◆ Science Press Releases

Fashion insiders and beauty magazines have long cited the “20-year-rule” — the idea that clothing trends often resurface every two decades.  According to Northwestern University scientists, that observation isn’t just anecdotal. It’s a mathematical reality. In a new study, the Northwestern team developed a new mathematical model showing that fashion trends tend to cycle roughly every 20 years. By analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women’s clothing spanning from 1869 to today, the team found that styles rise in popularity, fall out of favor and then eventually experience renewal. Along with supporting common ...

Health promotion, education, and behavior assistant professor Leila Larson conducts her nutrition-focused maternal and child health research all over the world, and South Carolinians will soon benefit from her expertise. With funding from the USC Collaborative for Health Equity Research (CHEER), an equity-driven pilot project program recently established by the USC Office of the Provost, Larson has launched a new study focused on pica (i.e., the craving and consumption of non-food items, like ice, and sometimes earth, like clay or soil). “Pica impacts pregnant women across the globe, including ...

Going to the grocery store these days can be a painful experience, with record-high price hikes biting into Canadian food budgets. However, as many societies around the world already know, a cheap, plentiful source of protein is literally at our feet: insects, especially crickets, grasshoppers, ants and beetles. While entomophagy — the eating of insects — has lagged in the U.S. and Canada, a new study by Concordia researchers found that there is some interest in the dietary practice, with some demographic groups showing more ...

DETROIT – A research team led by Wayne State University was awarded a $473,566, three-year grant from the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) for a major collaborative initiative focused on enhanced phosphorus removal at the nation’s largest single-site wastewater treatment facility. The GLWA Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF) serves 77 communities — including Detroit — and manages flows from a nearly 1,000‑square‑mile sewer shed. The project aims to protect the Rouge River and Lake Erie by improving phosphorus removal efficiency and ...

Traumatic muscle injury can be associated with volumetric muscle loss (VML), often leading to permanent functional loss. Until recently, experimental therapies to support muscle regeneration have faced several key limitations, including the challenge of delivering sufficient healing cells to the traumatized area and the inability of conventional tissue transplants to conform to the specific shape of a muscle defect. A recent study, led by senior author Ngan F. Huang, PhD, Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Research) in the Stanford Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, highlights a unique approach her research team has developed to address this problem and potentially ...

WASHINGTON, March 17, 2026 — Most people will close their eyes when trying to concentrate on a faint sound. Many of us have been told that keeping our eyes closed helps us hear better — that it frees up our brains’ processing abilities and increases our auditory sensitivity. However, that strategy may sometimes backfire, particularly in environments with a lot of loud background noise. In JASA, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University tested whether a person closing their eyes can really hear better in noisy environments. To test this, volunteers listened to a collection of sounds through ...

WASHINGTON, March 17, 2026 — Anyone with a chronic illness understands the struggle of living with a disease that is deeply unpredictable. Many such illnesses are characterized by long periods of remission broken up by sudden, debilitating flare-ups. Sometimes these flare-ups have obvious causes, but often they seem to come out of nowhere, which can be frustrating and unpleasant. The solution might come from a complex field of mathematics called nonlinear dynamics. This field involves changing systems where the relationships between variables ...

A unique collection of prehistoric bowhead whale bones, dating back 11,000 years, reveals a previously untold story of the relative impacts of humans on nature. The time series of ancient fossils show that commercial hunting of bowhead whales, which spanned 400 years and ceased less than a century ago in 1931, has left irreversible destructive traces in the species’ genetics. This could have serious consequences for the long-term vulnerability of the species. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen led an international team to study ...

Millions of Americans have thought about shooting someone, a new University of Michigan study finds. And if they didn’t already own a firearm, some of them have thought about getting one to make their thoughts a reality. Over 7% of adults in the United States say that at some time in their life, they have thought about shooting someone else. That percentage corresponds to 19.4 million people. Over 3%, or about 8.7 million adults, said they have thought of shooting someone in the last year. Firearm owners were no more likely to have had these thoughts than those who don’t own firearms, according to the findings published in the journal JAMA Network Open and based ...

(BERGEN, Norway) – Today, the Holberg Prize—one of the largest international prizes awarded annually to an outstanding researcher in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology—named Australian scholar Lyndal Roper as its 2026 Laureate. Roper is the Regius Chair of History at the University of Oxford emeritus. She will receive the award of NOK 6,000,000 (approx. GBP 466,00 / USD 630,000) during a 4th June ceremony at the University of Bergen, Norway. Professor Roper is internationally recognized as one of the leading scholars of early modern European history. Her pioneering ...

Reconnecting Kidney Plumbing, the Zebrafish Way MDI Bio Lab scientists discover how the fish solves a basic challenge in regenerative biology—insights in their newest publication in the journal Development could one day guide human repair. When the human kidney is damaged by conditions such as high blood pressure or the elevated blood sugar levels that accompany diabetes, it can lose some of its nephrons – the kidney’s basic waste-filtering units. Lose enough of them and kidney function falters, leading to the hallmarks ...

Tsukuba, Japan—Noncontact vibration measurement is essential for ensuring the safety and reliability of structures such as buildings, bridges, aircraft, and railway systems. Laser-based systems such as laser Doppler violometers provide accurate results but require expensive equipment and elaborate setup procedures. Camera-based vibration measurement has gained attention as a more affordable alternative. However, conventional cameras generate images by integrating light over a finite exposure time. To capture high-speed vibrations, the exposure time must be shortened, which reduces the amount of detectable light. Accordingly, the illumination must be significantly increased, ...

