A new multi-site study led by researchers at CU Anschutz shows that people with cystic fibrosis (CF) who start the triple-drug therapy elexacaftor/tezacaftor/ivacaftor (ETI) can safely reduce many of their daily lung treatments while maintaining good health for years. The study was published today in the Journal of Cystic Fibrosis. “This is incredibly meaningful for individuals and families living with CF,” said lead author Scott Sagel, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics-pulmonary medicine at the CU Anschutz School of Medicine and director of the University of Colorado Cystic Fibrosis Center. “For ...

From field to lab: Rice study reveals how people with vision loss judge approaching vehicles Despite impaired central vision, participants relied on both vision and audition, offering new insight into mobility and safety Patricia DeLucia has spent decades studying something many of us never think about: judgments about collision that are crucial for safety. But the roots of her research stretch back to her childhood, long before she became a professor of psychological sciences at Rice University. “I grew up playing sports, and when you’re on the field, collision judgment is everything — whether a ball is coming at you, whether ...

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – A new study published in the American Journal of Physiology - Heart and Circulatory Physiology reveals that chronic kidney disease (CKD) accelerates cognitive decline through interconnected damage to the heart and brain—and that these pathways differ markedly between men and women.   Scientists and physicians from the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, in collaboration with the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), led the study to better understand sex-specific ...

Women who report high levels of psychosocial stress, such as from caregiving and lack of emotional support, show signs of early heart tissue changes associated with cardiovascular disease – an association not observed in men, a new study reveals. The results support the notion that there are sex-specific ways in which stress affects cardiovascular health and that risk-assessment processes should take psychosocial factors and mental wellness into account, the researchers said. “From an epidemiological point of view, we have known for about two decades that stress is an important risk factor in cardiovascular health for people born female. But with this research ...

Q: How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? For breastfeeding women who have HIV, consistently taking antiretroviral therapy (ART) is essential for their own health and the health of their infants. New long-acting (LA) injectable ART options, such as LA cabotegravir with rilpivirine (CAB/RPV), can help women suppress the HIV virus within their bodies — keeping them healthy and reducing transmission to their infants. Instead of daily oral pills, the injection is received every two months, making it easier for women to sustain treatment during the postpartum period and keep their medical diagnoses private. Our study focused ...

The last time the New World screwworm invaded the U.S., it devastated livestock and required a decades-long eradication campaign. Now, University of California Riverside researchers are launching a preemptive strike against the parasitic fly’s threatened return. The New World screwworm isn’t a worm at all. It’s the larval or maggot stage of a shiny, metallic blowfly, a species called Cochliomyia hominivorax. While many blowflies are harmless and play a vital role in decomposing dead animals, this particular species feeds on living flesh.  “Not all blowflies are this species. We don’t ...

HONOLULU, Dec. 4, 2025 — The world is loud. A walk down the street bombards one’s ears with the sound of engines revving, car horns blaring, and the steady beeps of pedestrian crossings. While smartphone alerts to excessive sound and public awareness of noise exposure grows, few tools help people take protective action. To address this gap, Santino Cozza and a team from Applied Research Associates, Inc. developed the Hearing Protection Optimization Tool (HPOT). HPOT was designed to move beyond traditional noise reductions ratings and highlight performance characteristics that ...

Explore the future of clean hydrogen in this recorded webinar featuring Dr. Muhammad Aziz from the University of Tokyo. Discover how chemical looping technology can produce high-purity hydrogen, capture CO₂, and recover usable heat—all within a near-zero emission process. ???? In this session, you’ll learn about: Advanced oxygen carrier materials for stable reactor performance Process intensification strategies for efficient hydrogen production Real-world applications in power generation, steelmaking, refineries, and renewable energy storage Key scientific, economic, ...

By Diana Kenney WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- One of the enigmas of life is emergence, when the whole becomes more than its parts. Flocks of birds can instantly change direction when a predator appears, guided not by a lead bird but by a collective intelligence that no single bird can possess on its own. Multitudes of molecules skitter chaotically in a cell, but certain ones find each other, interact, and give rise to sophisticated cellular structures and functions that could not have been predicted by studying the molecules alone. Understanding how emergent properties arise in cells – in this case, how liquid droplets called condensates spontaneously form from rapidly moving molecules ...

A discovery by FIU researchers could help forensic investigators close the gap on estimating time of death.   Often, death investigations rely on maggots — the larvae of blow flies that are among the first insects to colonize a body after death — to estimate how long a person has been dead. The presence of eggs or the sizes of the maggots are indicators of time since death. Yet, there is a stage in their development, where the maggot’s physical form changes very little, which limits the precision of time of death estimates. While changes may not be visible on a maggot’s outside, their ...

HONOLULU, Dec. 4, 2025 — Bees, and other pollinator species, are dying. Between pesticides, the climate crisis, and habitat loss, bee colonies are becoming weaker, leaving them more vulnerable to parasites like the greater and lesser wax moths. Vulnerable bees have cascading effects on beekeepers and food security in the apiculture industry. A team of researchers from the University of Strathclyde and Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization is exploiting the unusual hearing of wax moths to develop a sustainable and efficient ...

The placenta regulates the exchange of nutrients, gases, and metabolic products between a pregnant woman and the foetus, thereby ensuring healthy development. The first 90 days of pregnancy are particularly important, because the baby’s organs begin to develop during this sensitive period. Although the placenta has barrier mechanisms designed to prevent the passage of dangerous substances into the baby, PFAS can accumulate in the body, interfere with foetal development, and, in severe cases, increase the risk of miscarriage. “For an accurate risk assessment, ...

