Researchers have demonstrated a new and sustainable way to make the chemicals that are the basis of thousands of products – from plastics to cosmetics – we use every day. Hundreds of thousands of chemicals are manufactured by the chemical industry, which transforms raw materials – usually fossil fuels – into useful end products. Due to its size and its use of fossil fuel feedstocks, the chemical industry is responsible for roughly 6% of global carbon emissions. But researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, are developing new methods ...

Higher levels of screen time in early childhood are associated with lower scores in reading and mathematics on Ontario’s standardised tests, with each additional hour of daily screen time associated with a 10 per cent drop in the likelihood of achieving higher academic levels. Published in JAMA Network Open, the findings are part of a new study from TARGet Kids!, a collaborative research network co-led by Dr. Catherine Birken at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and Dr. Jonathon Maguire at Unity Health Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital.  The study followed more than 3,000 children across Ontario from 2008 to 2023. Researchers ...

About The Study: In this cohort study, early extracranial surgery was associated with adverse function, cognition, and disability after traumatic brain injury (TBI) rated as moderate-severe or with radiographic abnormalities on computed tomography (CT) scan regardless of Glasgow Coma Scale at index admission but not after orthopedic trauma or CT− TBI. Further studies may help determine whether surgical timing or other interventions can improve the observed long-term deficits.  Corresponding ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of employed workers in the U.S., the new year-round baseline for work absences appeared to be on par with the levels formerly confined to pre-pandemic influenza season conditions. Policymakers should consider the consequences for workers, including the value of policies and actions that mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace. This study additionally highlights the potential for using nationally representative labor market data to monitor the impacts of ...

About The Study: The findings of this study suggest that elimination of race-conscious admissions coincided with declines in medical school diversity, threatening progress toward health care equity. Medical schools must explore alternative admissions strategies, such as holistic review processes that account for structural barriers. Without such efforts, reduced diversity in medical education may worsen existing health disparities.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Natalie Florescu, MD, MPH, email natalie.florescu@uvmhealth.org. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this ...

A new tool developed by Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of Adelaide investigators has enhanced the ability to track multiple gene mutations while simultaneously recording gene activity in individual cancer cells. The technology, which can now use diverse types of pathology samples and quickly process large numbers of cells, has enabled the investigators to glean new insights into how cancers evolve toward greater aggressiveness and therapy resistance. Described in a paper published Oct. 10 in Cell Genomics, the new tool, GoT-Multi, is a next-generation advance ...

About The Study: In this prospective cohort study of Canadian children recruited from primary care settings, high levels of total screen time and TV and digital media in young children were associated with lower achievement levels in reading and math on standardized tests in elementary school. Early interventions to reduce screen time exposure should be developed and tested to enhance academic achievement in elementary school.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Xuedi Li, MSc, email xuedi.li@sickkids.ca. To access the embargoed ...

About The Study: In this cohort study, 40% of orders for glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) were not filled. Non-Hispanic Black patients and Hispanic patients were less likely to fill orders than non-Hispanic white patients, and the non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic patients who filled their orders paid lower out-of-pocket costs. Out-of-pocket differences across groups may stem from differences in insurance coverage, use of different GLP-1RAs, or different cost thresholds for forgoing GLP-1RAs. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding ...

In a secondary analysis of a study of 200 classrooms, Mass General Brigham researchers found respiratory viral exposures were still high in those with HEPA purifiers, suggesting additional interventions are needed School is in session, and viral illness is on the rise. A new study suggests that lowering exposure to respiratory viruses in classrooms isn’t as simple as adding high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) purifiers to the room. In a secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial, investigators from Mass General Brigham and their colleagues found that exposure to respiratory viruses in the air were ...

UVA Health lung researchers are developing a promising approach to detecting patients at risk of interstitial lung disease (ILD), an increasingly common condition that is a leading reason for lung transplants. The approach could accelerate the development of new and better treatments with more tolerable side effects than existing options. The UVA scientists have already discovered biological indicators in the blood – “biomarkers” – that can predict the survival chances of patients with ILD. But the researchers, led by John S. Kim, MD, believe these types of biomarkers can be used for far more: The scientists are aiming to determine if biomarkers ...

Treatments for cancer are continuously improving, but they can still cause debilitating, even fatal, side effects. Immune checkpoint inhibitors, or ICIs, have revolutionized cancer therapy, yet their use can trigger a rare but deadly side effect that affects the heart: myocarditis. ICI-related myocarditis has a mortality of up to 40%. The adverse side effects caused by ICIs are immune-related. The immune system becomes hyperactive and attacks tissue that is healthy, not cancerous. In ICI-related myocarditis, ...

