Irvine, Calif., July 2, 2025 — President Donald Trump’s approval ratings among California residents are tanking while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s favorability has improved, according to the latest UCI-OC Poll, administered by the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology.  In late May and early June, Newsom’s approval ratings looked nearly as bad as those for Trump. Fifty-nine percent of Californians disapproved of the governor’s job performance, nearly a third ...

The downstream consequences of religion, politics and war can have far-reaching effects on the environment and on the evolutionary processes affecting urban organisms, according to a new analysis from Washington University in St. Louis.  Typically viewed from a sociological perspective, the implications of religion, politics and war are rarely discussed in the field of evolutionary biology. That should change, according to an international team of biologists, including Elizabeth Carlen in Arts & Sciences at WashU, co-lead author ...

New research reveals a surprising geometric link between human and machine learning. A mathematical property called convexity may help explain how brains and algorithms form concepts and make sense of the world. In recent years, with the public availability of AI tools, more people have become aware of how closely the inner workings of artificial intelligence can resemble those of a human brain. There are several similarities in how machines and human brains work, for example, in how they represent the world in abstract form, generalise from limited data, ...

Catalysis – the acceleration of a chemical reaction by adding a particular substance – is extremely important in industry as well as in everyday life. Around 80 % of all chemical products are produced with the help of catalysis, and technologies like exhaust catalysts or fuel cells are also based on this principle. One particularly effective and versatile catalyst is platinum. However, because platinum is a very rare and expensive precious metal whose production causes a lot of CO2 emissions, it is important to use as little of it as possible while maximizing its efficiency. Catalysts with single ...

Tokyo, Japan – Operators have pumped water to cool the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant  (FDNPP) since the accident in 2011 and treated this cooling water with the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which is a state-of-the-art purification system that removes radioactive materials, except tritium. As part of the water molecule, tritium radionuclide, with a half-life of 12.32 years, is very costly and difficult to remove. The ALPS-treated water was accumulating and stored at the FDNPP site and there is limited space to store this ...

Canada must address the growing crisis of communicable diseases that has occurred in tandem with a rise in misinformation that threatens our health systems, argue authors in an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.250916. “A crisis of communicable diseases is unfolding in North America, just as Canada’s health systems’ responses are being hampered by the dismantling of public health and research infrastructure in the United States,” writes family physician Dr. Shannon Charlebois, medical editor, CMAJ, with ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (July 2, 2025)—There has been a lot of research focused on understanding women’s experiences with depression during the menopause transition and early menopause, but there are few studies on perimenopausal women’s experiences with emotional arousal, such as anger. A new study shows that women’s anger traits significantly decrease with age starting at midlife. Results of the study are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society. Anger is defined as antagonism toward someone or something, often accompanied by a propensity to experience and express it indiscriminately. ...

Research from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences and Wildlife Crime Research Hub has highlighted evidence of shark products entering both Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, including clear patterns in flows between the two countries. According to the study, published in Pacific Conservation Biology, the products identified were carried in personal luggage and postage, likely transported for personal use, as trophies, or for resale or consumption. Most products seized upon entry to Australia came from Asia, ...

Imagine you are on a treasure hunt in a vast library with no catalog—typing random words into a search bar and hoping to stumble upon the exact book you need. That has been the reality for many roboticists trying to find the right ROS (Robot Operating System) package. With over 7,500 options available, keyword searches often return irrelevant results, wasting developers’ precious time and energy. Researchers from the National University of Defense Technology and Zhejiang University have developed a more efficient method for searching. Instead of relying on simple word matching, their new tool uses a “knowledge ...

Imagine reading a long article or a thick legal contract and knowing, with confidence, exactly which lines prove that an event happened—or did not happen. That is now possible thanks to a research team at Soochow University. They have built a new neural network that not only determines if an event described in a document is real but also highlights the exact sentences that led it to that conclusion. In head-to-head comparisons with earlier approaches, this new model improved overall fact-checking accuracy by 2.5 points and exact-match ...

Aromatics, as extremely crucial basic chemicals in the modern industrial system, are widely used in many fields such as energy, medicine, materials and the daily chemical industry. However, the traditional petroleum-based production routes, such as naphtha cracking and catalytic reforming, are facing the dual pressures of tight petroleum resources and carbon emissions. Meanwhile, CO2, as a typical greenhouse gas, its efficient and value-added utilization offers dual benefits in both environment and economic development, but is limited by its thermodynamic stability, and there are still challenges in producing aromatics with high selectivity through hydrogenation pathways. Propane, as a major ...

With the exponential growth of global data traffic driven by AI, big-data analytics, and cloud computing, today’s single-mode fiber (SMF) networks are edging toward their Shannon-capacity limits. Space-division multiplexing (SDM) in multimode fiber (MMF) has emerged as a leading candidate for the next-generation bandwidth breakthrough because a single MMF can carry many orthogonal transverse modes in parallel. However, random mode coupling during propagation mixes these modes into complex speckle patterns, severely complicating signal recovery. Although conventional digital signal ...

This study investigates the effectiveness of a vitamin D3-loaded nanoemulsion in improving the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children. Children with ASD often have low vitamin D3 levels, which are linked to delays in language development, adaptive behavior, and fine motor skills. While traditional vitamin D3 supplementation has shown mixed results in past studies, this research evaluates whether a nanoemulsion form—engineered to enhance absorption and bioavailability—might produce better outcomes.   Eighty children between the ages of 3 and 6 with diagnosed ASD were randomly assigned into two groups: one receiving the ...

