Science
press releases.

Science31 Jul 2025

Weather-tracking advances are revealing astonishing extremes of lightning

It was a single lightning flash that streaked across the Great Plains for 515 miles, from eastern Texas nearly all the way to Kansas City, setting a new world record. “We call it megaflash lightning and we're just now figuring out the mechanics of how and why it occurs,” said Randy Cerveny, an Arizona State University President’s Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. Cerveny and colleagues used space-based instruments to measure the megaflash, which took place during a major thunderstorm in October 2017. Its astonishing horizontal reach surpasses by 38 miles the previous record of 477 miles recorded during ...

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Science31 Jul 2025

Grasses are spendthrifts, forests are budgeters, in a nuanced account of plant water use

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Even a toddler knows that plants need water. It’s perhaps the first thing we learn about these green lifeforms. But how plants budget this resource varies considerably. The kapok trees of the Amazon have adopted vastly different strategies than the switchgrass of the American plains. Unfortunately, it’s hard to directly measure which ones prevail in different ecosystem types and how they shift under changing conditions. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and San Diego State University recently developed a metric ...

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Science31 Jul 2025

"Scrumping" windfallen fruits and the origin of feasting

The lives of our earliest hominin ancestors are often shrouded in mystery, but recent research on the consumption of windfallen fruit may shed light on one of humanity's oldest and most savored activities: sharing a good meal (and a tipple) with kith and kin. In a "Notes from the Field" article in the journal BioScience, Nathaniel Dominy (Dartmouth College), Catherine Hobaiter (University of St Andrews), and colleagues coin a new term for gathering and eating fallen fruit: scrumping. The term calls to mind scrumpy, a rustic unfiltered cider popular in the West Country of England. And just as ...

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Science31 Jul 2025

How ‘scrumping’ apes may have given us a taste for alcohol

If scientists are to better understand whether the genes that let us safely welcome the weekend with a cold beer or enjoy a bottle of wine with dinner began with apes eating fermented fruit, then the habit needs a name, according to a new study. "Scrumping" is the name coined in a paper led by researchers at Dartmouth and the University of St Andrews in Scotland for the fondness apes have for eating ripe fruit from the forest floor. These primates' palate for picked-up produce has taken on new importance in recent years, the researchers report in the journal BioScience. But scientists cannot fully understand the significance of this behavior—particularly ...

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Science31 Jul 2025

Scrumped fruit key to chimpanzee life and a major force of human evolution

New research from the University of St Andrews and Dartmouth College examines the crucial, but until now, overlooked, role of ‘scrumped’ fruit in the lives of great apes and the origins of human feasting. Published today (Thursday 31 July) in BioScience, this pioneering study is the first to tackle the mystery of why humans are so astoundingly good at metabolising alcohol. The findings show that feeding on fermented fruits gathered from the forest floor is an important behaviour in the lives of African apes, ...

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Science31 Jul 2025

Heavy drinking raises the risk of undesired pregnancy; cannabis use does not

A new study has found that, among women with a high desire to avoid becoming pregnant, those who drank heavily had a 50% higher risk of becoming pregnant than those who drank moderately or not at all. In contrast, participants who used cannabis were no more likely to have an undesired pregnancy than participants who did not use cannabis. From a larger sample of over 2,000 non-pregnant women aged 15-34, researchers identified a subgroup of 936 who didn't want to get pregnant. Within that subgroup, ...

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Science31 Jul 2025

New study shows young adults who use high strength cannabis do not ‘titrate’ to less risky levels of use

A new study published today in the scientific journal Addiction has found that young adults in the US do not ‘titrate’ when using strong cannabis. In other words, they do not use less cannabis to compensate for the stronger potency. In fact, it’s the opposite: young adults who report using strong cannabis also typically use it more frequently and in higher quantities than young adults who use weaker forms of the drug. This study surveyed over 400 young adults in California USA who had used cannabis in the past month. They were asked to describe the strength of their typical cannabis product using a THC potency scale of 0 (no THC) to 5 (very high THC concentration). ...

