Lead contamination in municipal water sources is a consistent threat to public health. Ingesting even tiny amounts of lead can harm the human brain and nervous system — especially in young children. To empower people to detect lead contamination in their own homes, a team of researchers developed an accessible, handheld water-testing system called the E-Tongue. This device, described in ACS Omega, was tested through a citizen science project across four Massachusetts towns. “I was driven by the reality that families could be unknowingly exposed to lead,” says Pradeep ...

Young consumers who shop online and have FOMO (fear of missing out) tend to feel lower levels of social, psychological and financial well-being, a new study finds – but there’s one important caveat.   Researchers found that having a stronger attachment to a social media influencer is linked to younger consumers having improved feelings of well-being in those areas.   The findings show a complex dynamic for young people who follow the latest trends in fashion as they shop online ...

Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT, President Park, Sun-Kyu) has successfully developed a real-time, low-cost algal bloom monitoring system utilizing inexpensive optical sensors and a novel labeling logic. The system achieves higher accuracy than state-of-the-art AI models such as Gradient Boosting and Random Forest. Harmful algal blooms (HABs) pose significant threats to water quality, public health, and aquatic ecosystems. Conventional detection methods such as satellite imaging and UAV-based remote sensing are cost-prohibitive ...

Nanomedicines, especially those based on nanoparticles, are revolutionizing healthcare in terms of both diagnostics and therapeutics. These particles, often containing metals like iron or gold, can serve as contrast agents in medical imaging, act as nutritional supplements, and even function as carriers for drug delivery. Thanks to their unique properties plus careful engineering, nanomedicines can reach and accumulate in places within the body that conventional medicines cannot, making them promising for cancer detection and treatment. However, the same characteristics that make nanomedicines ...

Montreal, May 29, 2025 - Caffeine is not only found in coffee, but also in tea, chocolate, energy drinks and many soft drinks, making it one of the most widely consumed psychoactive substances in the world. In a study published in April in Nature Communications Biology, a team of researchers from Université de Montréal shed new light on how caffeine can modify sleep and influence the brain's recovery — both physical and cognitive — overnight. The research was led by Philipp Thölke, ...

CLEVELAND—CAR T cell immunotherapy, which uses a patient’s own modified immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells, can produce dramatic results when treating blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia and shows promise against solid tumors. But harvesting T cells, a type of white blood cell that helps the immune system fight germs and protect against disease, is difficult and expensive—limiting the use of this potentially life-saving therapy to major cancer centers and after other treatments have failed. Now a team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University is developing a new device to harvest T cells that might make CAR ...

SHERBROOKE, Canada (May 29, 2025) – Nord Quantique, a pioneer in the field of quantum error correction, today announces a first in applied physics. The company has successfully developed bosonic qubit technology with multimode encoding, which outlines a path to a major reduction in the number of qubits required for quantum error correction (QEC). The result is an approach to quantum computing which will deliver smaller yet more powerful systems that consume a fraction of the energy. These smaller systems are also simpler to develop to utility-scale due to their size and lower requirements ...

Researchers have uncovered that some childhood cancers have a substantially higher number of DNA changes than previously thought, changing the way we view children’s tumours and possibly opening up new or repurposed treatment options. Concentrating on a type of childhood kidney cancer, known as Wilms tumour, an international team genetically sequenced multiple tumours at a resolution that was previously not possible. This collaboration included researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University of Cambridge, Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, the Oncode Institute in the Netherlands, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Cambridge University ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – A new material developed at Cornell University could significantly improve the delivery and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines by replacing a commonly used ingredient that may trigger unwanted immune responses in some people. Thanks to their ability to train cells to produce virus-killing proteins, mRNA vaccines have gained popularity over the last five years for their success in reducing the severity of COVID-19 infection. One method for delivering the mRNA to cells is by packaging it inside fatty spheres, called lipid nanoparticles, that protect it from being degraded. However, a common component of ...

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, commonly referred to as the “AMOC,” is a system of ocean currents confined to the Atlantic basin that plays a crucial role in regulating Earth’s climate by transporting heat from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere. The AMOC also modulates regional weather, from the mild summers in Europe to the monsoon seasons in Africa and India. Climate models have long predicted that global warming will cause the AMOC to weaken, with some projecting substantial weakening ...

MISTRAL is a new generation receiver installed on the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) and built by the Sapienza University of Rome for the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) as part of the upgrade of the radio telescope for the study of the Universe at high frequencies, funded by a PON (National Operational Program) project, concluded in 2023 and now providing its first significant scientific results. MISTRAL stands for “MIllimetric Sardinia radio Telescope Receiver based on Array of Lumped elements kids”. MISTRAL is an innovative receiver in many ways. Radio astronomy ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In a review in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Stephen Long, a professor of crop sciences and of plant biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, describes research efforts to “future-proof” the crops that are essential to feeding a hungry world in a changing climate. Long, who has spent decades studying the process of photosynthesis and finding ways to improve it, provides an overview of key scientific findings that offer a ray of hope. Higher temperatures, more frequent and longer droughts, catastrophic rainfall events and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels all ...

LONDON, England Revolutionary Platform Sets New Benchmark for Transparency and Compliance in Diagnostic AI As the May 26th CE-IVDR compliance deadline comes into effect, Diagnostics.ai launches the industry’s first fully-transparent machine learning platform for clinical real-time PCR diagnostics – demonstrating exactly how each result was achieved, a first for molecular-testing machine learning. The technology is backed by over 15 years of experience and millions of successfully processed samples with >99.9% proven accuracy. The CE-IVDR Strategic Advantage Platform is Diagnostics.ai's ...