“Lifestyle habits and hormonal imbalances significantly affect the fertility of men.” BUFFALO, NY — October 10, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Volume 12 of Oncoscience on September 30, 2025, titled “Lifestyle and hormonal factors affecting semen quality and sperm DNA integrity: A cross-sectional study.” In this study, Saniya Imtiyaz Chamanmalik, Rajendra B. Nerli, and Pankaja Umarane from KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research and Dr. D. Y. Patil ...

Recent research has achieved significant advances in acoustofluidic technologies for efficient isolation and biomarker-specific detection of small extracellular vesicles (sEVs). Nevertheless, rapid and high-sensitivity analysis of low-volume clinical samples remains challenging, often requiring multi-step preprocessing and bulky instrumentation. By integrating sharp-edge microstructures with acoustically induced vortices, we enable size-selective concentration of target-bound complexes for immediate fluorescence readout. "The acoustofluidic chip leverages localized acoustic streaming to spatially separate microbead-sEV conjugates from ...

Cancer remains a leading cause of global morbidity and mortality. Traditional therapies like chemotherapy and radiotherapy are often limited by their lack of specificity, leading to systemic toxicity and the emergence of drug resistance. Nanoparticles, with dimensions ranging from 1 to 100 nm, offer a sophisticated solution. Their unique physicochemical properties allow them to navigate biological barriers and can be engineered for active targeting (e.g., using ligands for overexpressed cancer cell receptors) or passive targeting (exploiting the Enhanced Permeability and Retention effect of tumor vasculature). The cellular uptake ...

Light bulbs come in many shapes and styles: globes, twists, flame-like candle tips and long tubes. But there aren’t many thin options. Now, researchers report in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they have created a paper-thin LED that gives off a warm, sun-like glow. The LEDs could light up the next generation of phone and computer screens and other light sources while helping users avoid disruptions to their sleep patterns. “This work demonstrates the feasibility of ultra-thin, large-area quantum dot LEDs that closely match the solar spectrum,” says Xianghua Wang, a corresponding author of the study. “These devices could enable next-generation eye-friendly ...

The global increase in migration—with approximately 3.6% of the global population living as expatriates—has resulted in many countries extending external voting rights to their overseas citizens. This has prompted scholarly interest in understanding the electoral participation of immigrants in their countries of origin. However, most research has focused on the factors that drive the provision of external voting rights to expatriates rather than the extent to which these rights are exercised. Furthermore, prior research has largely overlooked the political behavior of undocumented immigrants, who constitute a significant share of the immigrant population, especially in the United ...

Fukuoka, Japan—Publishing in npj Spintronics, a research team led by Kyushu University have developed a new fabrication method for energy-efficient magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) using a new material called thulium iron garnet (TmIG) that has been attracting global attention for its ability to enable high-speed, low-power information rewriting at room temperature. The team hopes their findings will lead to significant improvements in the speed and power efficiency of high-computing hardware, such as those used to power generative AI. The rapid spread of generative ...

Levitation has long been pursued by stage magicians and physicists alike. For audiences, the sight of objects floating midair is wondrous. For scientists, it’s a powerful way of isolating objects from external disturbances. This is particularly useful in case of rotors, as their torque and angular momentum, used to measure gravity, gas pressure, momentum, among other phenomena in both classical and quantum physics, can be strongly influenced by friction. Freely suspending the rotor could drastically reduce these disturbances – and now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have designed, created, and analyzed such a macroscopic device, bringing ...

Researchers have created a polymer “Chinese lantern” that can snap into more than a dozen curved, three-dimensional shapes by compressing or twisting the original structure. This rapid shape-shifting behavior can be controlled remotely using a magnetic field, allowing the structure to be used for a variety of applications. The basic lantern object is made by cutting a polymer sheet into a diamond-like parallelogram shape, then cutting a row of parallel lines across the center of each sheet. This creates a row of identical ribbons that is connected by a solid ...

In the future, could our mobile phones and internet data operate using light rather than just electricity? Now, for the first time, an international research team led by CNRS researchers1 has discovered how to generate an electron gas, found for example in LED screens, by illuminating a material made up of layers of oxides2. When the light is switched off, the gas disappears. This phenomenon, which lies at the interface of optics and electronics, paves the way for numerous applications in electronics, spintronics and quantum computing. It is described in an article to be published on 10 October in the journal Nature Materials. Electronic components that can be controlled by light ...

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 ...