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Science31 Jul 2025

The eagles resistant to poisonous toads

Kyoto, Japan -- In 1978, cane toads, which are native to South and Central America, were introduced for pest control to Ishigaki island in Okinawa prefecture in Japan. These poisonous toads secrete deadly toxins, killing enough of the predators in their new territories that they have been designated an invasive species. However, one predator on Ishigaki has proven resistant to the cane toads' poison. The crested serpent eagle, common across Asia but considered critically endangered in Japan where only about 200 individuals reside, has been observed feeding on the toads on the ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Simple solution to save lives globally: Low-cost ‘SimpleSilo’ offers hope for babies with gastroschisis

In low-resource settings, babies born with gastroschisis — a congenital condition in which the developing intestines extend outside the body through a hole in the abdominal wall —face life-threatening challenges. While survival rates in high-income countries now exceed 90% thanks to advanced medical tools and neonatal care, infants in resource-constrained medical settings still face high mortality rates, partially because of a lack of access to the lifesaving equipment needed to treat the condition. A team of engineers ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Curbing roadway fatalities hinges on shared responsibility and rethinking safety

Drivers are not the only ones to blame for roadway fatalities. That's the crux of a review article in the New England Journal of Medicine written by a pair of Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) researchers invited to share their insights on the strategies aimed at progressing toward a future with zero traffic deaths. Utilizing publicly available data, research publications, and their own expertise, Charlie Klauer and Zac Doerzaph evaluated the safety treatments and countermeasures that apply to what is known as the Safe System Approach, a framework that broadly embraces the concept that road users are not solely responsible ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Efforts underway to end race-based assessments of lung function

Multi-institutional team, including physicians and researchers who successfully proposed updates to national guidelines, share important next steps for reevaluating how occupational impairment is determined Last July, a team of physicians and researchers successfully proposed modifications to the American Medical Association (AMA) Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, advocating against the use of race in lung function testing. In a new publication in The New England Journal of Medicine, the team describes the history of how race and pulmonary function testing have been used to quantify lung function impairment, which often determines ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

New research further investigates safety of general anesthesia in infants

New research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that prolonged and/or repeated exposure to gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) anesthetic agents (sevoflurane, propofol) for infants in the first two months of life resulted in an accelerated maturation of brain electrical activity patterns evoked by visual stimuli when recorded at 2-5 months of age, compared to infants who did not have early general anesthesia exposure. These findings may suggest the use of non-GABA-active anesthetics for the newborn ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Instagram images could influence public opinion on certain major events

A new study of Instagram posts has uncovered strong statistical correlations suggesting that social media images may play a key role in shaping public opinion toward events, with notable social and political effects. Nafiseh Jabbari Tofighi of Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey, and Reda Alhajj of University of Calgary, Canada, Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey, and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on July 30, 2025. Some prior studies have suggested that images and videos on social media can significantly impact users’ sentiments ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

The unusual head of a fish and the puzzle of its genes

Almost all animals have symmetrical bodies: If we look at the left and right halves of our body, the limbs, eyes and ears are arranged evenly along the axis that runs through the centre of our body. This bilateral symmetry is almost universal in all animals and is only very rarely broken – with exceptions like the five-armed starfish or crab species that have one large and one small claw. One example of broken bilateral symmetry is the cichlid fish Perissodus microlepis, which is native to Lake Tanganyika in Africa. Its head and especially ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Influenza-associated acute necrotizing encephalopathy in US children

About The Study: In this case series of children with influenza-associated acute necrotizing encephalopathy from the 2 most recent influenza seasons in the U.S., the condition was associated with high morbidity and mortality in this cohort of predominantly young and previously healthy children. The findings emphasize the need for prevention, early recognition, intensive treatment, and standardized management protocols. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Andrew Silverman, MD, MHS, email Aesilver@stanford.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

‘One and done’: A single shot at birth may shield children from HIV for years, study finds

A new study in Nature shows that delivering a single injection of gene therapy at birth may offer years-long protection against HIV, tapping into a critical window in early life that could reshape the fight against pediatric infections in high-risk regions. This study is among the first to show that the first weeks of life, when the immune system is naturally more tolerant, may be the optimal window for delivering gene therapies that would otherwise be rejected at older ages. “Nearly ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