The process of necrosis, a form of cell death, may represent one of the most promising ways to change the course of human aging, disease and even space travel, according to a new study from researchers at UCL, drug discovery company LinkGevity and the European Space Agency (ESA). In the study, published in Nature Oncogene, a world-leading international team of scientists and clinicians explore the potential of necrosis – when cells die unexpectedly as a result of infection, injury or disease – to reshape our understanding and treatment of age-related conditions. Challenging prevailing ...

According to the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, approximately 1 in 6 children in the United States have developmental disabilities which include physical, learning, language or behavior-related disabilities. Students with disabilities often receive accommodations (how students access and learn the same content as their classmates) at school, but teachers rarely explain them to typically-developing classmates. Children with disabilities are increasingly included in general education classrooms alongside typically-developing classmates. Accommodations ...

Highlights - The world's first successful petabit-class transmission over more than 1,000 km using standard 19-core optical fiber, achieving a transmission rate of 1.02 petabits per second over a distance of 1,808 km. - Achieved using a newly developed standard 19-core optical fiber, equivalent to 19 standard fibers, low loss across multiple wavelength bands, and the development of an optical amplification relay function compatible with this fiber. - This is a major step to realize future long-distance, large-capacity optical communication systems. Abstract An international research team led by the Photonic Network Laboratory at the National Institute of Information and ...

Many sharks, particularly those that live in the open oceans, are hunters rather than scavengers. Despite this, a small portion of their diet comes from scavenging, a behavior they may engage in when the opportunity arises. Now, writing in Frontiers in Fish Science, researchers have described an unusual aggregation of sharks coming together to feed on a carcass that had decayed to mostly flesh and blubber. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a feeding aggregation of tiger sharks and oceanic whitetip sharks scavenging concurrently, and peacefully, on a carcass,” said first author Dr Molly Scott, a marine researcher ...

New archaeological findings along a little-known medieval wall in eastern Mongolia reveal that frontier life was more complex than previously believed. Excavations show evidence of permanent habitation, agriculture, and cultural exchange, suggesting that these walls were not solely defensive structures but part of a broader system of regional control and interaction during the Jin dynasty. Link to pictures and video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1krCqKwVHzMIA-EaU7AhES47HikEgElmp?usp=sharing A team of international archaeologists ...

Interactive robots should not just be passive companions, but active partners–like therapy horses who respond to human emotion–say University of Bristol researchers. Equine-assisted interventions (EAIs) offer a powerful alternative to traditional talking therapies for patients with PTSD, trauma and autism, who struggle to express and regulate emotions through words alone. The study, presented at the CHI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems held in Yokohama, recommends that therapeutic robots should also exhibit a level of autonomy, rather than one-dimensional displays of friendship ...

May 28, 2025 MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request. Why this matters: Too much of a specific type of Bt corn — genetically modified to produce insecticides against corn rootworm — is being planted in places that don’t have a high risk of corn rootworms destroying corn crops. This overuse is causing corn rootworms to become resistant, or immune, to Bt insecticides. So Bt corn isn’t working as well now in Corn Belt states where corn rootworm is a serious risk, as rootworms are becoming increasingly pesticide resistant. Corn rootworm is one of the worst ...

A new concept of kinetic modules in biochemical networks could revolutionize the understanding of how these networks function. Scientists from the University of Potsdam and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm succeeded in linking the structure and dynamics of biochemical networks via kinetic modules, thus clarifying a systems biology question that has been open for longtime. Their groundbreaking findings were published today in the journal “Science Advances”. Biochemical networks are the central processing units of a cell that enable it to process signals and convert molecules into building blocks ...

HOUSTON – (May 28, 2025) – Some of the most promising materials for future technologies come in layers just one atom thick ⎯ graphene, e.g., a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, prized for its exceptional strength and conductivity. While hundreds of such materials exist, truly merging them into something new has remained a challenge. Most efforts simply stack these atom-thin sheets like a deck of cards, but the layers typically lack significant interaction between them. An international team of researchers led by Rice University ...

TORONTO, May 28, 2025 – Ahead of World No Tobacco Day on May 31, York University researchers with Global Strategy Lab (GSL) have published a paper that finds a lack of gender analysis in tobacco control research. The researchers say this means that we could be missing out on important strategies accounting for gendered behaviors that could help smokers quit. The paper, published today in BMJ Tobacco Control, is the first in a series of papers coming out of York University and GSL on gender and smoking.  “In the tobacco ...

Parkinson’s disease is best known for its effects on the central nervous system. In addition, recent scientific advances generally emphasize the role of the immune system in the presence and development of the disease. In a study published today in Brain, researchers led by Université de Montréal associate professor of neuroscience Martine Tétreault show that some cell types in the immune system are activated more in patients who have Parkinson’s. “Thanks to a new technology called single-cell RNA-seq, we can differentiate ...

Inflammatory bowel disease, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, has long been considered a modern condition of the industrialized West, with cases steadily increasing in North America and Europe throughout the 20th century. New research conducted by an international consortium shows that IBD and related conditions are now spreading through developing regions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well. The study, published in Nature, used data from more than 500 population-based studies covering more than 80 geographic regions to describe a pattern of four distinct stages IBD ...