Science
press releases.

Science8 Jul 2025

Efficient elastic tissues may hold the secrets to Olympic success

New research into the muscles of world-class athletes and performance artists has revealed that a small number of “general motor skills” raise these experts above regional-level and novice competitors, with interesting implications for competitive sport and musculoskeletal health. Contrary to the belief that athletic motor skills are highly specific to individual sports or activities, this research has found that previously unexamined fundamental traits are associated with world-class performance across a range of athletic disciplines. “We discovered that world-class ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Behind the ballistics of the “explosive” squirting cucumber

New research into the biomechanics of explosive seed dispersal in squirting cucumbers (Ecballium elaterium) reveals how these plants have adapted a suite of unique traits that help propel their high-speed seeds far and wide. Seed dispersal comes in many forms, and much is known about animal, wind and water-assisted dispersal – but less is known about the self-propelled dispersal mechanisms of plants. One of these is the ballistic dispersal of the squirting cucumber, which uses high-pressure explosions to eject its seeds at ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Researchers find compound that inhibits cutaneous HPVs

Highlights: Human papillomaviruses, or HPVs, cause cutaneous and mucosal infections that may lead to cancer. To date, no antiviral treatment options exist for HPVs. Researchers have identified a promising new compound that inhibits cutaneous HPV. In lab studies, the compound inhibited viral replication genes in cutaneous HPVs without damaging host cells. Washington, D.C. — Human papillomaviruses, or HPVs, can cause dangerous infections in the skin and mucous membranes and may lead to cancer. Vaccines that prevent mucosal HPV infections aren’t effective against cutaneous infections, which can cause serious diseases, particularly ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

City of Hope Research Spotlight, April/May 2025

LOS ANGELES — City of Hope® Research Spotlight offers a glimpse at groundbreaking scientific and clinical discoveries advancing lifesaving cures for patients with cancer, diabetes and other chronic, life-threatening diseases. Each spotlight features research-related news, such as recognitions, collaborations and the latest research defining the future of medical treatment. To learn more about research at City of Hope, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States with its National Medical Center named a Top 5 “Best Hospital” in the nation for cancer care by U.S. News & World Report, subscribe to City of ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

The Three Gorges region of the Yangtze River hits record high temperatures in 2024

The Three Gorges Region (TGR) of the Yangtze River spans Chongqing Municipality and Hubei Province, serving as a vital corridor connecting western and central China. The climate in the TGR features four distinct seasons with abundant precipitation and synchronized rain–heat periods. The climatic conditions in the TGR directly impact the safety of navigation in the Yangtze River, as well as the basin's agricultural production patterns and clean energy supply, all of which are crucial to regional socioeconomic development and ecological conservation. Therefore, ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Experts urge evidence-based regulations of 7-OH, not restriction, as new science emerges showing safe use

A combination of data from the FDA and two independent studies prompted a group of scientists to speak out on conversations surrounding 7-OH and its parent plant, kratom. The science confirms the strong safety profile of 7-OH and slams the door closed on continued efforts by industry competitors to push 7-OH out of the marketplace with public smears, unfounded science, and government overreach. The Marwood Group recently completed an independent analysis of data from the FDA, CDC and other federal agencies that confirms 7-OH’s strong real-world safety profile. According to the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), there have ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Genes for surviving plague in prairie dogs

A study of the genetic basis of plague immunity in prairie dogs has broad implications for conservation. From white-nose syndrome in bats to avian malaria in Hawaiian birds, introduced pathogens are a major cause of population declines in native species. Many prairie dog populations in North America have been nearly wiped out by sylvatic plague, which is caused by the same bacteria that causes the Black Death in humans: Yersinia pestis. Loren Cassin-Sackett and colleagues studied an outbreak of plague in Boulder County, Colorado in 2006–2009 that hit the site of a long-term prairie dog ecology study. The authors trapped and sampled the ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Understanding how heat stress reshapes fat metabolism in chickens

