Conservation agriculture, including no-dig, crop-rotation and mulching methods, reduces water runoff and soil loss and boosts crop yield by as much as 122%, in Ethiopian trial

Climate change has caused some tropical plants to flower earlier or later than they used to, in some cases by a matter of weeks or even months, according to a study of 8,000 flowers across more than two centuries, published February 25, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Skylar Graves and Erin Manzitto-Tripp of the University of Colorado-Boulder, U.S. Among the documented impacts of recent climate change are the shifting flowering times of some plant species. Such changes to plant reproductive behaviors can have wide-ranging ecological consequences, particularly for pollinators and ...

New research shows that, off the U.S. West Coast, humpback whales face a higher risk of getting entangled in fishing equipment during years with lower availability of cool-water habitat, where the whales feed. Jarrod Santora of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Climate on February 25th. Many kinds of fishing gear, such as gillnets and traps, can entangle whales, injuring or even killing them. Before 2014, annual reported entanglements off the U.S. West Coast were below 10, but reports have risen, with 31 reported in ...

Suitable habitat for migrating monarch butterflies will shift southwards because of climate change, according to a study publishing February 25th in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Francisco Botello and Carolina Ureta at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and colleagues. One of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring phenomena in nature is the mass migration of the brightly colored monarch butterfly. Each year, millions of monarchs travel thousands of kilometers from their breeding grounds in Canada and the U.S. to overwintering sites in central Mexico. Conservationists have raised concerns over dramatic declines in the number of migrating monarchs, ...

When removing cancerous tissue in the brain, neurosurgeons often use “awake brain mapping” to minimize the risk of causing unintended disruptions to a patient’s quality of life while removing as much tumor as possible. This practice, which has been used for decades, involves waking a patient up mid-surgery to test their neurocognitive functions in real time by stimulating the brain surface and assessing for functional changes. A new study soon to be published in the journal Science Advances details ...

Almost 1-in-3 American adolescents has diabetes or prediabetes, with waist-to-height ratio the strongest independent predictor of prediabetes/diabetes, reveals survey of 1,998 adolescents (10-19 years) from 2021-2023 Article URL: https://plos.io/3MEkobs Article title: Prevalence and predictors of prediabetes/type 2 diabetes mellitus among adolescents in the United States: NHANES (2021–2023) Author countries: U.S., Ghana. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Researchers have investigated the role of a certain enzyme in regulating energy in muscle and exercise performance for decades, but a new study by Virginia Tech scientists has identified more precisely than ever how this mechanism works. Scientists working at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC focused on a triggering event that leads to the activation AMPK, which is a master energy senso known as Adenosine Monophosphate-Activated Protein Kinase. It is a regulator of energy production in response to the tremendous energetic demands of exercise. The study, published Wednesday, Feb. 25, in Science Advances, confirmed role of AMPK phosphorylation ...

Many therapeutic molecules used in cancer treatments are highly toxic, often harming healthy tissues and causing significant side effects. This creates a critical need for strategies that localize their toxic activity to tumors. What if cancer drugs could stay dormant until they reach cancer cells? A new study by Syracuse University researchers demonstrates a promising chemistry-based strategy that could do just that. Xiaoran Hu, assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Arts & Sciences (A&S), and his team introduced a prototyping “lock-and-key” system that holds therapeutic drugs in an inactive, caged form until a separate chemical trigger ...

February 25, 2026--  Benzodiazepine treatment declined among U.S. adults between 2018 and 2022, with the steepest drop among adults ages 56 and older, according to a new study by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Despite the overall decrease, co-prescribing with other central nervous system (CNS) depressants — including opioids — remains common, particularly among adults in poor health or experiencing serious psychological distress. The ...

Dining on the moon or Mars might seem like a fantasy reserved for science fiction, but researchers are investigating how it could become a reality. Their efforts to recycle plant and human waste into a fertilizer material — turning the barren surfaces of the moon and Mars into fertile fields that might be suitable for extraterrestrial agriculture — are described in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry. “In lunar and Martian outposts, organic wastes will be key to generating ...

When artificial intelligence systems began acing long‑standing academic assessments, researchers realized they had a problem: the tests were too easy. Popular evaluations, such as the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) exam, once considered formidable, are no longer challenging enough to meaningfully test advanced AI systems. To address this gap, a global consortium of nearly 1,000 researchers, including a Texas A&M University professor, created something different — an exam so broad, so challenging and so deeply rooted in expert human knowledge that current AI systems consistently fail it. “Humanity’s Last Exam” (HLE) introduces ...