In her 1962 book, Silent Spring, American biologist Rachel Carson revealed that DDT, a widely used pesticide at the time, was responsible for the mass death of birds, including the iconic bald eagle.  One reason was that the pesticide made eggshells thinner, causing mothers to break them when sitting on them to incubate. Silent Spring is considered the founding work of the modern environmental movement. Most rich countries had banned DDT by the 1970s. In Brazil, the agricultural ban did not take effect until 1985; however, the poison was still permitted for controlling disease vectors, such as Aedes aegypti. In 2009, a law prohibiting ...

Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the churn of its liquid nickel-iron outer core, but it is not a constant feature. Every so often, the magnetic north and south poles swap places in what are called geomagnetic reversals, and the record of these flips is preserved in rocks and sediments, including those from the ocean floor. These reversals don’t happen suddenly, but over several thousand years, where the magnetic field fades and wobbles while the two poles wander and finally settle in the opposite positions of the globe. Over the past 170 million years, the magnetic poles have reversed 540 times, with the reversal ...

More than 60% of American women prefer to get their cervical cancer screening in a clinic versus at home with a self-sampling kit, study finds Black women are less likely to prefer at-home cervical cancer screening In May, the FDA approved the first home-based self-sampling device for cervical cancer screening HOUSTON, FEBRUARY 6, 2026 – American women now have the option of screening for cervical cancer at home, using newly approved self-collection tools. While experts hope this will increase uptake in the under-screened population, a first-of-its kind study by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found the majority (60.8%) still prefer ...

HOUSTON – (Feb. 6, 2026) – Rice University bioengineer Antonios Mikos is part of a team of researchers led by the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine awarded up to $24.8 million over five years to help address the nation’s growing organ donor shortage by bioprinting on-demand kidney tissues. The new funding, from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), will enable the team to produce bioprinted, vascularized kidney tissue that augments renal function in patients suffering from kidney ...

In recent years, cancer researchers have made major breakthroughs by using the body’s immune system to fight cancer. One of the most promising approaches, known as immune checkpoint blockade, works by releasing molecular “brakes” on T cells. This allows them to better recognize and attack cancer cells. While these therapies can be very effective for some patients, many solid tumors, including most forms of breast cancer, remain largely unaffected. Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) Program Co-leader Erik Nelson and his research group are working to understand why these treatments ...

Around 14 hours before a partial solar eclipse passed over the Dolomites in Northern Italy, a group of spruce trees showed a sudden, synchronized increase in electrical activity. A widely publicized paper by Chiolerio et al. claimed that the trees were anticipating and preparing for the impending solar eclipse. In an opinion paper publishing February 6 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Plant Science, researchers debunked this claim by examining the evidence and offering a simpler explanation: a local thunderstorm coincided with the trees’ increased electrical activity, during which a cluster of lightning strikes struck near the study site. “To ...

Boston, MA— A new study led by the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute evaluates the impact of a voluntary code intended to improve ethical recruitment of physicians from World Health Organization-designated shortage countries. While the Code initially reduced physician migration from these countries, the research finds it did not improve their physician supply, highlighting the need for broader investments to strengthen global health systems. The study is published on February 6 in JAMA Health Forum. Global health care workforce shortages are intensified when physicians from lower-to-middle income countries (LMICs) migrate to high-income ...

“The concept of time has troubled philosophers and physicists for thousands of years, and the advent of quantum mechanics has not simplified the problem,” says Professor Hugo Dil, a physicist at EPFL. “The central problem is the general role of time in quantum mechanics, and especially the timescale associated with a quantum transition.” Quantum events, like tunnelling, or an electron changing its state by absorbing a photon, happen at mind‑bending speeds. Some take only a few tens of attoseconds (10-18 seconds), ...

Tungsten carbide–cobalt (WC–Co) is prized for its hardness, but that same property makes it unusually difficult to shape. The current process is wasteful and expensive for the yield produced, and an economically sensible method for creating these materials is long overdue. WC-Co cemented carbides are important in fields that require high wear resistance and hardness, such as cutting and construction tools. Currently, these carbides are made using powder metallurgy, utilizing high pressure and sintering machines to combine the WC and Co powders to yield a manufactured cemented carbide. Though this method does produce highly durable and hard final products, a lot of expensive ...

Iron-based molecular sieves show great promise for high-temperature NH3-SCR due to their intrinsic shape selectivity and thermal stability. However, excessive ammonia oxidation at high temperatures limits NOx conversion and long-term stability, and its kinetic transition remains poorly understood. A team led by Zhiqiang Sun, Hanzi Liu, and Xinlin Xie has developed a high-temperature Fe@ZSM-5 catalyst and established a coupled kinetic model to describe ammonia oxidation behavior at high temperatures. Their work is published in the journal Industrial Chemistry & Materials on December 2025. The authors synthesized HZSM-5 zeolites via ...

  WUHAN, CHINA — A research team from the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO) and the School of Optical and Electronic Information at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) has reported a new advancement in all-perovskite tandem solar cells. By utilizing quantitative Silvaco TCAD simulations, the team has elucidated the fundamental physics of the tunnel junction, providing a definitive design rule to overcome efficiency bottlenecks in all-perovskite tandem solar cells.   The Bottleneck: Unbalanced Charge Tunneling All-perovskite tandem solar cells are a high-potential technology ...

