Science
press releases.

Science11 Mar 2025

Study explores effects of climatic changes on Christmas Island’s iconic red crabs

The annual migration of Christmas Island’s red crabs – where millions of creatures cover its beaches as they make their way from land to sea – is a true natural spectacle. However, little is known about whether and how the species might be impacted under the future environmental conditions created by the changing global climate. A new study by scientists and graduates at the University of Plymouth has investigated one aspect of how such shifts might affect its earliest development. Specifically, the research focused on whether lower ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

Empire Discovery Institute appoints Dr. Ronald Newbold as Chief Executive Officer

Rochester, NY – March 10, 2025 – Empire Discovery Institute (EDI), a leading non-profit drug discovery and development accelerator, is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Ronald Newbold as Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Dr. Newbold, who joined EDI in 2021 as Chief Business Officer, has served as interim CEO since August 2022 and has been instrumental in driving the organization’s growth and success. Under his leadership, EDI has achieved significant milestones, including the growth of the Medicines Discovery ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

Nwd1 gene deletion triggers MASH-like pathology in mice: a new scientific breakthrough

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) is a liver disease that progresses without symptoms and is associated with significant global public health concerns. It is prevalent in 30% of the population worldwide and poses a risk of advancing to cirrhosis and liver cancer. MASH is marked by lipid droplet accumulation in the liver, progressing from steatosis to inflammation and cell damage, ultimately leading to fibrosis, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. A clear understanding of cellular processes in MASH pathogenesis is essential for developing ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

First burials: Neanderthal and Homo sapiens interactions in the Mid-Middle Palaeolithic Levant

The first-ever published research on Tinshemet Cave reveals that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in the mid-Middle Paleolithic Levant not only coexisted but actively interacted, sharing technology, lifestyles, and burial customs. These interactions fostered cultural exchange, social complexity, and behavioral innovations, such as formal burial practices and the symbolic use of ochre for decoration. The findings suggest that human connections, rather than isolation, were key drivers of technological and cultural advancements, highlighting the Levant as a crucial crossroads in early human history. Link to the images: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19p__omKCSSPkGBI3b8beF1QXqeRahGk1?usp=drive_link ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

Gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon has done more damage to peatlands in the last two years than in the previous three decades

New research published in the academic journal Environmental Research Letters reveals that artisan gold mining in the southern Peruvian Amazon has caused more destruction to carbon-rich peatlands in the past two years than in the previous three decades combined, posing a serious threat to the environment and climate. For decades, small-scale gold mining has thrived along the rivers of the Madre de Dios region, driven by gold frequently found in the surrounding soils. While the deforestation caused by mining has already resulted in significant carbon emissions, scientists have now discovered that the damage ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

Rare frog rediscovered after 130 years

A team of researchers has rediscovered a frog species which has not been seen in more than 130 years. First described in 1902, Alsodes vittatus had evaded detection since then, despite multiple search efforts. The researchers discovered two populations of the frog at the southeastern end of the ancient Hacienda San Ignacio de Pemehue in La Araucanía Region, Chile. The rediscovery is an important milestone for South American herpetology and the conservation of biodiversity in the southern cone. The frog Alsodes vittatus is an elusive creature – described in 1902, it managed to go undetected for more than a century. Now, after a decade of investigation, a research team ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

A call for federally funded pediatric firearm injury prevention research

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – Firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States, yet research on firearm injury prevention receives significantly less federal funding compared to other major pediatric health concerns. A new paper published in Pediatrics underscores the critical need for an enhanced federal investment in firearm injury prevention research to address the rising rates of fatalities and injuries. “Expanding the field of firearm injury ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

Foraging footballers suggest how we come together to act as one

What do albatrosses searching for food, stock market fluctuations, and the dispersal patterns of seeds in the wind have in common? They all exhibit a type of movement pattern called Lévy walk, which is characterized by a flurry of short, localized movements interspersed with occasional, long leaps. For living organisms, this is an optimal strategy for balancing the exploitation of nearby resources with the exploration of new opportunities when the distribution of resources is sparse and unknown. Originally described in the context of particles drifting through liquid, Lévy walk has been found to accurately describe a very wide range of phenomena, from cold atom dynamics to ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

SSA: Semantic Structure Aware Inference for Weakly Pixel-Wise Dense Predictions without Cost

CAM is proposed to highlight the class-related activation regions for an image classification network, where feature positions related to the specific object class are activated and have higher scores while other regions are suppressed and have lower scores. For specific visual tasks, CAM can be used to infer the object bounding boxes in weakly-supervised object location(WSOL) and generate pseudo-masks of training images in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Therefore, obtaining the high-quality CAM is very important to improve the recognition performance of weakly supervised pixel-wise ...

