was building a structure that could physically support cells and sustain their activity.

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Is The Trend "Slow Fade" The New "Ghosting"?

There is nothing like the feeling of new relationship energy. You know the onev—vthe feeling when you’ve been dating someone for a while, it’s going really well, and you start getting giddy thinking about them. But then, as their texts pivot from flirty paragraphs to one-word replies, the blissful bubble bursts. That behavior, my friends, is called the "slow fade" in dating.

"The person doesn't disappear entirely; instead, their texts become shorter and less frequent, dates become rarer, and their enthusiasm noticeably wanes," says Natassia Miller, an ASSECT-certified sexologist and relationship expert with Dating News. "They're still technically 'there,’ but their presence feels increasingly hollow."

But what does the slow fade really mean? And what can you do if you’re the one being slowly faded out in a relationship? Or better yet, are you guilty of the deed yourself? With the help of experts, we're breaking down all the need-to-know deets on navigating this modern dating behavior.

According to Miller, the "slow fade" in dating is the gradual withdrawal of communication and effort in a dating relationship. It's when someone progressively becomes less available, responsive, and engaged over time until the connection eventually dies out.

You might notice that once frequent good morning texts turn into no text at all; they slowly pull their energy back even when actively going on dates with you; and, in general, you just feel that that something is off.

Now, you might be thinking, "Isn’t that just ghosting?" Well, no. It’s actually quite different.

While ghosting is like slamming a door shut, the slow fade is like slowly turning down the volume on a relationship until it becomes silent. "It's a drawn-out process that can take weeks or even months," says Miller. Unlike with ghosting, which is often quite abrupt.

"They [the slow fader] gradually reduce communication, attention, and effort until the relationship fizzles out completely," Foxx says, "It leaves the other person wondering what’s happening because the disconnection happens in small steps."

Because of the slow in the slow fade, it can often be more psychologically taxing than ghosting, due to the ambiguity and false hope it can create. With ghosting, the message is clear (albeit hurtful): it's over.

"Ghosting is abrupt, but at least it’s clear," Foxx adds, "With the slow fade, there’s always a lingering question: Are they busy, or are they done with me?"

In short, it doesn’t feel great.

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