Science
press releases.

Science5 Dec 2025

The presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide by three to five times

In addition to posing physical and life risks, access to firearms has an impact on mental health. It increases suicides, intensifies psychological fragility, and amplifies violence. This is the conclusion of a study published in the September issue of the scientific journal Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The study was led by researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP) in Brazil. The researchers conducted a systematic review of 467 studies from various ...

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Science5 Dec 2025

PFAS exposure and endocrine disruption among women

About The Study: Data from this cross-sectional study show that exposure to single and mixtures of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) was associated with higher odds of endocrine disruption (ED) among women. The findings demonstrated that certain PFAS compounds, particularly n-PFOS, were associated with ED. PFAS are widely used in industry, and increasing evidence suggests that even low-level, chronic exposure may disrupt endocrine function and harm health. Exposure to mixtures of PFAS remained positively associated with developing ED. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Rezaul Karim Ripon, ...

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Science5 Dec 2025

When pregnancy emergencies collide with state abortion bans

Although the United States does not guarantee health care as a right, federal law mandates that hospitals cannot deny anyone lifesaving emergency care. However, a new study finds that restrictive state abortion laws may affect frontline emergency care despite federal protections—possibly hindering access to timely screening and treatment in pregnancy-related emergencies. The 1986 U.S. Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires all Medicare-participating hospitals to screen every emergency ...

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Science5 Dec 2025

When you’re happy, your dog might look sad

When people are feeling happy, they’re more likely to see other people as happy. If they’re feeling down, they tend to view other people as sad. But when dealing with dogs, this well-established psychological effect ceases to work as expected. That’s according to a new study by behavioral scientists at Arizona State University. In one experiment, nudging people into positive emotional states by showing them pictures that usually cheer people up did not significantly impact how they perceived dog emotions. In a modified experiment, the effect actually worked in reverse: people prompted to feel upbeat tended to rate dogs as being sadder. Those nudged into a negative ...

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Science5 Dec 2025

A new kind of copper from the research reactor

The copper isotope Cu-64 plays an important role in medicine: it is used in imaging processes and also shows potential for cancer therapy. However, it does not occur naturally and must be produced artificially — a complex and costly process. Until now, Cu-64 has been generated by bombarding nickel atoms with protons. When a nickel nucleus absorbs a proton, it is transformed into copper. At TU Wien, however, a different pathway has now been demonstrated: Cu-63 can be converted into Cu-64 by neutron irradiation in a research reactor. ...

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Science5 Dec 2025

Planned birth at term reduces pre-eclampsia in those at high risk

Planned birth at term reduces the incidence of pre-eclampsia in women at high risk of the condition, without increasing emergency Caesarean or neonatal unit admission, according to new trial results. The PREVENT-PE trial, led by researchers from King’s College London and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, is the first to find that a strategy of screening for pre-eclampsia risk at 36 weeks of pregnancy, and then offering planned early term delivery according to the mother’s risk, can reduce the incidence of subsequent pre-eclampsia by 30%, compared with usual care. The ...

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Science5 Dec 2025

Penguins starved to death en masse, study warns, as some populations off South Africa estimated to have fallen 95% in just eight years

Penguins living off the coast of South Africa have likely starved to death en masse during their moulting season as a result of collapsing food supplies. In fact, on two of the most important breeding colonies of the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) — Dassen Island and Robben Island — some 95% of the birds that bred in 2004 were estimated to have died over the next eight years as a result of food scarcity. This is the conclusion of a new study ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Preempting a flesh-eating fly’s return to California

The last time the New World screwworm invaded the U.S., it devastated livestock and required a decades-long eradication campaign. Now, University of California Riverside researchers are launching a preemptive strike against the parasitic fly’s threatened return. The New World screwworm isn’t a worm at all. It’s the larval or maggot stage of a shiny, metallic blowfly, a species called Cochliomyia hominivorax. While many blowflies are harmless and play a vital role in decomposing dead animals, this particular species feeds on living flesh. “Not all blowflies are this species. We don’t ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Understanding emerges: MBL scientists visualize the creation of condensates

