Flowers grow stems, leaves and petals in a perfect pattern again and again. A new Cornell study shows that even in this precise, patterned formation in plants, gene activity inside individual cells is far more chaotic than it appears from the outside. This finding has important implications for plant engineering, where scientists design artificial gene switches to control growth or behavior. Understanding how plants manage genetic “noise” could also inform research in other fields, from synthetic ...

Q: How would you summarize your study for a lay audience?  Given the rise in brain-based conditions and the growing development and investment in neurotechnologies to target them, it is important to understand how the public views these interventions and whether they would be willing to use them. To explore this, we conducted a survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults to examine perceptions of four neurotechnologies designed to treat severe mood, memory, or motor symptoms.  Q: What question were you investigating?   One of the goals of the recently created Neurotech Justice Accelerator at Mass General Brigham (NJAM), a Dana Center for Neuroscience & Society, is to better ...

NEW ORLEANS, May 23, 2025 – When children are dropped off at a school or day care for the first time, there can be a lot of feelings and sometimes meltdowns caused by being separated from parents, meeting new people, and hearing new noises. Could the architecture of the room help to soothe at least some of the children’s concerns? “Classrooms without any sound absorption are the majority in Japan,” said Ikuri Matsuoka, a master’s student at Kumamoto University in Japan. “My motivation was to make people aware of the importance of acoustics in classrooms because in Japan, there are no standards ...

Eight times more American young adults now take medication to protect them from HIV than a decade ago, a new study finds. But even with this positive news about increasing use of pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, the study also suggests that health care providers and public health agencies could do more to promote consistent use of these medications. The new study, done by a team at the University of Michigan Medical School, uses national pharmacy data to look at prescriptions for oral PrEP from 2016 to 2023 among people ages 18 to 25. It’s published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. At the start of the study period, 26 of every 100,000 U.S. young ...

Where did the moon’s magnetism go? Scientists have puzzled over this question for decades, ever since orbiting spacecraft picked up signs of a high magnetic field in lunar surface rocks. The moon itself has no inherent magnetism today.   Now, MIT scientists may have solved the mystery. They propose that a combination of an ancient, weak magnetic field and a large, plasma-generating impact may have temporarily created a strong magnetic field, concentrated on the far side of the moon.  In a study appearing in the journal Science Advances, the researchers show through detailed simulations that ...

Much of the world’s lithium occurs in salty waters with fundamentally different chemistry than other naturally saline waters like the ocean, according to a study published on May 23 in Science Advances. The finding has implications for lithium mining technologies and wastewater assessment and management. Lithium is a critical mineral in the renewable energy sector. About 40% of global lithium production comes from large salt pans, called salars, in the central Andes Mountains in South America and the Tibetan Plateau ...

Researchers from Nagoya City University, Tohoku University, and other institutions have used numerical simulations to replicate how a peculiar mineral texture called barred olivine forms inside chondrules—millimeter-sized spherical particles found in meteorites. These chondrules are considered time capsules from the early solar system, and barred olivine is a rare mineral texture not seen in Earth rocks. Associate Professor Hitoshi Miura of Nagoya City University and the team was the first to reproduce this texture using numerical simulations and ...

Embargoed to 14:00 (2:00 pm) US Eastern Time Friday, 23 May 2025 or NZT 06:0 6am Saturday 24 May 2025: A breakthrough study, led by scientists at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, has uncovered how daylight can boost the immune system’s ability to fight infections. The team focused on the most abundant immune cells in our bodies, called ‘neutrophils’, which are a type of white blood cell. These cells move quickly to the site of an infection and kill invading bacteria. The researchers used zebrafish, a small freshwater fish, as a model organism, because its genetic ...

The study, a collaboration between MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), reanalyzed massive datasets of large-scale distributions of plankton-derived lipids in the ocean, which were initially published by WHOI in 2022. “This study shows the value of open science,” says first author Dr. Weimin Liu from MARUM. “Using new methods on open-access data, we uncovered previously hidden patterns of plankton adaptation.” The datasets, totaling over 200 GB ...

A research team led by Professor Randolf Pohl from the Institute of Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has achieved a significant breakthrough in determining fundamental properties of atomic nuclei. For the first time, the team conducted laser spectroscopy experiments on muonic helium-3 at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. Muonic helium-3 is a special form of helium in which the atom’s two electrons are replaced by a single, much heavier muon. Yesterday, the results ...

Background and objectives Oral microbiota dysbiosis and altered salivary cortisol levels have been linked to depression and anxiety. Given that bacterial transmission can occur between spouses, this study aimed to investigate whether the transmission of oral microbiota between newlywed couples mediates symptoms of depression and anxiety. Methods Validated Persian versions of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Beck Depression Inventory-II, and Beck Anxiety Inventory were administered to 1,740 couples who had been married for six months. The researchers compared 268 healthy control spouses with 268 affected cases in a cross-sectional study. Data were analyzed using appropriate ...

Researchers led by Maike Sander, Scientific Director of the Max Delbrück Center, have developed a vascularized organoid model of hormone secreting cells in the pancreas. The advance, published in Developmental Cell, promises to improve diabetes research and cell-based therapies. An international team of researchers led by Max Delbrück Center Scientific Director Professor Maike Sander has for the first time developed an organoid model of human pluripotent stem cell-derived pancreatic islets (SC-islets) with integrated vasculature. Islets are cell clusters in the pancreas that house several different types of hormone-secreting cells, including insulin-producing beta ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL 11 AM EST on Friday, May 23, 2025 Contact: Jillian McKoy, jpmckoy@bu.edu  Michael Saunders, msaunder@bu.edu  ## US Excess Deaths Continued to Rise Even After the COVID-19 Pandemic  There were over 1.5 million “missing Americans” in 2022 and 2023, deaths that would have been averted if US mortality rates matched those of peer countries. Excess US deaths have been increasing for decades, with working-age adults disproportionately affected, and this trend continued during and after the pandemic.  In 2022 and 2023, more than 1.5 million deaths would have been averted if the United ...

