Adolescent girls who have weight concerns despite not being obese are more likely to also experience depression and suicidality, per Korean survey of more than 50,000 middle and high school students

Two-thirds of dogs tested in a recent survey consume higher-than-recommended levels of heavy metals in their drinking water, according to a study published August 6, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS Water by Audrey Ruple from Virginia Tech, U.S., and colleagues. The survey, which focused on well water households in 10 states, uncovered 13 instances where arsenic, lead and copper tested above EPA-recommended levels.  Roughly 15 million U.S. households use private well water and are not protected by the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act, which regulates safety testing in drinking water. These households — and the canine companions inside — ...

Analysis of ocean sediments has surfaced geochemical clues in line with the possibility that an encounter with a disintegrating comet 12,800 years ago in the Northern Hemisphere triggered rapid cooling of Earth’s air and ocean. Christopher Moore of the University of South Carolina, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on August 6, 2025. During the abrupt cool-off—the Younger Dryas event—temperatures dropped about 10 degrees Celsius in a year or less, with cooler temperatures lasting about 1,200 years. Many researchers believe that no comet was ...

August 6, 2025        Waiting in Line: Why Six Feet of Social Distancing May Not Be Enough Study, led by undergraduate physics majors at UMass Amherst and researchers at University of Cadiz, sharpens our understanding of how airborne-communicable diseases travel   AMHERST, Mass. – We all remember the advice frequently repeated during the COVID pandemic: maintain six feet of distance from every other human when waiting in a line to avoid transmitting the virus. While reasonable, the advice did not take into account the complicated fluid dynamics governing how the airborne particles ...

Dogs drink water wherever they happen to find it — a puddle, a pond, a toilet. But the stuff in their actual water bowls almost always comes from the same tap their owners use. When that water is contaminated, both dogs and humans may suffer. The risk is especially high for the 15 million American households that rely on private wells, according to a new Virginia Tech study in the journal PLOS Water. In dog drinking water sampled from wells across the country, 64 percent contained excessive levels of at least one potentially toxic heavy metal, such as lead, iron, sulfur, or arsenic.  Whatever’s ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif) — Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, The University of Texas at Austin, Yale University and National Taiwan Normal University have found that a fair number of sun-like stars emerge with their rotational axis tilted with respect to their protoplanetary disks, the clouds of gas and dust from which solar systems are born. “All young stars have these discs, but we’ve known little about their orientations with respect to the spin axis of the host stars,” said UCSB associate physics professor Brendan Bowler, who studies how planets form and evolve through their orbits and atmospheres, and is senior author of a study in ...

A study from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health sheds new light on the relationship between community cohesion prior to a natural disaster and resilience after one, with possible policy applications for public health and emergency preparedness practitioners. “Recent events have reminded us that resilience isn’t just about bricks and budgets,” said community health expert Garett T. Sansom, who led the study. “In part, it’s also about bonds between neighbors.” Until now, he added, little has been known about the mechanisms ...

Virtual Reality Shows Promise in Easing Stress for Cardiac Patients, UCLA Health Study Finds  Living with cardiovascular disease often takes a serious emotional toll - and with stress known to worsen heart health, there’s growing interest in low-risk, innovative ways to help patients cope. New research from UCLA Health suggests that virtual reality (VR) may offer a promising tool to ease psychological stress and support heart health.  In a pilot study involving 20 patients from UCLA’s ...

MBARI researchers have developed an innovative imaging system that can be deployed at great depths underwater to study the movement of marine life. The team used the system to study deep-sea octopus and shared their findings in the scientific journal Nature. EyeRIS (Remote Imaging System) can capture detailed three-dimensional visual data about the structures and movement of marine life in their natural deep-sea habitat. MBARI researchers integrated EyeRIS on board a remotely operated vehicle to observe deep-sea pearl ...

Mutations in a single gene, HNF1A, are known to cause MODY3, a rare, early onset form of diabetes. Smaller scale mutations in the very same gene are also common and quietly nudge millions of people toward type-2 diabetes. A study published today in Cell Metabolism reveals why. Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona show it’s fundamentally a problem of insulin-producing β‑cells. Using mouse models, they switched HNF1A off in different tissues and cell types including the liver, the gut and both α and β‑cells in the pancreas, ...

An international team led by scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature and the University of Chicago reconstructed the brain, heart, and fins of an extinct fish called Norselaspis glacialis from a tiny fossil the size of fingernail and found evidence of change toward a fast-swimming, sensorily attuned lifestyle well before jaws and teeth were invented to better capture food. “These are the opening acts for a key episode in our own deep evolutionary history,” said Tetsuto Miyashita, who is a research scientist with the ...