Broiler chickens, bred for rapid growth, accumulate more fat under chronic heat stress, which reduces meat quality and production efficiency. In a recent study, researchers from Japan revealed that heat stress directly alters fat metabolism in adipose tissue, regulating genes that promote fat storage. Their findings suggest new strategies to mitigate heat stress-related losses in poultry production amidst global warming. The world’s growing population relies heavily on poultry as a source of protein, making the health and productivity of chickens critical for global food security. ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Innovative Genomics Institute announce new Center for Pediatric CRISPR Cures

San Francisco — Personalized CRISPR cures for children born with rare genetic diseases are now a step closer to being more widely available. Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) announced the funding of the Center for Pediatric CRISPR Cures (Center). The Center will use CRISPR-based editing technology to advance cures for severe pediatric genetic diseases and will bridge CRISPR cure design and testing at the University of California, Berkeley ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Study traces evolutionary origins of important enzyme complex

University of Cincinnati Cancer Center researchers looked billions of years into the past to learn more about the potential future of precision medicine. Led by first author Bibek R. Karki and senior author Tom Cunningham, new research published July 8 in the journal Nature Communications traced the evolutionary origins of the PRPS enzyme complex and learned more about how this complex functions and influences cellular biochemistry. Study background The researchers focused on one of nature’s most important and evolutionarily ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Heat and heavy metals are changing the way that bees buzz

Ongoing research into the effect of environmental change on the buzzing of bees reveals that high temperatures and exposure to heavy metals reduces the frequency (and audible pitch) of non-flight wing vibrations, which could have consequences on the effectiveness of bee communication and their role as pollinators. “People have been long interested in how insect flight muscles work, as these muscles power the most efficient flight systems in nature,” says Dr Charlie Woodrow, a post-doctoral researcher at Uppsala University. “However, many do not know that bees use these muscles for functions other than flight.” These ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

For ultrasound, ultra-strength not always a good thing

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers have solved a long-standing mystery in the field of sonochemistry: why do chemical reactions slow down when ultrasonic power becomes too strong? Their findings allow for smarter use of ultrasound in science and industry, such as for environmental cleanup or the creation of useful nanoparticles. Although ultrasound is inaudible to the human ear, it plays a powerful role in sonochemistry. When ultrasonic waves are applied to a liquid, they generate microscopic bubbles that rapidly ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Matching your workouts to your personality could make exercising more enjoyable and give you better results

Finding motivation to exercise can be the greatest challenge in working out. This might be part of the reason why less than a quarter of people achieve the activity goals recommended by the World Health Organization. But what if working out could be more enjoyable? One way of achieving this could be opting for types of exercise that fit our personalities. To this end, researchers in the UK now have examined how personality affects what types of exercise we prefer, and our commitment and engagement to them. The results ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Personality type can predict which forms of exercise people enjoy

The key to sticking to and reaping the rewards of exercise over the long term may be as simple as doing something you enjoy, say the authors of a new study from UCL. Previous research has shown that the personalities of people who engage in different types of organised sport tend to vary. But what is less clear is how personality affects the types of exercise people actually enjoy doing. The new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, explored whether individual personality traits corresponded to the enjoyment of different types of exercise, whether participants completed a prescribed exercise programme, and the subsequent ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

When domesticated rabbits go feral, new morphologies emerge

Originally bred for meat and fur, the European rabbit has become a successful invader worldwide. When domesticated breeds return to the wild and feralise, the rabbits do not simply revert to their wild form – they experience distinct, novel anatomical changes. Associate Professor Emma Sherratt, from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences, led a team of international experts to assess the body sizes and skull shapes of 912 wild, feral and domesticated rabbits to determine how feralisation affects the animal. “Feralisation ...

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Science8 Jul 2025

Rain events could cause major failure of Waikīkī storm drainage by 2050

Existing sea level rise models for coastal cities often overlook the impacts of rainfall on infrastructure. Researchers at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa discovered that by 2050, large rain events combined with sea level rise could cause flooding severe enough to disrupt transportation and contaminate stormwater inlets across 70% of Waikīkī on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, due to interactions with water in the Ala Wai Canal. Their study was published recently in Scientific Reports. “We’ve known that sea level rise will reduce the capacity for our drainage system to handle surface runoff, however, including rainfall events in our models showed ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