Fukuoka, Japan—Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, marked by the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells. What makes it more dangerous is the ability of cancer cells to move quickly through the body, allowing them to invade surrounding tissues. While this behavior is well known, the mechanism behind this rapid spread remains unclear. Researchers from Kyushu University set out to fill this gap and unveiled a new physical process that helps cancer cells move rapidly throughout the body. This study was led by Professor Junichi Ikenouchi from Kyushu University’s Faculty of Medical Sciences, along with his colleagues at Kyushu University, in collaboration with ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study in mice hints at the potential to use tiny particles made with RNA molecules to deliver chemotherapy drugs and other therapies directly to tumors, killing cancer cells without generating an immune response or toxicity-related side effects. Researchers constructed tiny molecular clusters called RNA micelles, loaded them with potent chemo drugs and an RNA molecule that blocks cancer survival, and placed a tumor targeting molecule on their outer wall that attaches to receptors on cancer cell surfaces to enhance delivery. Treatment with these RNA micelles almost ...

Materials scientists have long sought to enhance the durability of thermal/environmental barrier coatings (T/EBCs) under extreme conditions, particularly against corrosion caused by calcium‑magnesium‑alumino‑silicate (CMAS) melts. Understanding the corrosion mechanisms and accurately predicting the long‑term service life of coating materials remain critical challenges for aerospace and energy applications.   Recently, a research team from Harbin Institute of Technology and Shanghai University achieved a significant breakthrough. They designed two novel high‑entropy rare‑earth disilicates—(Er1/4Y1/4Lu1/4Yb1/4)2Si2O7 and ...

Invisible light beyond the range of human vision plays a vital role in communication technologies, medical diagnostics, and optical sensing. Ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths are routinely used in these fields, yet detecting them directly often requires complex instrumentation. Developing materials that can convert invisible light into visible signals could serve as essential components for measurement technologies and sensors, and play a major role in understanding the fundamental photophysical processes. However, developing those materials remains a key challenge in ...

Earth’s surface is covered by more than a dozen tectonic plates, and in subduction zones around the world—including the Japanese Islands—plates converge and dense oceanic plates sink into the Earth’s interior. These regions, especially plate boundaries, are known for frequent seismic activity. In recent years, scientists have increasingly emphasized that water plays a crucial role in earthquake phenomena in subduction zones, and thus conducted active research to investigate the influence of water on various processes occurring within earthquake source regions. When water is supplied, peridotite—the primary constituent of ...

Early in the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” Dustin Hoffman, playing the character of Ratso Rizzo, crosses a Manhattan street and angrily bangs on the hood of an encroaching taxi. Hoffman’s line — “I’m walking here!” — has since been repeated by thousands of New Yorkers. Where cars and people mix, tensions rise.  And yet, governments and planners across the U.S. haven’t thoroughly tracked where it is that cars and people mix. Officials have long measured vehicle traffic closely while largely ignoring pedestrian traffic. Now, an MIT research group has assembled a routable dataset of sidewalks, ...

An AI-powered model developed at University of Michigan can read a brain MRI and diagnose a person in seconds, a study suggests. The model detected neurological conditions with up to 97.5% accuracy and predicted how urgently a patient required treatment. Researchers say the first-of-its-kind technology could transform neuroimaging at health systems across the United States. The results are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. “As the global demand for MRI rises and places significant strain our physicians and health systems, our AI model has potential to reduce burden by improving diagnosis and treatment with fast, accurate ...

Researchers from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with international partners, have engineered a thin two-dimensional perovskite phase at the buried interface of three-dimensional (3D) perovskite solar cells (PSCs) to boost device performance and operational stability. The method, published in Nature Energy on February 6, improves the crystallization quality of perovskite films and reduces defect concentrations at the buried interfaces by more than 90 percent (a tenfold ...

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have uncovered a strategy that triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) cells use to boost their ability to metastasize, or spread to other organs. Metastasis is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths and scientists are investigating ways to prevent it. These findings, published in Nature Communications, highlight new possibilities for developing clinical interventions to treat metastatic TNBC patients for whom there are no specific therapies. “Metastasis occurs ...

A recent study, led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA and using modelling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The work, published in Nature Astronomy, provides new insights into how complex organic molecules and carbon are processed in some of the most extreme environments in the Universe. The study focuses on IRAS 07251–0248, ...

The Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), in partnership with the scientific publisher Pensoft Publishers and famous science YouTuber Ze Frank, have let the Internet name a newly discovered deep-sea chiton (a type of marine mollusk). The formal description of the species was published today in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal. From over 8,000 name suggestions submitted via social media, the research team responsible for describing the species selected the name Ferreiraella populi. The specific epithet populi is a Latin singular noun in the genitive case meaning “of the people”. Curiously, the name was independently suggested by 11 different contributors ...

February 6, 2026 -- A UT San Antonio-led international research team has identified chitin, the primary organic component of modern crab shells and insect exoskeletons, in trilobite fossils more than 500 million years old, marking the first confirmed detection of the molecule in this extinct group. The findings, led by Elizabeth Bailey, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at UT San Antonio, offer new insight into fossil preservation and Earth’s long-term carbon cycle. Chitin is one of the most abundant organic polymers produced by life on Earth, second only to ...

A research team from the Department of Psychiatry at Tohoku University, led by Dr. Zhiqian Yu and Professor Hiroaki Tomita, has uncovered compelling evidence that maternal perinatal depression - psychological distress occurring during pregnancy or postpartum - elevates the risk of autistic-related traits in toddlers, with a particularly strong impact on girls. Their findings are derived from a large-scale Japanese cohort of over 23,000 mother-child pairs (the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project Birth and Three-Generation Cohort Study) and supported by mouse ...

MIAMI, FLORIDA (Feb. 5, 2026) – Overcoming tumor resistance to chemotherapy drugs has long been a challenge for oncology clinicians and researchers. Now, a new study suggests that blocking a key protein, p300, may force damaged cancer cells into a state of uncontrolled transcriptional activity, thereby creating a novel form of cellular stress that can make even chemo-resistant tumors sensitive again to treatment. The study was led by researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of ...