Science
press releases.

Science28 Mar 2025

New approach makes one type of clean fuel production 66% more efficient

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers have uncovered a more efficient way to turn carbon dioxide into methanol, a type of alcohol that can serve as a cleaner alternative fuel. In the lab, synthesizing methanol can be extremely difficult, due to the extremely complex reaction pathway needed to select for it. Previous attempts by the same team to manufacture this valuable liquid fuel from carbon dioxide have used a combination of cobalt phthalocyanine (CoPc) molecules and electricity, but this method is inefficient as only about 30% of the carbon dioxide is converted to methanol. To ...

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Science28 Mar 2025

New approach could treat anthrax beyond the “point of no return”

Anthrax, an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, is often treatable in its early stages. But once the disease has progressed beyond the “point of no return” after just a few days, patients are almost certainly doomed. In a new Nature Microbiology study, University of Pittsburgh researchers show that a cocktail of growth factors reversed would-be lethal cell damage in mice with anthrax, suggesting that this approach could be adapted for use in patients beyond the brink. “While only a few people die from anthrax in the United States each year, there is always the concern ...

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Science28 Mar 2025

Those constantly distracted by their phone will just find other ways to procrastinate if it isn’t nearby

If you just put away your phone to read this, chances are you’re not alone. Our phones are an endless source of distraction, and we interact with them every four to six minutes. This is often driven by habit as well as notifications, leading to a disrupted flow of activity while we’re trying to be productive. A new study published in Frontiers in Computer Science investigated if placing smartphones just out of our reach while we’re at work influenced device use for activities not related ...

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Science28 Mar 2025

Ottoman Empire’s religious ‘tolerance’ another form of control

Population surveillance. The carrying of identification while traveling. Add to that the public presence of diverse religions and it sounds like 2025, but this was life in the Ottoman Empire 200 years ago. Yet this seeming tolerance of non-Muslim faiths was in fact tied to the first two aspects, according to research by Osaka Metropolitan University Associate Professor Masayuki Ueno. The Ottoman Empire lasted from around 1300 until 1922, and at various points in its history ruled present-day Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, and beyond. In the wake of the 1821 Greek revolt, the Ottoman Empire instituted ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Discovery of novel small compounds that delay flowering in plants

Ikoma, Japan—In an era where climate change threatens food security, scientists worldwide are searching for reliable ways to improve crop production. Extreme weather and shifting seasonal patterns can disrupt traditional agricultural cycles, making technologies that regulate the timing of plant growth invaluable for farmers worldwide. Plant growth and development are dependent on many factors such as the environment, photoperiod, and genetics. Flowering is an important event in a plant’s life ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Genetic defense breakthrough: plants repurpose stomatal genes to fend off herbivores

Ikoma, Japan—Throughout evolution, plants have continuously adapted to survive in changing environments. Apart from complex structural changes, plants have also developed various defense strategies against herbivores, including tougher protective layers, thorns, and chemical deterrents. Delving deeper into the evolution of defense mechanisms, a research team led by Assistant Professor Makoto Shirakawa from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), identified a surprising genetic adaptation in the Brassicales plant order. In these cruciferous ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

David B. Allison, Ph.D., Daniel W. Belsky, Ph.D., and Arlan Richardson, Ph.D., to receive 2025 Scientific Awards of Distinction from the American Federation for Aging Research

New York, NY — The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), is pleased to announce the 2025 recipients of three of its annual Scientific Awards of Distinction: David B. Allison, PhD, will receive the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction; Daniel W. Belsky, PhD, will receive the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star Award in Aging Research; and Arlan Richardson, PhD, will receive the George M. Martin Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award. The Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction is named in honor of AFAR’s founder and recognizes exceptional contributions to basic ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Pregnant women advised to avoid mentholated e-cigarettes

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Vaping during pregnancy is becoming more common, but its impact on early human development is not well understood. A new study by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, now reports that the flavor chemical menthol used in electronic cigarettes could pose risks to a developing baby. The study, published in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine, used human embryonic stem cells, or hESCs, to characterize early stages of embryonic development and examined how low concentrations of menthol affect important cellular processes. The ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Smart textiles and surfaces – How lightweight elastomer films are bringing tech to life