New method for detecting neutrinos

Neutrinos are extremely elusive elementary particles. Day and night, 60 billion of them stream from the Sun through every square centimeter of the Earth every second, which is transparent to them. After the first theoretical prediction of their existence, decades passed before they were actually detected. These experiments are usually extremely large to account for the very weak interaction of neutrinos with matter. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg have now succeeded in detecting antineutrinos from the reactor of a nuclear power plant using the CONUS+ experiment, with a detector mass of just ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Mortality among surgeons in the United States

About The Study: Although nonsurgeon physicians have lower mortality rates than other highly educated professionals, this mortality benefit does not extend to surgeons. Because surgeons and nonsurgeon physicians have similar levels of health care knowledge and resources, higher mortality rates among surgeons might reflect differences related to work environment, professional demands, and lifestyle. The results of this study indicate that several causes of death (e.g., motor vehicle collisions), disproportionately affect surgeons, aligning ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Study reveals mixed impact of state e-cigarette flavor bans on tobacco use

A new study by investigators from Mass General Brigham examined the effects of policies banning flavored e-cigarettes on adults and young people. Investigators found that e-cigarette use significantly declined among young adults and adults in states that had enacted flavor bans relative to states that did not. However, declines in cigarette smoking also slowed in those states with flavor bans relative to other states—a potential unintended consequence of the bans. Results are published in JAMA Network Open. “Both ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

How the common fungus Candida albicans colonizes the gut

About 80% of people have the fungus Candida albicans in their gut. Although most of the time it persists unnoticed for years causing no health problems, C. albicans can turn into a dangerous microbe that causes serious diseases in many organs, including the urinary tract, lungs and brain. Understanding how this fungus colonizes the gut is key to preventing it from becoming harmful. Working with a mouse model, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and international collaborators have discovered unexpected factors that help C. albicans ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Announcing Zuber Lawler as a Sponsor of ARDD 2025

The University of Copenhagen is excited to announce Zuber Lawler as a Sponsor of the 12th Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting, the world's largest conference on aging research in the biopharmaceutical industry that will transpire on August 25 - August 29, 2025 on-site at the Ceremonial Hall, University of Copenhagen, and online. “Zuber Lawler demonstrates meticulous attention to detail with a client-first mentality… They offer personalized care from highly intelligent and creative counsel… ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Is this what 2,500-year-old honey looks like?

Decades ago, archaeologists discovered a sticky substance in a copper jar in an ancient Greek shrine. And until recently, the identity of the residue was still murky — is it a mixture of fats, oils and beeswax or something else? Researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society have reanalyzed samples of the residue using modern analytical techniques and determined that it’s likely the remains of ancient honey — a conclusion previous analyses rejected. Honey was an important substance in the ancient world, sometimes left in shrines as offerings ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Announcing Deep Origin as a sponsor of ARDD 2025

The University of Copenhagen is excited to announce Deep Origin as the latest tier 3 sponsor of the 12th Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting, the world's largest conference on aging research in the biopharmaceutical industry that will transpire on August 25 - August 29, 2025 on-site at the Ceremonial Hall, University of Copenhagen, and online. Deep Origin is building hybrid mechanistic, physics and AI-based models that help researchers design, test, and filter therapeutics in silico – particularly for challenging disease areas such as aging. ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Through the shot glass, and what can be found in liverworts

Studying plant vegetative reproduction is key to increasing crop yield and for bioengineering. Kobe University research is making progress on studying the genetic regulation of the process in liverworts, which are ideal model plants and even a candidate for space crops. Potatoes are tubers, ginger is a rhizome, and both are forms of vegetative plant reproduction, in which plants create structures from which genetically identical individuals can emerge. This mode of reproduction is very important for agriculture and horticulture, but there is very little research on the underlying genetic mechanism. Kobe University ...

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Science30 Jul 2025

Female pilots perform better under pressure, study finds

Female pilots may outperform their male counterparts in high-pressure flight situations, according to a new study led by University of Waterloo researchers. The findings challenge traditional assumptions in aviation and suggest that women pilots may have unique strengths that could be better recognized in pilot training and evaluation systems. “These findings are exciting because they push us to rethink how we evaluate pilots,” said Naila Ayala, lead author of the study and postdoctoral fellow ...

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