Smaller than a speck of dust and shaped like tiny discs, coccolithophores are microscopic ocean organisms with a big climate job. They draw carbon out of seawater, help produce oxygen, and their calcite plates sink to form chalk and limestone that preserve Earth’s climate history. Today, five European research organisations launched an initiative to make 10 October International Coccolithophore Day, highlighting their crucial role in regulating the planet’s carbon balance, producing oxygen, and sustaining the ocean ecosystems that underpin all life. The campaign is led by the Ruđer Bošković Institute (Zagreb, Croatia), the ...

Stress sensitivity increases the frequency, intensity, and variability of suicidal thoughts among the university community. These are the findings of a longitudinal study coordinated by the Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Pompeu Fabra University, which analyses survey data from more than 700 university students. The study defines, for the first time, three degrees of passive suicidal ideation according to their frequency, intensity and increasing variability. Taking stress sensitivity into account could have an impact on suicide prevention.  Suicide is the first cause of death among young people aged between 15 and 29 in Spain and ...

Understanding people’s attitudes to interactions with sharks could help halt the global decline of shark numbers, according to new research carried out on Ascension Island.   In 2017, there were two non-fatal shark attacks at Ascension – a UK territory in the South Atlantic with a population of about 800 people. Large numbers of sharks – mostly silky and Galapagos sharks – have affected the island’s recreational fishers, who often lose tackle and hooked fish before they can be landed. The research team, led by the University of Exeter and ZSL, interviewed 34 islanders to assess perceptions of sharks. “We found that human-shark conflict ...

Researchers have found that low to moderate-severity fires not only benefit many bird species in the Sierra Nevada, but these benefits may persist for decades. In addition to a handful of bird species already known to be “post-fire specialists”, a broad variety of other more generalist species, like Dark-eyed Juncos and Mountain Chickadees, clearly benefited from wildfire. This research will help land managers make decisions about how to manage forests and fires as they face a changing fire regime.  In the study, published October 9, 2025 in the journal Fire Ecology, researchers from The Institute for Bird ...

Women performed best on cognitive tests during ovulation but physical activity level had a stronger influence on brain function, according to a new study from researchers at UCL. The study, published in Sports Medicine – Open, explored how the different phases of the menstrual cycle and physical activity level affected performance on a range of cognitive tests designed to mimic mental processes used in team sports and everyday life, such as the accurate timing of movements, attention, and reaction time. The team found that women had the fastest reaction times and made the fewest errors on the day of ovulation, when the ovaries ...

New research reveals that ‘third-sector’ services, such as those run by housing associations, are far more effective than government work programmes at helping the long-term unemployed in deprived areas. The study, led by the University of East Anglia (UEA), investigated the impact of alternative support services and recommends key strategies for helping individuals move closer to employment and improve their overall wellbeing, using a person-centred, strength-based, and long-term approach. Published in the Journal of European Social Policy, it highlights three crucial ingredients for success: Focusing on strengths: rather than ...

A global study has found that adding biochar to organic waste composting can significantly reduce emissions of potent greenhouse gases, offering a promising pathway for sustainable waste recycling and climate change mitigation. Researchers from Nanjing Agricultural University and Sichuan University of Arts and Science analyzed data from 123 published studies covering more than 1,000 composting experiments worldwide. Their meta-analysis revealed that biochar reduced methane emissions by an average of 54 percent, nitrous oxide by 50 percent, and ammonia by 36 percent, while showing no significant effect on carbon dioxide release. “Biochar acts like a sponge that improves aeration, ...

Neli Ulrich, PhD, MS, chief scientific officer and executive director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) and Jon M. and Karen Huntsman Presidential Professor in Cancer Research in population sciences at the U, has been elected by the members of the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI) to serve as vice president/president-elect of the AACI Board of Directors. Ulrich is a leading epidemiologist, whose ...

Picture this: You’re on a Zoom call, Slack is buzzing, three spreadsheets are open and your inbox pings. In that moment of divided attention, you miss the tiny red flag in an email. That’s how phishing sneaks through, and with 3.4 billion malicious emails sent daily, the stakes couldn’t be higher. A new study involving faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York's School of Management shows that multitasking makes phishing detection significantly worse: When people are overloaded ...

In an approach reminiscent of the classic board game Battleship, Stanford researchers have discovered a way to characterize the microscopic structure of everyday materials such as sand and concrete with high precision. Heterogeneous, or mixed, materials have components in random locations. For example, concrete – the most abundant human-made material – is composed of cement, water, sand, and coarse stone. Predicting where a particular component appears in a jumbled mosaic of concrete or in Earth’s subsurface ...

WASHINGTON — Dry soils in northern Mexico may trigger episodes of simultaneous drought and heatwave hundreds of miles away in the southwestern United States, such as Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, according to a new study. These “hot droughts” in the region increasingly persist through consecutive days and nights rather than easing up after sundown, the research also found, leaving no window for afflicted areas to recover. Hot drought can kill crops, worsen wildfire risk, and shock workers and outdoor enthusiasts with unexpectedly high temperatures, all ...

For decades, it’s been known that subtle chemical patterns exist in metal alloys, but researchers thought they were too minor to matter — or that they got erased during manufacturing. However, recent studies have shown that in laboratory settings, these patterns can change a metal’s properties, including its mechanical strength, durability, heat capacity, radiation tolerance, and more. Now, researchers at MIT have found that these chemical patterns also exist in conventionally manufactured metals. The surprising finding revealed a new physical phenomenon that explains the persistent patterns. In a paper published in Nature Communications today, ...