Clothes that can mimic the feeling of being touched, touch displays that provide haptic feedback to users, or even ultralight loudspeakers. These are just some of the devices made possible using thin silicone films that can be precisely controlled so that they vibrate, flex, press or pull exactly as desired. And all done simply by applying an electrical voltage. The research teams at the Center for Mechatronics and Automation Technology in Saarbrücken (ZeMA) headed by Professors Stefan Seelecke and Paul Motzki (Saarland University) and John Heppe (htw saar – University of Applied Sciences ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Getting the ball rolling

How gravity causes a perfectly spherical ball to roll down an inclined plane is part of elementary school physics canon. But the world is messier than a textbook. Scientists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have sought to quantitatively describe the much more complex rolling physics of real-world objects. Led by L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Physics, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in SEAS and FAS, they combined theory, simulations, and experiments to understand what happens when an imperfect, ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Breakthrough copper alloy achieves unprecedented high-temperature performance

A team of researchers from Arizona State University, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Lehigh University and Louisiana State University has developed a groundbreaking high-temperature copper alloy with exceptional thermal stability and mechanical strength. The research team’s findings on the new copper alloy, published in prestigious journal Science, introduce a novel bulk Cu-3Ta-0.5Li nanocrystalline alloy that exhibits remarkable resistance to coarsening and creep deformation, even at temperatures near its melting point. “Our alloy design approach mimics the strengthening mechanisms found in Ni-based superalloys,” said Kiran Solanki, a professor at ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Gasdermin D emerges as a potential therapeutic target for atrial fibrillation

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common form of heart arrhythmia, a serious condition in which the heart beats so fast that its upper chambers, the atria, quiver. This irregular heartbeat can increase the risk of severe conditions, including heart failure, dementia and stroke. “My lab has been studying the role of inflammation in the initiation and persistence of AF for many years. In this multidisciplinary study, we investigated the function of gasdermin D, a key participant in inflammatory pathways, in atrial heart cells and its potential contribution to AF,” said corresponding author Dr. Na Li, professor of medicine ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Mapping the Earth’s crops

As agricultural research continues to become more entwined with technology, smart farming – a phrase that encompasses research computing tools that help farmers to better address issues like crop disease, drought and sustainability – has quickly become a ubiquitous term in Ag labs across the country. The availability of NCSA resources like Delta for researchers, both nationally and on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.) campus, has fostered a hotbed of cutting-edge research projects in the agricultural domain. Yi-Chia Chang, a Ph.D. student at the ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Rideshare data reveal discriminatory policing for speeding in Florida

Using data on more than 220,000 individuals on the Lyft rideshare platform, researchers report that drivers of color are significantly more likely to receive speeding tickets than white drivers, and to face steeper fines, even when traveling at identical speeds. Racial profiling by law enforcement is a pressing social issue in the United States. Previous research analyzing police and judicial records suggests that racial and ethnic minorities face disproportionately higher rates of searches, fines, force, detentions, and incarceration compared to white civilians. However, research on racial bias in policing has long been hindered by data limitations ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Unique genetic mutation underlies horses’ exceptional athleticism

Researchers have revealed a secret behind horses' exceptional endurance – a mutation in the KEAP1 gene that boosts energy production while protecting against cellular oxidative stress. The findings – which shed light on a unique evolutionary adaptation that has shaped one of nature’s most powerful athletes – hold potential implications for human medicine. They also highlight how the recoding of a de novo stop codon – a strategy thought restricted to viruses – can facilitate adaptation in vertebrates. Long prized for their speed and endurance, horses possess remarkable physiological adaptations ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Balancing national priorities and basic research in China

As China rises as a global science power, its government has increased efforts to align basic research with national priorities, such as economic growth, environmental sustainability, and national security. In a Policy Forum, Andrew Kennedy discusses how this increasing emphasis on national priorities creates tension with basic research in China – a pattern that reflects broader global trends – and the potential risks of prioritizing near-term objectives over long-term scientific discovery. According to the author, neglecting curiosity-driven research while expanding support for near-term priorities is short-sighted. Without it, transformative innovations – from ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