HONOLULU, Dec. 4, 2025 — Acoustic signals have been important markers during NASA’s Mars missions. Measurements of sound can provide information both about Mars itself — such as turbulence in its atmosphere, changes in its temperature, and its surface conditions — and about the movement of the Mars rovers. Using these sound measurements to the best extent possible requires an accurate understanding of how sound propagates on Mars. Charlie Zheng, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Utah State University, and his doctoral student Hayden Baird, who is partially sponsored by the Utah Space Grant Consortium Graduate ...

Higher plant diversity in agricultural grasslands increases yields with lower inputs of nitrogen fertiliser. That is the headline finding of a landmark, international study led by Trinity College Dublin that paints a promising picture for more sustainable agriculture. And in further good news, the research shows that under warmer temperatures, the yield benefits of more diverse grasslands further increase. This highlights the climate adaptation potential of multispecies mixtures in an era where the global climate crisis is driving rising temperatures in many countries. The research, published today in leading ...

When DNA breaks, cells must repair it accurately to prevent harmful mutations. Researchers have discovered that during a key repair process called homologous recombination, the cell uses loops in its DNA structure to speed up the search for an intact copy of the damaged region. These loops act like shortcuts, allowing the repair machinery to scan along the chromosome in a directed way rather than randomly. This finding, published today in Science, reveals an unexpected function for chromatin loops—not just in organizing the genome, but also in helping maintain its integrity. “Homologous recombination is a key DNA repair process often linked to cancer, but ...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- A short interaction with a chatbot can meaningfully shift a voter’s opinion about a presidential candidate or proposed policy in either direction, new Cornell University research finds. The potential for artificial intelligence to affect election results is a major public concern. Two new papers – with experiments conducted in four countries – demonstrate that chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are quite effective at political persuasion, moving opposition voters’ preferences ...

Even small, open-source AI chatbots can be effective political persuaders, according to a new study. The findings provide a comprehensive empirical map of the mechanisms behind AI political persuasion, revealing that post-training and prompting – not model scale and personalization – are the dominant levers. It also reveals evidence of a persuasion-accuracy tradeoff, reshaping how policymakers and researchers should conceptualize the risks of persuasive AI. There is a growing concern amongst many that advances in AI – particularly conversational ...

Microscopic analysis of an unconventional throat bone helps resolve a long-standing debate in paleontology, researchers report, revealing evidence that Nanotyrannus lancensis – long thought by many to be a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex – was in fact a fully mature, distinct species of smaller tyrannosaurid. Because the fossil record is often fragmentary, it is difficult to discern the full range of distinct dinosaur species that lived in ancient ecosystems. This is made more challenging when trying to determine true new species from juveniles of known ones. One of the most ...

Inside human cells, biology has pulled off the ultimate packing job, figuring out how to fit six feet of DNA into a nucleus about one-tenth as wide as a human hair while making sure the all-important molecules can still function. To compress itself, DNA wraps around proteins to form nucleosomes that are linked together like beads on a string. These strings coil into compact chromatin fibers, which are further condensed inside the nucleus. It was unclear how this additional compaction process happened. Then, in 2019, HHMI Investigator Michael Rosen and his team at UT Southwestern Medical Center reported that synthetic nucleosomes created ...

Los Angeles, CA (December 4, 2025)—For decades, paleontologists argued over the lone skull used to establish the distinct species Nanotyrannus. Was it truly a separate species or simply a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex? A new paper published in Science has definitively shown that Nanotyrannus is, in fact, nearly fully grown and not an immature T. rex, at the same time revealing new insights into how these giant predators achieved such terrifying sizes so quickly.  A multi-institutional team, including Dinosaur Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Zach Morris, examined the much-debated Nanotyrannus holotype—the specimen used to name ...

New study confirms Nanotyrannus holotype was diminutive, distinct species from T. rex New research from a team including the University of Nebraska State Museum’s Ashley Poust further moves a decades-long scientific debate toward a conclusion — the Nanotyrannus, a teacup variation of the T. rex, did exist. Poust and the team, led by Christopher Griffin of Princeton University, used a novel approach to determine maturity of the holotype of Nanotyrannus, a fossil skull at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. They examined the ceratobranchial, or hyoid bone, which was intact with the skull, and determined it was an adult when it ...

Astronomer Michael R. Blanton will join the Carnegie Science Observatories as its 12th director, overseeing astronomical research in Pasadena and telescope operations at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, one of the world’s elite observing sites. Blanton joins Carnegie Science from New York University, where he is a Professor of Physics and the Director of the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics. He succeeds John Mulchaey, who was named Carnegie Science President in late 2024. Blanton’s research has centered primarily on conducting large astronomical surveys to place ...

Tiny charming immune cells called microglia protect the central nervous system (CNS) in a multitude of ways: They provide innate immunity, shape neurodevelopment, maintain homeostasis and modulate neurological disorders. That functionality can be lost, however, when microglia acquire mutations. An concept to correct this by replacing the mutated microglia with genetically typical cells — now called microglia intervention strategy for therapy and enhancement by replacement, or MISTER — emerged five years ago and was successfully achieved in mice. This year, researchers successfully used the approach to halt a fatal neurological ...

In a paper publishing in the Cell Press journal Trends in Immunology on December 4, scientists and doctors highlight the importance of studying long COVID in the context of other post-acute infection syndromes or chronic illnesses. By analyzing historical accounts of other epidemics, they say, researchers can gain important perspective on the profound effects of these chronic illnesses—with the goal of informing ...

Clues contained in tree rings have identified mid-14th-century volcanic activity as the first domino to fall in a sequence that led to the devastation of the Black Death in Europe. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig have used a combination of climate data and documentary evidence to paint the most complete picture to date of the ‘perfect storm’ that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, as well as profound demographic, economic, political, cultural and religious change. Their evidence suggests that a volcanic eruption – or cluster of eruptions – ...