Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with others, or anti-conformity, the choice to deliberately diverge. A new way to model this dynamic interplay could ultimately help explain societal phenomena like political polarization, cultural trends, and the spread of misinformation.  A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlines this novel approach. Presenting a mathematical model, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton with colleagues ...

A research team from NIMS and the Japan Fine Ceramics Center (JFCC) has developed a next-generation AI device—a hardware component for AI systems—that incorporates an iono-magnonic reservoir. This reservoir controls spin waves (collective excitations of electron spins in magnetic materials), ion dynamics and their interactions. The technology demonstrated significantly higher information processing performance than conventional physical reservoir computing devices, underscoring its potential to transform AI technologies. As AI devices become increasingly sophisticated, ...

By Shawn Ballard The complexity of the human brain – 86 billion neurons strong with more than 100 trillion connections – enables abstract thinking, language acquisition, advanced reasoning and problem-solving, and the capacity for creativity and social interaction. Understanding how differences in brain signaling and dynamics produce unique cognition and behavior in individuals has long been a goal of neuroscience research, yet many phenomena remain unexplained. A study from neuroscientists and ...

As the atmosphere continues to fill with greenhouse gases from human activities, many proposals have surfaced to “geoengineer” climate-saving solutions, that is, alter the atmosphere at a global scale to either reduce the concentrations of carbon or mute its warming effect. One recent proposal seeks to infuse the atmosphere with hydrogen peroxide, insisting that it would both oxidize methane (CH4), an extremely potent greenhouse gas while improving air quality. Too good to be true? University of Utah atmospheric scientists Alfred Mayhew and Jessica Haskins were skeptical, so they set out to test the claims behind this proposal. Their results, published on ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced it is accepting applications for the 2025 DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program to support the research of outstanding scientists early in their careers. The program will support over 80 early career researchers for five years at U.S. academic institutions, DOE national laboratories, and Office of Science user facilities. “The vision, creativity, and effort of early career faculty drive innovation in the basic science enterprise. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is dedicated to ...

University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty members James T. Burns, Coleen Carrigan and Liheng Cai received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) on Tuesday, as did two UVA Engineering alumni, Ashutosh Giri and Ryan Johnson.  PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. According to the release from the White House, this award recognizes “innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology.” “This award year has been extraordinary not ...

ARLINGTON, Va.—A favorite childhood memory for Dr. Sandra Chapman was visiting the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor with her father. They hung out at the memorial so often that they memorized lines to the movie playing prior to the boat ride to the memorial. So it’s appropriate that Chapman — a program officer in the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Warfighter Performance Department — is passionate about her involvement in the development of an innovative technology recently applied to efforts to preserve the area around the USS Arizona ...

Images EAST LANSING, Mich. – Our sun is essentially a searing hot sphere of gas. Its mix of primarily hydrogen and helium can reach temperatures between 10,000 and 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit on its surface and its atmosphere’s outermost layer. Because of that heat, the blazing orb constantly oozes a stream of plasma, made up of charged subatomic particles — mainly protons and electrons. The sun’s gravity can’t contain them because they hold so much energy as heat, so they drift away into space as solar wind. Understanding how charged particles ...

Maital Neta, professor of psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. Neta, Carl A. Happold Professor of Psychology, directs the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab and is resident faculty of the Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior. Neta said she was “very grateful” for the honor, announced ...

As Donald Trump prepares to take office for a second term as President, research led by the University of California, Santa Cruz is demonstrating the important role nonprofits played during Trump’s first term as a counterforce that channeled public resistance to anti-immigrant policies. The new study, published in the journal International Migration Review, shows how nonprofits that provide legal services for immigrants ended up receiving increases in public contributions in the wake of Trump's attacks on immigrants.  Previously, there had been many reported examples of this backlash effect, sometimes called ...

Like many rare diseases, fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma (FLC) mounts a ferocious attack against an unlucky few—in this case, children, adolescents, and young adults. Because its symptoms can vary from person to person, it’s often missed or misdiagnosed until it has metastasized and becomes lethal. Moreover, drug therapies for common liver cancers are not just useless for FLC patients but actually harmful. But new insights about the disease, coupled with a just-launched clinical trial of a promising drug treatment, could significantly improve health outcomes. Researchers in Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Cellular Biophysics, headed by Sanford ...

Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) have developed a new sorghum variant that can outperform soybeans in oil production, with great potential as a clean source of renewable fuel. Scientists have long worked to create new sustainable sources of vegetable oils, known as triacylglycerols (TAG), to meet the growing demand for renewable fuels like sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel. Currently, oil palm and oilseeds such as soybeans provide most TAG for renewable ...

SAN FRANCISCO—Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a stroke. For survivors of the most common type of stroke, called an ischemic stroke, only about 5 percent fully recover. Most others suffer from long-term problems, including weakness, chronic pain, or epilepsy. Now, scientists at Gladstone Institutes and the regenerative medicine company SanBio have shown that a cell therapy derived from stem cells can restore normal patterns of brain activity after a stroke. While most stroke treatments must be administered in the immediate hours ...