A genetic tree as a movie: Moving beyond the still portrait of ancestry

ANN ARBOR—University of Michigan researchers have developed a statistical method that can be used for such wide-ranging applications as tracing your ancestry, modeling disease spread and studying how animals spread through geographic regions. One of the method's applications is to give a more complete sense of human ancestry, says Gideon Bradburd, U-M professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. For example, when you send your DNA off for a personalized ancestry report, the report you get back is only a very small view of your family tree pinned in a specific point ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Terahertz imaging: a breakthrough in non-invasive cochlear visualization

Advancements in healthcare and technology have significantly increased the average human lifespan. However, with longer life comes a higher prevalence of age-related disorders that affect overall well-being. One such condition is hearing loss in older adults, which can severely impact communication, social interactions, and daily functioning. Hearing relies on the cochlea, a spiral-shaped organ in the inner ear that converts sound waves into neural signals. Any structural or functional impairment of the cochlea ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

We must not ignore eugenics in our genetics curriculum, says professor

To encourage scientists to speak up when people misuse science to serve political agendas, biology professor Mark Peifer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill argues that eugenics should be included in college genetics curriculums. In an opinion paper publishing March 27 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Genetics, Peifer explains how he incorporated a discussion of eugenics into his molecular genetics course last year and why understanding the history of the field is critical for up-and-coming scientists. “Eugenics is not dead but continues to influence science and policy today,” writes Peifer ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

State Minimum Wage and Food Insecurity Among US Households With Children

About The Study: In this pooled cross-sectional study, findings suggest that state legislatures that elected to increase their state minimum wage may have also improved state food security rates among households with children at risk for economic hardship. The findings provide policymakers with actionable evidence to consider in setting minimum wages that could reduce the burden of food insecurity among U.S. children and families. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Megan R. Winkler, PhD, RN, email megan.winkler@emory.edu. To ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Novel adsorbent offers effective solution for perchlorate removal from water

A study published in Engineering introduces an innovative approach to address the issue of perchlorate (ClO4−) contamination in water. Perchlorate is a harmful oxo-anion found in aquatic environments. It can enter the human body through drinking water and inhibit iodine absorption in the thyroid gland, potentially causing various thyroid-related diseases. Given the strict perchlorate limits in drinking water worldwide, such as 70 μg/L in China and 15 μg/L in the United States, developing efficient methods for its removal is crucial. The research team, hailing from Hunan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, prepared an adsorbent ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Baylor Anthropology scientist Julie Hoggarth, Ph.D., named AAAS Fellow

Noted Maya archaeologist Julie Hoggarth, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at Baylor University, has been elected to the rank of AAAS Fellow, a lifetime honor announced today by the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. Hoggarth is among the 471 scientists, engineers and innovators who have been elected 2024 Fellows for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements throughout their careers. The new Fellow class hails from academic institutions, ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

The MIT Press releases 2025 Direct to Open (D2O) Impact Report

The MIT Press is proud to release our 2025 Impact Report for Direct to Open (D2O), our sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. The continued growth in the reach of open access publishing couldn’t be more timely. In 2025, access to truth and facts are under attack, and democratizing access to trustworthy, peer-reviewed information has never been more important. In the face of so many forces working against the spread of knowledge, Direct to Open continues to be a critical tool. To date, ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Damaging cluster of UK winter storms driven by swirling polar vortex miles above Earth

University of Leeds news Embargoed until 10:00 GMT, 27 March Damaging cluster of UK winter storms driven by swirling polar vortex miles above Earth Powerful winter storms which led to deaths and power outages in the UK and Ireland were made more likely by an intense swirling vortex of winds miles above the Arctic, say scientists. A team of researchers led by the University of Leeds has pinpointed a new reason for winter storm clusters such as the trio named Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, which hit the nation within the space of a week in February 2022. The findings which are published today in the journal ...

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Science27 Mar 2025

Nature’s viny vampire: Discovering what drives parasitic Cuscuta campestris

The parasitic vine Cuscuta campestris grows by latching onto the stems and leaves of plants and inserting organs called haustorium into the host plant tissues to draw nutrients. The haustorium is formed when ion channels in the cell membrane are stimulated during coiling and induce a reaction within the cell. Further, Cuscuta campestris has many types of ion channels, but which ones were linked to the development of haustorium were previously unknown. “For the first time, the genes involved in sensing ...

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