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 ...

When it comes to the air in public places, germophobes can breathe a bit easier. According to a new Northwestern University study, the ambient air on airplanes and in hospitals mostly contains harmless microbes typically associated with human skin. In the first study of its kind, scientists used an unexpected sampling tool — used face masks and an aircraft air filter — to uncover the invisible world of microbes floating in our shared air. Their results revealed that the same types of harmless, human-associated bacteria dominate both airplane and hospital air. Across all samples, the team detected 407 ...

Biased or misleading medical advice shared by social media influencers can cause harm and requires coordinated action by governments and platforms to protect the public, argue experts in The BMJ today. Social media influencers are a growing source of medical advice, say Raffael Heiss and colleagues. More than 70% of young adults in the US follow influencers, and over 40% have purchased products based on their recommendations.  Yet they warn that influencer advice can be subject to four sources of bias: lack of ...

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, ...

A new study suggests that traditional learning activities like making notes remain critical for students’ reading comprehension and retention, while also suggesting that large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, could be a useful tool for helping students clarify, explore, and contextualise learning material. Although many students are already using LLMs, there is a lack of research on the impact of generative AI on the fundamental processes of learning. The study by Cambridge University Press & Assessment and Microsoft Research, which is published today (Thursday) in the ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 00:01 GMT THURSDAY 04 DECEMBER 2025 / 19:01 ET WEDNESDAY 3 DECEMBER 2025 An international team led by the University of Oxford has identified one of the largest rotating structures ever reported: a “razor-thin” string of galaxies embedded in a giant spinning cosmic filament, 140 million light-years away. The findings, published today (4 December) in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could offer valuable new insights into how galaxies formed in the early Universe. Cosmic filaments are the largest known structures in the Universe: vast, ...

Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA) is an inherited retinal disease leading to severe vision impairment from early infancy, affecting 2-3 out of every 100,000 newborns. LCA is caused by variants in certain genes from which proteins essential for retinal cell function and survival are made. Mutations in over 20 different genes can cause LCA and in each of those genes, hundreds of different changes, known as genetic variants, can occur.  Importantly, while some of these genetic variants are benign and do not compromise function, other variants cause dysfunction or complete loss of function. Further, for some of these variants, which are called variants ...

A new perspective published in Biocontaminant outlines an urgent scientific roadmap for understanding how common chemicals interact with microbial communities to accelerate the global crisis of antimicrobial resistance. The work, led by Ji Lu from the University of Queensland, highlights why traditional single chemical experiments fail to capture the real drivers of resistance in natural and clinical environments. “Chemicals rarely occur alone in the real world. They mix, react, and interact with diverse microbiomes in ways that can either amplify or suppress antimicrobial resistance,” said Dr ...

Heavy metals in soil are often measured in bulk, but those totals can badly overestimate the real risk to crops, ecosystems and human health, according to a new scientific review. The article, published in Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes, explains that only a fraction of the metal present in soil is actually accessible to plants, microbes and people – a concept known as bioavailability. “Metal pollution in soil is a genuine global concern, but decisions about food safety, clean‑up and land reuse need to be based on ...

A rare and life-threatening kidney disease in children finally has an effective therapy, thanks in large part to pioneering research and clinical leadership from University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital.    The disease, known as C3 glomerulopathy (C3G), is an ultra-rare condition that primarily affects children and young adults. Only around 5,000 Americans have C3G, which causes progressive kidney damage, with more than half of patients reaching end-stage kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis.   Unlike previous treatments for C3G that aimed to alleviate ...

A research team from NIMS, Tohoku University and AIST has developed a new technique for controlling the nanostructures and magnetic domain structures of iron-based soft amorphous ribbons, achieving more than a 50% reduction in core loss compared with the initial amorphous material. The developed material exhibits particularly high performance in the high-frequency range of several tens of kilohertz—required for next-generation, high-frequency transformers and EV drive power supply circuits. This breakthrough is expected to contribute to the advancement of these technologies, development of more energy-efficient electric machines and progress ...

Thulium fiber lasers, operating at a wavelength of 2 micrometers, are valued for applications in medicine, materials processing, and defense. Their longer wavelength makes stray light less damaging compared to the more common ytterbium lasers at 1 micrometer. Yet, despite this advantage, thulium lasers have been stuck at around 1 kilowatt of output power for more than a decade, limited by nonlinear effects and heat buildup. One promising route to break this barrier is inband pumping—switching from diode pumping ...

A new international study led by the Nanobiosystems group at CIC nanoGUNE, is developing miniature, non-invasive, precise robotic catheters for use in reproductive medicine and gynaecological health. This research, which was recently published in the prestigious journal Advanced Materials, has the potential to improve infertility treatments, for example, and enable the highly localised release of drugs and cells. Minimally invasive therapies require precise navigation through complex and delicate anatomical pathways, necessitating medical tools that are small, flexible and highly maneuverable. This study presents a high-yield fabrication method for producing magnetic ...

MINNEAPOLIS — People with impaired kidney function have higher levels of Alzheimer’s biomarkers in their blood, but not an increased risk of dementia, according to a study published December 3, 2025, in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that poor kidney function causes higher levels of Alzheimer’s biomarkers in the blood, it only shows an association. Kidneys remove waste and toxins from the blood, which are then excreted in urine. “Our study found that when the kidneys are not functioning properly, there may be higher levels of Alzheimer’s biomarkers in the blood,” ...