By Diana Kenney WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- One of the enigmas of life is emergence, when the whole becomes more than its parts. Flocks of birds can instantly change direction when a predator appears, guided not by a lead bird but by a collective intelligence that no single bird can possess on its own. Multitudes of molecules skitter chaotically in a cell, but certain ones find each other, interact, and give rise to sophisticated cellular structures and functions that could not have been predicted by studying the molecules alone. Understanding how emergent properties arise in cells – in this case, how liquid droplets called condensates spontaneously form from rapidly moving molecules ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Discovery could give investigators a new tool in death investigations

A discovery by FIU researchers could help forensic investigators close the gap on estimating time of death. Often, death investigations rely on maggots — the larvae of blow flies that are among the first insects to colonize a body after death — to estimate how long a person has been dead. The presence of eggs or the sizes of the maggots are indicators of time since death. Yet, there is a stage in their development, where the maggot’s physical form changes very little, which limits the precision of time of death estimates. While changes may not be visible on a maggot’s outside, their ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Ultrasonic pest control to protect beehives

HONOLULU, Dec. 4, 2025 — Bees, and other pollinator species, are dying. Between pesticides, the climate crisis, and habitat loss, bee colonies are becoming weaker, leaving them more vulnerable to parasites like the greater and lesser wax moths. Vulnerable bees have cascading effects on beekeepers and food security in the apiculture industry. A team of researchers from the University of Strathclyde and Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization is exploiting the unusual hearing of wax moths to develop a sustainable and efficient ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Carnegie Science names Michael Blanton 12th Observatories Director

Astronomer Michael R. Blanton will join the Carnegie Science Observatories as its 12th director, overseeing astronomical research in Pasadena and telescope operations at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, one of the world’s elite observing sites. Blanton joins Carnegie Science from New York University, where he is a Professor of Physics and the Director of the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics. He succeeds John Mulchaey, who was named Carnegie Science President in late 2024. Blanton’s research has centered primarily on conducting large astronomical surveys to place ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

No, we don't need more and more data about nature. We need more people to use the data

Europe is gobbling up almost 50 square metres of land and topsoil per second. And Norway tops the list of European countries with the most land lost to construction per person, according to a study initiated by the Arena for Journalism in Europe and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, NRK. At the same time, we have never had access to more data and knowledge about nature and the ecosystems we are building on. "We are acquiring more and more ecological data as a basis for land-use planning. Then you would think that the decisions we make ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Phonetic or morpholexical issues? New study reveals L2 French ambiguity

Ambiguous speech production is a common challenge for learners of a second language (L2), but identifying whether the problem lies in pronunciation or deeper linguistic processing is not always straightforward. A new study conducted by Professor Sylvain Detey from Waseda University, with Dr. Verdiana De Fino from IRIT, UT3, University of Toulouse & Archean Labs, France, and Dr. Lionel Fontan, Head of Archean Labs, France, sheds light on this distinction. Their study was published on October 30, 2025, in the journal Language Testing in Asia. The researchers sought to determine whether ambiguous speech errors made by Japanese learners of French could be better categorized through a combined ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Where the elements come from

Kyoto, Japan -- "Why are we here?" is humanity's most fundamental and persistent question. Tracing the origins of the elements is a direct attempt to answer this at its deepest level. We know many elements are created inside stars and supernovae, which then cast them out into the universe, yet the origins of some key elements has remained a mystery. Chlorine and potassium, both odd-Z elements -- possessing an odd number of protons -- are essential to life and planet formation. According to current theoretical models, stars ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

From static papers to living models: turning limb development research into interactive science

The choreographed movements that cells perform to form complex biological shapes, like our hands, have fascinated scientists for centuries. Now, researchers at EMBL Barcelona have launched LimbNET, an open-access online platform that allows scientists to directly choreograph this dance by computationally simulating how genes guide these intricate growth processes. Their work has recently been published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology. LimbNET is much more than a simple data repository. It is a new type of platform allowing ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Blink and you will miss it: Magnetism switching in antiferromagnets

A research team led by Ryo Shimano of the University of Tokyo has successfully visualized two distinct mechanisms through which up and down spins, inherent properties of electrons, switch in an antiferromagnet, a material in which spin alignments cancel each other out. One of the visualized mechanisms provides a working principle for developing ultrafast, non-volatile magnetic memory and logic devices, which could be much faster than today’s technologies. The findings are published in the journal Nature Materials. Paper slips with holes, small metal rods, vacuum tubes, and transistors: these are technologies that have ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