Tsukuba, Japan—To reduce the adverse health effects associated with exposure to second-hand smoke, Japan fully enforced the Revised Health Promotion Law in April 2020, introducing a nationwide indoor smoking ban in restaurants and similar hospitality establishments. However, the law includes temporary exemptions that permit pre-existing small-scale restaurants and bars to allow indoor smoking, provided that individuals under the age of 20 are not exposed. To mitigate the potential public health impact of these exemptions, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Chiba City simultaneously implemented stricter passive smoking prevention ordinances designed to further ...

Herdon, VA, March 17, 2026 — Listeria is the third-leading cause of death among bacterial foodborne pathogens in the U.S. and pregnant individuals bear a disproportionate share of that burden. Yet the scientific models used to set food safety policy have rarely been designed with pregnant people specifically in mind. A new study to be published in Risk Analysis aims to change that.  Each year, approximately 1,250 Americans contract listeriosis, the illness caused by Listeria monocytogenes. The disease carries a staggering 86% hospitalization rate and is fatal in approximately 14% of cases. For pregnant individuals, the stakes are even higher: ...

WASHINGTON—Early-life exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) may influence how children’s bones develop during adolescence, according to new research published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society. PFAS are synthetic chemicals found in water, food and everyday products. These “forever chemicals,” many of which persist in the environment and in the human body, may interfere with normal development, including ...

A study clarifies the date of an important technological milestone: the adoption of the bow and arrow in western North America. The replacement of older weapons by bows and arrows occurred independently in several prehistoric cultures. Briggs Buchanan and colleagues explore this transition in western North America, where the bow replaced the atlatl and dart as the primary hunting technology. The authors focused on 136 radiocarbon-dated, well-preserved organic weapons, which provide evidence of when and where the weapons ...

Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. “The fact that many populous and economically powerful countries are autocratizing is especially worrying. ...

What do we really know about how oviraptors – bird-like but flightless dinosaurs – hatched their eggs? Did they use environmental heat, like crocodiles, or body heat from an adult, like birds? In a new Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution study, researchers in Taiwan examined the brooding behavior and hatching patterns of oviraptors. They also modelled heat transfer simulations of oviraptor clutches and compared hatching efficiency to modern birds. To do so, they experimented with a life-sized oviraptor incubator and eggs. “We show the difference ...

A research team led by Dr. Ji-Hyung Han from the Convergence Research Center of Sector Coupling & Integration at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (President Yi, Chang-Keun, hereinafter “KIER”) has developed a new seawater electrolysis system that overcomes the precipitate formation issue long blamed for performance degradation and process interruptions, while also presenting a new direction for further technology advancement. Water electrolysis is a technology that produces hydrogen, an eco-friendly energy source, by splitting water. Recently, amid the global freshwater shortage, seawater electrolysis using seawater has been gaining attention as a promising ...

Bull sharks form social relationships with specific “friends”, new research reveals. Sharks are often viewed as solitary, but the study – carried out on the Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji – found that rather than mixing at random, sharks have “active social preferences” and choose their social partners. The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, University of Lancaster, Fiji Shark Lab, and Beqa Adventure Divers. “As humans we cultivate a range of social relationships – from casual acquaintances to our best friends, but we also actively avoid certain ...

Early life stress may lead to digestive issues later in life, driven by changes in the gut and sympathetic nervous systems, according to a new study published in the journal Gastroenterology. “Our research shows that these stressors can have a real impact on a child's development and may influence gut issues long-term. Understanding the mechanisms involved can help us to create more targeted treatments,” said study author Kara Margolis, director of the NYU Pain Research Center and professor of molecular pathobiology at NYU College of Dentistry and pediatrics and cell biology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Emotional neglect ...

Mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue, malaria and Zika, cause more than 600,000 deaths worldwide per year. Mosquitoes are increasingly becoming resistant to current insecticides, leading to a pressing need for new methods to prevent mosquito bites — and the potential transmission of disease. New research by an international team, including researchers at the University of Washington, provides insight into how an organic compound common in plant-based mosquito repellents affects mosquitoes. The study, published Feb. 20 in Nature Communications, reveals that Aedes ...

Potato dry rot leads to significant losses during storage and postharvest handling, making management of this disease critically important for potato farmers. Colorado State University researchers in the San Luis Valley – one of the top regions for potato production in the U.S. – have identified multiple fungal species causing dry rot in Colorado. By analyzing structural and molecular features, plant pathologists at CSU’s San Luis Valley Research Center identified four Fusarium species associated with potato dry rot in the valley – including one that hadn’t ...

BOZEMAN – With the support of a recent federal grant, a team of Montana State University microbiologists will spend the next three years expanding and deepening research into one of the world’s most damaging agricultural viruses, capitalizing on cutting-edge facilities and technologies housed at the university. Assistant professor Emma Loveday of the College of Agriculture’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology is the lead investigator on a $1.9 million grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study HPAI, or highly pathogenic avian influenza, more commonly known as “bird flu.” ...

The Chesapeake Bay’s most popular crustacean has a dark streak. Cannibalism is the No. 1 killer of juvenile blue crabs in mid-salinity waters where they are known to congregate, according to a new study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. But shallow waters can offer a vital refuge.  Blue crabs lead a life on the run. After spending roughly two months as larvae in the ocean, they are swept back into the lower bay to morph into juvenile crabs. There, the juveniles rely on seagrass to provide partial refuge from predatory fish like striped bass. ...