Polymer editing can upcycle waste into higher-performance plastics   By editing the polymers of discarded plastics, chemists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found a way to generate new macromolecules with more valuable properties than those of the starting material. Upcycling may help remedy the roughly 450 million tons of plastic discarded worldwide annually, of which only 9% gets recycled; the rest is incinerated or winds up in landfills, oceans or elsewhere.   ORNL’s ...

Tropical storms like hurricanes are not only terrifying, but also incredibly costly for coastal regions across the United States, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Beyond the immediate devastation, these storms contribute to significant economic losses and human displacement. In 2023 alone, climate migration linked to such events saw 2.5 million individuals attempt to cross the U.S. southern land border. New research led by The University of Texas at Arlington emphasizes that studying ...

SAN ANTONIO, Jan. 17, 2025 – On the eve of a historic merger between The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and The University of Texas at San Antonio, researchers from the two institutions have been honored with highly prestigious 2025 Hill Prizes, in medicine and technology. The prizes are awarded by the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology (TAMEST), and Lyda Hill Philanthropies, which fund the awards to “propel high-risk, high-reward ideas and innovations that demonstrate very significant potential for real-world impact and can lead ...

In the decades following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way — the Andromeda Galaxy. It can be seen with the naked eye on clear autumn nights as a faint oval object roughly the size of the moon. A century ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble first established that this so-called "spiral nebula" was approximately 2.5 million light years away from our own Milky Way galaxy. Now, the space telescope named ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Many vaccines work by introducing a protein to the body that resembles part of a virus. Ideally, the immune system will produce long-lasting antibodies recognizing that specific virus, thereby providing protection. But Scripps Research scientists have now discovered that for some HIV vaccines, something else happens: after a few immunizations the immune system begins to produce antibodies against immune complexes already bound to the viral protein alone. They don’t yet know whether this chain reaction, described in Science ...

Scientists at Caltech and Princeton University have discovered that bacterial cells growing in a solution of polymers, such as mucus, form long cables that buckle and twist on each other, building a kind of "living Jell-O."   The finding could be particularly important to the study and treatment of diseases such as cystic fibrosis, in which the mucus that lines the lungs becomes more concentrated, often causing bacterial infections that take hold in that mucus to become life threatening. This discovery ...

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have improved our understanding of how rotavirus, the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis in children, makes people sick. The study published in Science Advances is among the first to show that the rotavirus protein NSP4 is both necessary and sufficient for multiple aspects of rotavirus infection by disrupting calcium signaling not only within infected cells but also in nearby uninfected cells. These disruptions in calcium signaling affect rotavirus disease severity, providing new insights into how ...

Interleukin-1 (IL-1) is a key molecule involved in inflammation and plays an important role in both healthy and diseased states. In disease, high levels of IL-1 in the brain are linked to neuroinflammation, which can disrupt the body’s stress response, cause sickness-like behaviors, worsen inflammation by activating brain immune cells, and allow immune cells from the body to enter the brain. It also can lead to brain damage by causing support cells to produce harmful molecules. Elevated IL-1 levels are associated with mood disorders, ...

Our genes contain all the instructions our body needs to function, but their expression must be finely regulated to guarantee that each cell performs its role optimally. This is where DNA and RNA epigenetics comes in: a series of mechanisms that act as "markers" on genes, to control their activity without modifying the DNA or RNA sequence itself. Until now, DNA and RNA epigenetics were studied as independent systems. These two mechanisms seemed to function separately, each playing its own role in distinct stages of the gene regulation process. Perhaps that was a mistake. In a publication ...

Background and objectives No previous study has been conducted in Nigeria on the role of neutrophil elastase in predicting preterm birth. The present study aimed to determine the role of the neutrophil elastase test in predicting birth in women with preterm labor. Methods The present prospective cohort study recruited 83 pregnant women with preterm labor between 28 and 36+6 weeks of gestation, and followed up these subjects for 14 days. The controls comprised 85 pregnant women without preterm labor. The cervicovaginal fluid was collected and tested using the neutrophil elastase test. Then, the sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive parameters were determined. ...

WHAT: With support from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is leading the implementation of the Dr. Emmanuel Bilirakis and Honorable Jennifer Wexton National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act (P.L. 118-66), which was signed into law on July 2, 2024.  This follows a delegation of authority from the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to the NIH Director. The act establishes a Federal ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study, nearly one-half of all primary care physicians (PCPs) were affiliated with hospitals, while private equity-affiliated PCPs were growing and concentrated in certain regional markets. Relative to PCPs in independent settings, hospital-affiliated PCPs and private equity-affiliated PCPs had higher prices for the same services.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Yashaswini Singh, PhD, MPA, email yashaswini_singh@brown.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.4935) Editor’s ...