HONOLULU, Dec. 3, 2025 — Have you ever tried yelling underwater? Not only is it difficult to make the noise, but it is rarely audible to those outside of the water. Sound travels differently in mediums of different densities, and that causes a high acoustic impedance ratio between air and water, meaning that sound waves have a tough time breaking the air-water barrier, and most of the sound waves reflect off the barrier rather than penetrating it. To help sound travel between these two mediums, Rutgers University doctoral student Hesam Bakhtiary Yekta simulated a metamaterial that will sit at the air-water interface and improve sound transmission. Bakhtiary Yekta will present his ...

HONOLULU, Dec. 3, 2025 — Many modern buildings are “green buildings,” adhering to a complex set of standards to ensure they are environmentally friendly and sustainably designed, with minimal impact on nature and the humans that inhabit them. These standards can govern everything from energy efficiency to construction materials used for acoustic privacy between rooms. The sheer number of factors to consider when designing such a building can make even veteran architects stumble. Even deciding which construction material to use requires accounting for cost, lifetime carbon emissions, and acoustic performance. Acoustic consultant George Edgar will present ...

A fossil site in Bolivia preserves thousands of traces of dinosaurs who walked, ran, and swam along an ancient coastline, according to a study published December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Raúl Esperante of the Geoscience Research Institute, California, U.S., and colleagues. Bolivia is well known for its abundance of fossil sites preserving dinosaur footprints. These sites provide unique details into the behaviors of ancient species, but most such sites remain unpublished. In this study, Esperante and colleagues report an unprecedented variety of dinosaur tracks at the Carreras Pampas tracksite ...

Dolphins produce a range of vocalizations used for echolocation and communication. These vocalizations vary with social context, environmental conditions, external stimuli, and communication, reflecting their cognitive and behavioral complexity. A study published in PLOS One on December 3, 2025 by Francesco Di Nardo at Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy and colleagues suggests that the frequency and duration of captive dolphin vocalizations may indicate engagement with structured activities. Captive dolphins require ...

Participants in a study who self-reported a stronger desire to have children showed a weaker preference for younger faces compared to those with a weaker desire to have children, according to a study published December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Jingheng Li and colleagues from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, U.K. The preference was unrelated to the potential partners’ perceived wealth or parental prowess. Researchers have long excavated the foundations of attractiveness — the intangible “it” factor that tempts voters, procures job offers and allures romantic partners. Men tend to associate attractiveness with youthful features, presumably ...

Authoritative parenting styles are associated with better mental health and self-esteem among adolescents, while authoritarian parenting styles are associated with depression and lower self-esteem and permissive parenting styles are associated with stress, according to Nepalese study of 583 adolescents Article URL: https://plos.io/44lRwtW Article title: Relationship of parenting styles on depression, anxiety, stress and self-esteem of adolescents Author countries: Nepal Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

A rose by any other name? Not necessarily—how words sound aesthetically correlates with their memorability, study finds Article URL: https://plos.io/4a5P0f8 Article title: Phonemic composition influences words’ aesthetic appeal and memorability Author countries: Austria Funding: This work was supported by a Disruptive Innovation Grant from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Science Fund (grant number: DI_2023-108_MATZINGER_BEALP) awarded to Theresa Matzinger. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...

The odds of iron deficiency in adolescent girls are almost 14 times higher among those who experience heavy menstruation and follow a meat-restricted diet, compared to girls with normal menstruation who eat an omnivorous diet Article URL: https://plos.io/4883ZTd Article title: Exploring the effect of menstrual loss and dietary habits on iron deficiency in teenagers: A cross-sectional study Author countries: Canada, Sweden. Funding: Open access funding provided by Karolinska Institutet. This study was funded by the Southern Health ...

Male infertility is a major issue worldwide and its causes remain unclear. Now, an international team of researchers led by Hiroki Shibuya at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR) in Japan has discovered a key structure in the germ cells of male mice that, when disturbed, leads to deformations in sperm flagellum—the tail that allows sperm to swim. Made possible by the first observation of the mouse flagellar base structure using ultrastructure expansion microscopy, this finding could explain some forms of infertility in human men. The study was published in the scientific journal Science ...

Bumblebees respond to physical disturbance of their nest with a sequence of defensive behaviors that lasts up to 10 minutes, according to a study by Sajedeh Sarlak at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and colleagues, publishing December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One. Although we often think of bumblebees as docile, friendly garden visitors, they will fiercely defend their nest if needed. Bumblebees are important pollinators for both wild plants and crops, and they are often kept in commercial greenhouses, so understanding their defensive behavior is important for both conservation and ...

Cedars-Sinai scientists have developed an experimental drug that repairs DNA and serves as a prototype for a new class of medications that fix tissue damage caused by heart attack, inflammatory disease or other conditions. Investigators describe the workings of the drug, called TY1, in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine. “By probing the mechanisms of stem cell therapy, we discovered a way to heal the body without using stem cells,” said Eduardo Marbán, MD, PhD, executive director of the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai and the study’s senior author. “TY1 ...