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Science11 Mar 2025

UC Study: Long sentences for juveniles make reentry into society more difficult

Juveniles grow up hearing a multitude of adages about life, such as: “True friends are forever,” “Fake it ’til you make it,” and “Change is a good thing.” However, these adages — and other life advice about behavior in society — are difficult to process for juveniles who were incarcerated at a young age and served long sentences, says J.Z. Bennett, a criminologist at the University of Cincinnati whose research focuses on prison reform. “Spending decades in prison removes individuals from social structures and sources of informal social control, such as education, employment, marriage and parenting,” he writes ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Plant Physiology is Searching for its Next Editor-in-Chief

After taking the helm of Plant Physiology 2022, Yunde Zhao's celebrated term as Editor-in-Chief of the journal, during which he introduced changes that saw the journal flourish, will come to a close on December 31, 2026. The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) is seeking a prominent plant scientist to assume the duties and responsibilities of Editor-in-Chief of Plant Physiology effective January 1, 2027. ASPB’s EIC Search Committee is charged with evaluating candidates for the position and invites members of the plant science community to participate in the process by nominating someone who they ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

MSU study pinpoints the impact of prenatal stress across 27 weeks of pregnancy

MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request. EAST LANSING, Mich. – A team of researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan found new insights on the timing of prenatal stress and its effect on infant stress reactivity and temperament — including differences between genders. The study, published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, is the first to examine weekly stress across 27 weeks of pregnancy to pinpoint when it most affects a newborn’s stress response and temperament — two measures that indicate infant biobehavioral reactivity. “Prenatal ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

What’s in a label? It’s different for boys vs. girls, new study of parents finds

A decades-old riddle poses the following scenario: A boy is injured in a car crash in which the father dies and is taken to the emergency room, where the doctor says, “I cannot operate on him—he’s my son.” Who, then, is the doctor? Many over the years have been stumped in not recognizing the answer: the mother. Similarly, research has shown that adults instinctively think of men when asked to think of a person—they describe the most “typical” person they can imagine as male and assume storybook characters without a specified gender are men. A new study by psychology researchers shows that the way parents ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Rutgers researchers revive decades-old pregnancy cohort with modern scientific potential

The Camden Study, a pregnancy cohort of 4,765 women recruited between 1985 and 2006 from one of America’s poorest cities, has found new life at Rutgers University – where it promises to unlock critical insights into maternal and child health for researchers worldwide. According to a recent paper in Nutrients, the project was designed to study nutritional status in adolescent pregnancies but expanded into a comprehensive repository of maternal and infant health data that yielded more than a decade of significant ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

AACR announces Fellows of the AACR Academy Class of 2025 and new AACR Academy President

PHILADELPHIA – The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) today announced its newly elected 2025 class of Fellows of the AACR Academy. The mission of the Fellows of the AACR Academy is to recognize and honor extraordinary scientists whose groundbreaking contributions have driven significant innovation and progress in the fight against cancer. Fellows of the AACR Academy constitute a global brain trust of leading experts in cancer science and medicine, working to advance the AACR’s mission to prevent and cure all cancers through ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

New insights into plant growth

Ghent, Belgium, 10 March 2025 – New research from an international team of plant biologists, led by researchers at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, has revealed crucial insights into the role brassinosteroids – essential plant hormones – play in regulating cell division and growth. The findings, published in Cell, provide a comprehensive understanding of how these hormones influence development at the cellular level. Plants on steroids Brassinosteroids are vital hormones for plants, which influence ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Female sex hormone protects against opioid misuse, rat study finds