USF-led study reveals dramatic decline in some historic sargassum populations

Media Contact: John Dudley (814) 490-3290 (cell) jjdudley@usf.edu TAMPA, Fla. (Dec. 2, 2025) – A new study led by researchers at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science has found that certain populations of the seaweed sargassum have experienced a significant decline over the past decade, even as increased abundance of sargassum in the tropical Atlantic has caused large mats of the seaweed to inundate beaches across the Caribbean and Gulf regions. The abundance of sargassum in the Atlantic’s ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Fullerenes for finer detailed MRI scans

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is invaluable in the medical world. But despite all the good it does, there is room for improvement. One way to enhance the sensitivity of MRI is called dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP), where target molecules for imaging are modified so they form clearer images when scanned with an MRI machine. But this technique requires some special crystalline materials mixed with polarizing agents which are difficult to create. For the first time, researchers including those from the University of Tokyo demonstrate the use of molecules called fullerenes as polarizing agents. Their new method can make DNP targets sufficient to yield far greater clarity when ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Fearless frogs feast on deadly hornets

A remarkable resistance to venom has been discovered in a frog that feasts on hornets despite their deadly stingers. This frog could potentially serve as a model organism for studies on mechanisms underlying venom tolerance. While just the sight of a hornet’s stinger is enough to fill many of us with dread, some animals, such as some birds, spiders and frogs, are known to prey on adult hornets. The venom injected by their stingers can cause sharp, intense pain as well as local tissue damage and systemic effects such as destruction of red blood cells and cardiac dysfunction, which may even be fatal. But whether the animals that hunt hornets are able to ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Fibulin-5: A potential marker for liver fibrosis detection

When damage to the liver caused by alcohol or viral infections persists, liver fibrosis progresses and replaces tissue with collagen fibers. This is especially a risk in chronic hepatitis C patients, where liver fibrosis can continue post-viral treatment. If this condition advances, it leads to cirrhosis, a state of liver function decline. Further, liver fibrosis is considered the greatest risk factor for liver cancer, thus making the development of early diagnostic methods crucial. To detect the presence of liver fibrosis, a research group led by Associate Professor Misako Sato-Matsubara at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Progresses on damped wave equations: Multi-wave Stability from partially degenerate flux

The study of large-time behavior of solutions to partial differential equations is a fundamental pursuit in mathematical analysis, with profound implications for physics and engineering. It addresses a core question: regardless of the initial data, will the solutions eventually settle into a simple, predictable pattern? Answering this question is crucial for verifying the long-term validity of mathematical models and predicting final, stable states. Asymptotic states—such as shock waves, rarefaction waves, and contact waves—are universal patterns that serve ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Breast density notification increases levels of confusion and anxiousness among women

Breast density notification is being rolled out across Australia, but evidence suggests that women do not feel more informed by it Between 25 and 40 percent of women have denser breast tissue which can make it harder for cancers to be detected through a mammogram New research by experts at the University of Sydney shows that breast density notification is leaving some women confused and anxious about their breast health. The notification program is designed to advise women that their breast density ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

K’gari’s world famous lakes could be at risk of drying

K’gari is the world’s largest sand island and known for its world-famous lakes, but research from the University of Adelaide has discovered its largest lakes could be vulnerable to drying. The researchers looked back at ancient sediment profiles on K’gari, which is located off Queensland’s south-eastern coast, and found evidence of a strong drying event around 7500 years ago, a period known as the middle Holocene. “Our research shows that about 7500 years ago, at a time of higher rainfall and long after the end of the last Ice Age, some of K’gari’s deepest lakes dried out,” says lead researcher Associate Professor John ...

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Science4 Dec 2025

Telling women as part of mammography screening that they have dense breasts may have unintended effects

Recommendations introduced in Australia and being considered in the UK to tell women if they have dense breasts as part of their screening results may have unintended effects and increase demand on health services, finds a clinical trial designed to assess the real-world impact of notification, published by The BMJ today. The results show that women who were notified of their dense breasts (which can hide small cancers on a mammogram, making them harder to detect) felt more anxious and confused about their breast health 8 weeks after their screening appointment, ...

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