About The Study: Between 1980 and 2023, the total number of excess U.S. deaths reached an estimated 14.7 million. Although excess deaths per year peaked in 2021, there were still more than 1.5 million during 2022 to 2023. In 2023, excess death rates remained substantially higher than pre-pandemic rates. The rising trend from 1980 to 2019 appears to have continued during and after the pandemic, likely reflecting pre-pandemic causes of death, including drug overdose, firearm injury, and cardiometabolic disease. These deaths highlight the continued ...

PITTSBURGH, May 23, 2025 — Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, University of South Carolina and Emory University have published findings in JAMA Health Forum from a recent study on coverage retention and plan switching among Americans who obtain their health insurance through HealthCare.gov. Looking at data from 2022 through 2024, the authors found that losing the option to automatically reenroll into a zero-premium plan reduced enrollment. Reenrollment decreased by about 7% among those affected, indicating that an estimated quarter of a million Americans ...

A recent study on the application of Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) found that mNGS can achieve early detection of pathogens and accelerate the development of targeted anti-infection treatment plans, thereby improving treatment outcomes and patient prognosis. The research, conducted by the Department of Clinical Laboratory, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University and BGI Genomics, was published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology early in May. The mNGS Outperforms Traditional Methods Conventional microbiological tests (CMTs) rely ...

The expression of symptoms of viral infections is a byproduct of complex virus-host molecular pathways. These remain largely unknown, especially in the case of fungus-virus pathogen systems. Fungal antiviral responses involve three known mechanisms: RNA interference (RNAi), a post-transcriptional mechanism that inhibits viral replication; transcriptional reprogramming; and recognition of self versus non-self, which limits cell-to-cell transmission of viruses within fungi. While many fungal viruses (mycoviruses) cause asymptomatic infections in their hosts, the mechanisms ...

About The Study: Although the global age-standardized burden rates of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) more than halved over the last 3 decades, SAH remained one of the most common cardiovascular and neurological causes of death and disabilities in the world, with increasing absolute case numbers. These findings suggest evidence for the potential health benefits of proactive public health planning and resource allocation toward the prevention of SAH. Nontraumatic SAH represents the third most common stroke type after ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage, accounting for 5% to ...

New research published in Communications Biology has uncovered the earliest known use of the medicinal and psychoactive plant Peganum harmala, commonly known as Syrian rue or harmal, in fumigation practices and inhaled as smoke. The findings offer unprecedented insight into early Arabian therapeutic and sensorial practices, revealing that native plants were already being deliberately used for their bioactive and psychoactive properties nearly 2,700 years ago. Led by Dr. Barbara Huber (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology) and Professor ...

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could continuously monitor the molecular state of our body? Consider the solutions that could enable, from optimized drug delivery to early detection of deadly diseases like cancer. For the last two decades, research has aimed to make this a reality by developing devices that measure a chemical or biological reaction in our bodies and send their measurements as a signal readable from outside the body. These devices, called biosensors, can now spot tiny molecules like drugs in real time, but they work only briefly. There is still no single reliable biosensor that can monitor many different substances in our bodies over long stretches. To address ...

A new international study led by researchers at Tulane University shows that the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns affect nearly half of the world's mangrove forests, underscoring the vulnerability of these vital coastal ecosystems to climatic shifts. Mangroves are shrubs or trees that grow in dense thickets mainly in coastal saline or brackish water. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, is based on nearly two decades of satellite data from 2001 to 2020 and is the first study to demonstrate global-scale patterns in how El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences ...

Improving energy conversion efficiency in power electronics is vital for a sustainable society, with wide-bandgap semiconductors like GaN and SiC power devices offering advantages due to their high-frequency capabilities. However, energy losses in passive components at high frequencies hinder efficiency and miniaturization. This underscores the need for advanced soft magnetic materials with lower energy losses. In a recent study published in Communications Materials, a research team led by Professor Mutsuko Hatano from the ...

While moderate touristification can bring economic benefits to cities, overtourism has adverse social effects on residents and visitors. To prevent this, it is necessary to understand the disrupted balance between tourist accommodations and residential housing. Junior Associate Professor Haruka Kato investigated the spatial patterns and geographic characteristics of tourism-accommodation hotspots in proximity to tourist locations in Kyoto, one of the most famous tourist cities in the world. In this study, the tourism-accommodation intensity index was calculated using the ratio of the number of accommodation rooms to that of households. The results revealed that ...

Plants require phosphorus to grow and survive. In environments with low levels of available soil phosphorus, plants need to adjust to stay alive. The pincushion hakea is a large woody, evergreen shrub native to southwestern Australia, an area that has amazingly low levels of soil phosphorus. This plant has adapted to these conditions by forming cluster roots—a large number of smaller rootlets extending from the root axis that resemble a bottlebrush—to extract the small amount of phosphorus in the soil. Cluster roots help plants in low-nutrient soils by increasing the amount of root surface area in contact with the soil, improving ...

A survey on larvae of Japanese wasps revealed that not only is their diet more diverse than previously thought, it also showed that wild colonies prey on more species of vertebrates than had been reported in the past. The Kobe University study highlights the potential for management practices that are sustainable both ecologically and culturally. The wasp species Vespula shidai has long been reared for its edible larvae, a delicacy in central Japan. The rural woodlands of Japan which these wasps inhabit are areas of high biodiversity. Though this ...