Nearly half of U.S. grandchildren live within 10 miles of a grandparent

ITHACA, N.Y. — New, more precise estimates show most American grandchildren live close to a grandparent, with implications for families’ well-being and for how much time and money generations share. Cornell researchers’ analysis found that nearly half of U.S. grandchildren (47%) live within 10 miles of a grandparent. Of those, significant numbers live even closer: 21% live between 1 and 5 miles, and 13% live within a walkable distance of 1 mile. As many grandchildren live within 1 mile of their grandparents as live 500 miles or more away. Families living closer to grandparents tend to have lower socioeconomic status, the researchers found, ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

Three years in, research shows regional, personal differences in use of 988 lifeline

Who is most likely to use the 988, the national suicide and crisis lifeline launched on July 16, 2022? Two studies led by researchers at the NYU School of Global Public Health find both geographic differences and personal factors that shape where people might seek help during mental health crises. For instance, people in western and northeastern states are more likely to have called 988 than those in the South; similarly, Democrats are more inclined to say that they would use 988 than Republicans. In addition, more than 10 percent of calls came from veterans. The findings, published in JAMA Network ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

Beyond the alpha male

To the point Power relationships between males and females are less clear-cut than expected: In most species, neither sex clearly dominates over the other. Evolutionary factors shape intersexual power: Males have power when they can physically outcompete females, while females rely on different pathways to achieve power over males. New findings by researchers at the University of Montpellier, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and the German Primate Center in Göttingen resolve why male-female power ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

For fish, hovering is not restful

Fish make hanging motionless in the water column look effortless, and scientists had long assumed that this meant it was a type of rest. Now, a new study reveals that fish use nearly twice as much energy when hovering in place compared to resting. The study, led by scientists at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, also details the biomechanics of fish hovering, which includes constant, subtle fin movements to prevent tipping, drifting or rolling. This more robust understanding of how fish actively maintain their position could inform the design of underwater robots ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

Smithsonian-led team discovers North America’s oldest known pterosaur

A Smithsonian-led team of researchers have discovered North America’s oldest known pterosaur, the winged reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs and were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. In a paper published today, July 7, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by paleontologist Ben Kligman, a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, present the fossilized jawbone of the new species and describe the sea gull-sized ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

A study shakes up received ideas on male domination among primates

While knowledge of the female dominance spectrum among certain primate species dates back to the 1960s, research precisely quantifying the degree of one gender’s dominance over the other was lacking. A team of scientists collected data from 253 populations representing 121 primate species in order to study confrontations between males and females. It also analysed the contexts in which one or the other tend to dominate. Scientists then tested five evolutionary hypotheses to better understand these power relations. Females tend to dominate in species [3] where they have strong control over their reproduction. Their dominance is also more frequent in societies ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

Mobile mindfulness meditation apps may improve attention

Studies suggest mindfulness meditation can improve cognition, but few researchers have examined whether virtual mindfulness meditation apps are effective. In a new eNeuro paper, Andy Kim et al., from the University of Southern California, assessed attention control in adults following about a month of mindfulness meditation guided by a mobile app. In participants of all ages, mindfulness improved attention control as measured by reliable eye movement tasks established to assess how quickly people orient their attention. A control group that listened to an audio book did not have this cognitive improvement. Notably, self-reported measures of cognitive ability, ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

Positive emotions may strengthen memories

How do emotions influence memory? In a collaboration between Hangzhou Normal University and Nanjing Normal University, Xi Jia led a study to explore whether emotions shape how well people remember meaningless, or neutral, images. As detailed in their new JNeurosci paper, the researchers recorded the brain activity of 44 study participants as they viewed meaningless images of squiggles followed by images meant to evoke positive, neutral, or negative emotions. Researchers presented each squiggle–emotional image pair to participants three times. During image pair learning sessions, positive emotions promoted ...

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Science7 Jul 2025

Audit published in research integrity and peer review identifies key failings of institutional animal care and use committees

WASHINGTON, D.C.— A focused review published in the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review has found that Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) provide surprisingly little protection for animals in research, that searches for alternatives to animal use are seldom conducted, and that, when performed, they are inadequate. For the first time since the publication of “The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals” (The Guide) in 1963, research scientists are recommending a new guide that puts replacement of animals in research and IACUC member training ...

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