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- Understanding how ions diffuse in solid materials is essential for technologies including batteries, electronics and chemical catalysts, but it has been hard for a simple reason: the materials are solids.
- A research team has developed a new theoretical framework that can suppress light scattering in certain directions while enhancing it in others, even in irregularly arranged materials. The work extends research on controlling light scattering, which has traditionally centered on ordered crystal structures, into the realm of disordered systems.
- Researchers have helped unravel the mystery of why certain pairs of stars pulse with regular, long-period bursts of radio waves. The particular class of objects observed comes in pairs that always include a compact dead star, called a white dwarf, locked in orbit with an M dwarf, a red star smaller than our sun.
- Every 15 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies from a drug-resistant superbug. A few decades from now, antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections threaten to become the leading cause of death worldwide, outpacing cancer.
- There's good news and bad news for folks who love a good coat of ice on the Great Lakes for the activities and businesses it supports. The good news is that, after decades of declining annual average ice cover, there's reason to believe that trend could slow or even temporarily reverse. That's according to new research from the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, or CIGLR, at the University of Michigan.
- Scientists from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador officially described Pristimantis milpe, an abundant and widely distributed species that had been confused with another species for more than a century. To solve the mystery, researchers reviewed historical specimens collected in Ecuador during the 19th century and preserved at the Natural History Museum in London.
- A vaccine's molecular structure plays a key role in determining how the immune system responds and prepares to protect the body from future exposure to a specific pathogen. To develop a vaccine that offers long-term protection from HIV, it's essential to promote a long-lasting immune response in which immune cells and antibodies prepared to combat the virus persist within the body. This has inspired scientists to find ways to alter vaccine structure to increase the duration and persistence of the immune response.
- For decades, astronomers lumped brown dwarfs into a single category defined by mass alone—too big to be classified as planets but too small to become stars. However, this definition ignores the two very different mechanisms that can form them: the direct collapse of gas clouds and formation within the accretion disks of massive stars.
- Kids, marriage and commute: A study co-authored by Dr. Mariana Macedo of Constructor University provides new insights into how major life transitions alter how individuals navigate and experience urban environments. Published in npj Complexity, the research challenges traditional urban planning models that rely on a single, average citizen profile, advocating instead for demographically sensitive city designs.
- A new study, led by researchers at the University of Staffordshire, has found evidence of potentially hazardous microbial growth on mummified human and animal remains advertised for sale online—posing risks to both sellers and buyers. The paper is published in the International Journal of Cultural Property.
- It doesn't take a scientist to figure out that social media can trend toward the negative. But it might take one to figure out why. In a new paper in PNAS, professor of psychology Joshua Conrad Jackson and colleagues show that algorithms aren't the only driver of online negativity. Another culprit is what psychologists call differentiation, the innate drive to stand out from one's peers.
- Scientists from the University of Manchester's Department of Chemistry, Centre for Radiochemistry Research and Photon Science Institute, led by Professor Steve Liddle, have uncovered why a rare class of metal clusters appears to behave differently in experiments and theoretical calculations, resolving a debate about the nature of chemical aromaticity and revealing a previously overlooked type of magnetic response.
- Future fusion power plants aim to recreate the heart of a star here on Earth to power our future energy needs. While the core fusion plasma will burn at hundreds of millions of degrees, the surrounding structural components must handle sudden, punishing heat loads that rival the extreme temperatures faced by spacecraft upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Copper and its alloys are primary candidates for handling these intense heat fluctuations, making it vital to understand exactly how the metal behaves when pushed to its melting point.
- Detecting water where none remains today: Neutron and X-ray tomography make it possible. In an international study conducted with the participation of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, researchers have brought to light macroscopic hydrogen-rich regions inside a Martian meteorite. The findings provide evidence for early water-rock interactions on Mars.
- ETH researchers have used a sustainability program for cocoa cultivation in Côte d'Ivoire to demonstrate that, in one in four cases, data was manipulated to meet the program's requirements. If the auditor were aware of the required target values, data manipulation increased significantly. Where these values were unknown, the frequency of fraudulent alterations halved. The findings provide important insights for companies, public authorities and certification bodies to ensure sustainable supply chains and the implementation of the EU Deforestation Regulation.
- Animals struggle to cool down in extreme heat and high humidity, and heat stress is rising in many regions around the world. This is especially true for people in tropical countries, including populous India. In a new paper in AGU Advances, researchers characterize the extent of India's "uncompensable heat stress" and project how the problem could worsen in the future.
- If you want to know how rapidly pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will affect future forest ecosystems, you have to look into the distant past. The researchers behind a new study published in Science have done just that, reconstructing the forest canopy of 56 million years ago, during a massive and abrupt emission of carbon into the atmosphere during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). For the first time, the study's authors used fossilized leaf cells to reconstruct the tree canopy of the PETM, Earth's most recent period of comparable global warming, with chilling implications for our near future.
- An international team of researchers from Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain and the U.S. has reconstructed the evolution of body mass in carnivorous mammals during the Paleogene—a crucial window in the diversification of mammals that followed the extinction of dinosaurs. This work, published in Biology Letters, challenges the long-standing hypothesis that competition decided the fate of ancient top predators.
- Made entirely of muscle, with no rigid skeleton, muscular hydrostats like octopus arms, elephant trunks and human tongues can move in ways traditional mechanical systems cannot. Between crawling across the seafloor, picking up a peanut and enabling speech, scientists have long wondered how soft structures can perform so many different functions without becoming impossible to control.
- Like a delivery driver navigating crowded city streets, a gene-therapy-toting lipid nanoparticle faces a gauntlet of potential detours on its journey toward a cell's nucleus. First, there's entering the cell's plasma membrane; then navigating around organelles like the Golgi apparatus, mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum—all destinations that can errantly absorb the particle's payload, rendering it ineffective at best or harmful at worst. And that's all before the particle even enters the nucleus and successfully makes a genetic change.
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