The opioid epidemic has claimed more than half a million lives in the U.S. since 1999, about three-quarters of them men, according to the National Institutes of Health. Although men’s disproportionate rates of opioid abuse and overdose deaths are well-documented, the reasons for this gender disparity are not well understood. A new study in rats by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that one underlying cause may be biological. Male rats in chronic pain gave themselves increasing doses of an opioid – specifically, fentanyl – over ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Long-term effects of a responsive parenting intervention on child weight outcomes through age 9

About The Study: An early-life responsive parenting intervention resulted in lower body mass index from age 3 to 9 compared with a control intervention. This group difference was driven by effects on female participants, with differences appearing to dissipate over time. A life-course approach may be required to sustain the benefits of early-life responsive parenting interventions for obesity prevention. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Ian M. Paul, MD, MSc, email ipaul@psu.edu. To access ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Facebook is constantly experimenting on consumers — and even its creators don’t fully know how it works

Users of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok might think they’re simply interacting with friends, family and followers, and seeing ads as they go. But according to research from the UBC Sauder School of Business, they’re part of constant marketing experiments that are often impossible, even for the companies behind them, to fully comprehend. For the study, the researchers examined all known published, peer-reviewed studies of the use of A/B testing by Facebook and Google — that is, when different consumers are shown different ads to determine which are ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Intelligent covert communication: a leap forward in wireless security

In the ever-evolving landscape of wireless communication, security remains a paramount concern. A recent study published in Engineering delves into the realm of intelligent covert communication, exploring its latest advancements and future research trends. Covert communication, also known as low probability of detection (LPD) communication, is a technique that aims to conceal the existence of communication, thereby safeguarding private information. As the volume of private data transmitted via wireless systems continues to soar in the big data era, the need for ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

‘You don’t just throw them in a box.’ Archaeologists, Indigenous scholars call on museums to better care for animal remains

Two years ago, Chance Ward began opening boxes of horse remains that had been shipped to the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History from other institutions around the country. What he saw made his heart sink. At the time, Ward was a master’s student in Museum and Field Studies at CU Boulder. The researcher, who had grown up riding horses, was taking part in a large-scale study exploring the history of these iconic animals in the American West. But when he looked inside the packages, he sometimes found ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Research shows humans have a long way to go in understanding a dog’s emotions

EMBARGOED: FOR RELEASE 7:01 A.M. (ET), MARCH 10, 2025 Tempe, Ariz., March 10, 2025 – Life with a dog is a matter of give and take. Especially when it comes to communication. With no common human-dog language, our ability to communicate relies on understanding and reading our pet, and vice versa. That process can seem seamless. You give your dog a treat, you look into her eyes and she says “I am delighted to have that cookie.” With a slight wag of her tail, she accepts the treat ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Discovery: The great whale pee funnel

Whales are not just big, they’re a big deal for healthy oceans. When they poop, whales move tons of nutrients from deep water to the surface. Now new research shows that whales also move tons of nutrients thousands of miles—in their urine. In 2010, scientists revealed that whales, feeding at depth and pooping at the surface, provide a critical resource for plankton growth and ocean productivity. Today, a new University of Vermont-led study shows that whales also carry huge quantities ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

The two faces of liquid water

Water is unique. It is one of the only substances that can exist in nature as a solid, liquid and gas at the same time under ambient conditions (think of solid ice over a pond, which is liquid underneath while storm clouds float overhead). It is also one of the only substances whose solid form is less dense than its liquid — this is why ice floats. Now scientists from the University of California San Diego have uncovered a key finding to another unique property: at high pressure and low temperature, liquid water separates into two distinct liquid phases — one high-density ...

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Science10 Mar 2025

Less than half of parents think they have accurate information about bird flu

With soaring egg prices and ongoing bird flu headlines, many parents are uncertain about the risks and facts surrounding the virus, a national poll suggests. Most parents say they don’t know if there have been cases of bird flu in their state, and less than half feel that they are able to find accurate and current information about it, according to the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s health. “Many parents may hear about bird flu in the news but don’t feel well-informed or know if they should be taking action to protect their families,” said Mott Poll Co-Director Sarah Clark, M.P.H. “This ...

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