Everywhere you go, you carry a population of microbes in your gastrointestinal tract that outnumber the human cells making up your body. This microbiome has important connections to health in your gut, brain and immune system. Some resident bugs produce vitamins, antioxidants, nutrients and other helpful compounds. Even those whose direct effects seem neutral take up space that makes it harder for harmful microbes to move in. There is still much to be understood about the gut microbiome, but its connections to health suggest the potential for curating this community to address disease. New discoveries from a research ...

Researchers have uncovered how dissolved biochar—tiny carbon particles derived from burning plant material—affects soil nematodes, shedding light on both benefits and risks to these important ecosystem players. The study focused on the common laboratory worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, revealing that the impact of dissolved biochar strongly depends on the amount present in the environment. The team found that when nematodes were exposed to low concentrations of dissolved biochar, their growth and physical activity increased. These smaller doses likely functioned as extra nutrients ...

Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025, CLEVELAND: Researchers at Cleveland Clinic Children’s have helped identify a previously unknown gene that increases the risk of developing osteosarcoma, the most common type of malignant bone tumor in children and young adults. Recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers analyzed genetic information from nearly 6,000 children with cancer and compared it to more than 14,000 adults without cancer. Utilizing databases and prediction tools, the study authors focused on 189 genes that participate in several DNA repair pathways. The results showed that some children with cancer had inherited changes in certain DNA ...

Total solar eclipses only happen in the same spot once every 300 or 400 years, so it’s no surprise that a team of researchers at Indiana University jumped on the opportunity to use this natural experiment to better understand how light affects wild birds. Their study, led by Liz Aguilar, was published in the latest edition of Science. Aguilar is a Ph.D. student in Kimberly Rosvall’s lab in the Evolution, Ecology and Behavior program at the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.  In ...

With a new imaging technique, scientists discover an ecosystem that determines how eggs mature and ovaries age.  The ticking of the biological clock is especially loud in the ovaries — the organs that store and release a woman’s eggs. From age 25 to 40, a woman’s chance of conceiving each month decreases drastically.  For decades, scientists have pointed to declining egg quality as the main culprit. But new research from UC San Francisco and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco shows that the story is bigger than the eggs: The surrounding ...

When the April 2024 “Great American Eclipse” plunged midday into near-night, the daily rhythms and vocal behaviors of many bird species shifted dramatically; some fell silent, others burst into song, and many erupted into a “false dawn chorus” after the Sun returned, singing as if a new day had begun. In a new study, merging citizen science, machine learning, and a continent-wide natural experiment, researchers reveal the immediate effects of light disruption on bird behavior. The daily and seasonal rhythms of birds are tightly governed by shifts between light and ...

To exploit a rich food resource that remains largely inaccessible to most predators, Europe’s largest bat captures, kills, and consumes nocturnally migrating birds in flight high above the ground, according to a new study. The findings confirm this behavior of the greater noctule (Nyctalus lasiopterus) using direct biologger observations. Billions of birds seasonally migrate at night and over long distances at high altitude. These massive flocks represent an enormous – albeit challenging – food resource for predators. Yet only three fast-flying echolocating bat species, including the greater noctule, are known to exploit this opportunity, ...

In a Policy Forum, Yue Zhu and colleagues provide an overview of China’s emerging regulation for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and its potential contributions to global AI governance. Open-source AI systems from China are rapidly expanding worldwide, even as the country’s regulatory framework remains in flux. In general, AI governance suffers from fragmented approaches, a lack of clarity, and difficulty reconciling innovation with risk management, making global coordination especially hard in the face of rising controversy. Although ...

The secret to the naked mole-rats’ extraordinarily long life may lie in subtle changes to just four amino acids, researchers report. According to a new study, evolutionary mutations in cGAS – an enzyme in the innate immune system that senses DNA to trigger immune responses – may enhance the animal’s ability to repair aging-related genetic damage, whereas in other species, such as mice and humans, cGAS can suppress DNA repair. Wrinkled and unassuming though they appear, the naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is an exceptionally long-lived rodent, with a maximum life span of nearly 40 years – roughly 10 times longer than ...

Tumors are not a comfortable place to live: oxygen deficiency, nutrient scarcity, and the accumulation of sometimes harmful metabolic products constantly stress cancer cells. A research team from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna has now discovered that the acidic pH value in tumor tissue—known as acidosis—is a decisive factor in how pancreatic cancer cells adapt their energy metabolism in order to survive under these adverse conditions. The results were published in the journal Science. Poor blood circulation and increased metabolic activity often create hostile conditions in tumors: ...

From willow bark remedies to aspirin tablets, salicylic acid has long been part of human health. It also lies at the heart of how plants fight disease. Now, researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a pioneering biosensor that allows scientists to watch, for the first time, how plants deploy this critical immune hormone in their battle against pathogens. Published today in Science, Dr Alexander Jones’ group at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University (SLCU) presents SalicS1, a genetically encoded biosensor that can detect and track the dynamics of ...

Most REDD+ forest carbon offset projects significantly overstate their climate benefits, according to a new study published in Science. The findings come from an international team of researchers, primarily based at the Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), China, with contributions from Prof. Dr. Jonathan Chase of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU).  The study analysed 52 REDD+ initiatives, ...

After nearly 25 years of research, the mystery has finally been solved: Europe’s largest bat doesn’t just eat small birds – it hunts and captures them more than a kilometre above the ground. And it eats them without landing. An international team of researchers has shed light on how Europe’s largest bat hunts and consumes small birds. The results, now published in Science, make for fascinating reading – a story of nocturnal aerial acrobatics, pursuit and predation. Every year, billions of songbirds migrate between their breeding grounds and wintering areas. Many species fly high and travel at night, partly to avoid daytime ...