This pilot study evaluates a newly developed point-of-care (PoC) device designed to measure bilirubin levels in human blood serum using a microfluidic cartridge and optoelectronic sensing module. Accurate bilirubin measurement is critical for assessing liver function and diagnosing conditions such as jaundice and neonatal hyperbilirubinemia. Traditional laboratory methods are accurate but not suitable for rapid or resource-limited settings due to their complexity. The goal of this study was to determine if the new portable PoC device could deliver comparable accuracy and clinical utility.   Serum samples from 20 patients with bilirubin concentrations ranging ...

This study investigates the potential of amygdalin, a natural compound found in almonds, peaches, and apples, as a therapeutic agent for HER2-positive breast cancer. HER2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2) is overexpressed in a significant percentage of aggressive breast cancer cases and is associated with poor prognosis. The researchers aimed to explore whether amygdalin could effectively bind to and stabilize the HER2 protein, which could suppress its cancer-promoting activity.   To do this, the study employed a variety of computational tools. Molecular docking was used to determine how strongly amygdalin could bind to HER2, and results showed favorable binding ...

Published in Smart Construction, this study investigates the cyclic bond behavior of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) bars—an area vital to seismic design yet previously underexplored. By examining carbon (CFRP), glass (GFRP), and basalt (BFRP) fiber reinforced polymer bars under reversed cyclic loading, the research quantifies how bar diameter, embedment length, concrete strength, and rib geometry influence initial bond stiffness, unloading strength, frictional resistance, and energy dissipation. A unified bond stress–slip ...

Researchers discover high-velocity clouds in the nearby spiral galaxy M83. These clouds are moving at speeds significantly different to the galaxy’s overall speed of rotation. The findings suggest that these clouds likely originated outside the galaxy, offering new insights into how galaxies acquire fresh gas and sustain star formation over billions of years. This hints at how our own galaxy evolved and may evolve in the future. Maki Nagata is a graduate student and astronomer at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Astronomy. Recently, she and her colleagues were trying to solve a long-standing question in astronomy: “How do galaxies ...

The deadly, record-breaking heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in June 2021 continues to be the subject of intense interest among scientists, policy makers and the public. A new study from some of the region's top climate scientists synthesized more than 70 publications addressing the causes and consequences of the extreme heat wave and the potential for similar high-heat events to happen in the future. "It's still the event of interest for anyone who studies heat waves or the atmospheric patterns that cause them," says Paul Loikith, associate professor of geography ...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) impacts approximately 2% of the global population, often preventing individuals from living life to their full potential. The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) invites the public to a free webinar, “Transforming Treatment Outcomes for People with OCD” on Tuesday, July 8, 2025, at 2:00 pm ET. In this talk, Helen Blair Simpson, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University / New York State Psychiatric Institute and Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, will explore how research can transform outcomes for those living with OCD. She will discuss clinical trials that ...

A rare cell in the lining of lungs is fundamental to the organwide response necessary to repair damage from toxins like those in wildfire smoke or respiratory viruses, Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues have found. A similar process occurs in the pancreas, where the cells, called neuroendocrine cells, initiate a biological cascade that protects insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells from damage. Treating the airways of mice with an experimental drug that activates the repair pathway protected their airways from damage after infection with influenza or ...

New cutting-edge software developed in Melbourne can help uncover how the most common heart tumour in children forms and changes. And the technology has the potential to further our understanding of other childhood diseases, according to a new study. The research, led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and published in Genome Biology, found the software, VR-Omics, can identify previously undetected cell activities of cardiac rhabdomyoma, a type of benign heart tumour. Developed by MCRI’s Professor Mirana Ramialison, VR-Omics is the first tool capable of analysing and visualising data in both ...

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle—specifically, a diet rich in fibre but light on red/processed meat, regular exercise, not smoking, and sticking to a normal weight—is linked to a significantly lower risk of diverticulitis, finds a large long term study, published online in the journal Gut. What’s more, these 5 components seem to offset the effects of inherited genes, the findings indicate. Diverticulitis occurs when ‘pouches’ develop along the gut and become inflamed or infected in the wall of the large intestine (colon), explain the researchers. It’s a common cause of hospital admissions and a major reason for emergency colon surgery, they add. Genetic ...

Women aged 65 and above are still at heightened risk of cervical cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), suggest the findings of a large observational study published in the open access journal Gynecology and Obstetrics Clinical Medicine. But most guidelines currently recommend discontinuing screening for the disease in women aged 65+ if they have had previously normal smear tests. Yet global cases of cervical cancer have been rising among women in this age group, prompting the researchers to call for a policy rethink. Recent data from the World Health Organization indicate that ...

A diet high in foods with the potential to promote low grade inflammation during pregnancy may raise that child’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes, suggests Danish research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. This dietary pattern was associated with a 16% heightened risk for every unit increase in a dietary measure of inflammatory food intake, the findings show. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disorder characterised by the destruction of insulin-producing β-cells in the pancreas, necessitating lifelong ...

More must be done to address the growth in anxiety related to climate change, says a leading psychologist, before it becomes the next mental health crisis. In his book Understanding Climate Anxiety, Geoff Beattie documents how climate anxiety is on the rise, especially amongst young people. Yet support is limited and sufferers face stigma because of the polarised debate around whether the climate crisis even exists, he says. Understanding Climate Anxiety offers psychological tips and guidance ...