Tiny pond worms could help find new ways to treat schizophrenia, develop understanding around drug addiction and test new medicines for mental illnesses – all while reducing the number of mice and rats used in early medical research.  Scientists from the University of Reading say that planaria - harmless flatworms found in ponds and rivers - react to brain medicines in ways similar to rodents. When given haloperidol, a drug used to treat mental health conditions, the worms became much less active, ...

In Ho Yong Chung’s laboratory, magic is at work — plants turn into plastics. In new research, Chung, an associate professor in the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, showed for the first time the possibility of using lignin, a material found in plant cell walls, and carbon dioxide to create a new kind of polyurethane, a polymer used in various applications for its ability to regulate heat, flexibility during processing and strength as a finished product. The work was published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. “We’ve ...

Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) announces leadership team appointments overseeing clinical and research efforts in theranostics, an innovative approach to radiation treatment for cancer that combines diagnostics and therapeutics.  Heloisa Soares, MD, PhD, Huntsman Cancer Institute medical oncologist and associate professor of internal medicine at the U, will serve as medical director of the theranostics program.  Theranostics is a powerful new way to both find and treat cancer. It uses radioactive drugs—called radiopharmaceuticals—that ...

Most people picture a doctor checking for a broken bone when they think of an X-ray. But the technology is just as important in places like airport security, manufacturing, quality control and scientific research, each with its own criteria for size and shape.  A team led by Florida State University Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Biwu Ma has developed a new form for X-ray materials that can meet the needs of large-area applications, changing out complex crystal structures for an adaptable and scalable thin-film detector. The work was published in Angewandte Chemie.  “We took a material we developed and made it better,” Ma said. “This ...

CHICAGO — August 14, 2025  — The 66th Supplement to the American Ornithological Society’s (AOS’s) Check-list of North American Birds, published today in Ornithology, includes several significant updates to the classification of bird species found in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean. A few highlights from the supplement, detailed below, include species splits for Myiarchus nuttingi, Vireo gilvus, and Larus argentatus; the addition of subfamilies in the Laridae for white-terns and noddies; and a merging of three families ...

Canadian-grown wheat, canola and peas have some of the lowest carbon footprints in the world—so low that, in some cases, they could be shipped to Europe 17 times before matching the emissions of the same crops grown there.  The study out of UBC Okanagan, published in Nature Food, compared the carbon footprints of these crops from Canada, France, Germany, Australia and the United States using the ISO 14067 standard.   Led by Dr. Nicole Bamber of UBCO’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, the research ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Origin-recognition complex, or ORC, plays an unexpectedly broad role in the regulation of human cell gene expression, according to a study in the journal Cell Reports. “This is the first detailed study of how and where ORC regulates epigenetics and gene expression in human cells,” said Anindya Dutta, Ph.D., leader of the study and chair of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Genetics. “The unanticipated scale and breadth of the regulation opens new chapters in ORC biology.” The six-subunit complex was discovered ...

The next time you breathe, consider this: photosynthesis of algae, powered by iron dust in the ocean, made it possible. Now, a new Rutgers University study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pulls back the curtain on this vital process. Iron is a critical micronutrient for marine phytoplankton, the microscopic algae that form the foundation of the ocean’s food webs. It is deposited into the world’s oceans as dust from deserts and arid areas as well as from glacial meltwater. “Every other breath you take includes oxygen from the ocean, ...

Scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, working in collaboration with a team from the University of Texas at El Paso, have developed a novel computational framework for understanding how a region of the brain known as the striatum is involved in the everyday decisions we make and, importantly, how it might factor into impaired decision-making by individuals with psychiatric disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder. In a study published in Nature Communications [10.1038/s41467-025-61466-x] on August 14, the team reported that modulating activity ...

Omega fatty acids are important to human health, including their role in metabolizing fats. Deviations in their position in a fatty acid chain can signal enzyme malfunctions or pathological metabolic processes, such as those occurring in cancer and autoimmune disorders. Now, researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Graz (Austria) have presented a new computational method to determine omega positions of lipids — the scientific term for fats — in complex biological samples including human tissues and blood. Until ...

Recent advancements in cancer research are shedding light on a novel therapeutic strategy aimed at overcoming the formidable challenge of cancer stem cells (CSCs). These unique cells are known for their remarkable ability to resist conventional therapies, leading to treatment failures and cancer recurrence. A promising new approach involves targeting ferroptosis, a regulated cell death process driven by iron accumulation and lipid peroxidation, which could significantly improve cancer treatment outcomes.   CSCs ...

Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere will change the way geomagnetic storms impact Earth, with potential implications for thousands of orbiting satellites, according to new research led by scientists at the US. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR). Geomagnetic storms, caused by massive eruptions of charged particles from the surface of the Sun that buffet Earth’s atmosphere, are a growing challenge for our technologically dependent society. The storms temporarily increase the density of the upper atmosphere and therefore the drag on satellites, ...

Researchers in Japan have genetically transferred a unique courtship behavior from one fruit fly species to another. By turning on a single gene in insulin-producing neurons, the team successfully made a species of fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) perform a gift-giving ritual it had never done before. The study, published in the journal Science, represents the first example of manipulating a single gene to create new neural connections and transfer behavior between species.   In nature, most male fruit flies court mates by rapidly vibrating their wings to create sound patterns or “courtship songs." However, Drosophila subobscura ...

A network analysis of more than 26,000 dogs and their health conditions helps reveal which diseases tend to go together, providing data that veterinarians and researchers can use to help treat the problems that dog man’s best friend face, according to a study published DATE in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology by Antoinette Fang from the Fred Hutchingson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, USA, and colleagues. As both humans and their pups age, conditions and diseases accumulate, but some are more likely to be comorbid—or occur together—than ...

While biofuels may be part of the solution to replace fossil fuels and reduce climate-warming carbon emissions, bioenergy needs a new “climate-smart” policy to ensure that it produces both low-carbon products and promotes carbon sequestration, according to Madhu Khanna and colleagues. In this Policy Forum, Khanna et al. note that current policies to promote bioenergy in the United States, such as the Renewable Fuel Standard and Low Carbon Fuel Standard, do not distinguish between carbon intensities ...

Brian Spears and colleagues built a generative machine learning model that was used to successfully predict the outcome of a recent fusion ignition experiment at the U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF). Their model predicted, with a probability greater than 70%, that ignition was the most likely outcome of the experiment. The findings could guide researchers working on future inertial confinement fusion experiments, which use energetic lasers to compress and heat a capsule of hydrogen isotopes to create nuclear reactions that produce fusion energy. Ignition ...

The first weeks outside the womb are a massive learning experience for the neonatal immune system, especially in the gut as it learns to distinguish helpful from harmful antigens. In mice, maternal antibodies ingested in breast milk in the first week after birth help to regulate immune responses in the newborn gut, according to a new study by Meera Shenoy and colleagues. This process builds the important partnership between the microbiome and host at an early stage, paving the way for nutrient assimilation, avoiding inappropriate inflammation and resistance against pathogens. ...

A careful experiment by Dongsheng Guo and colleagues reveals that maize in a densely planted plot can communicate with neighboring plants through the release of the volatile gas linalool, triggering the roots of its neighbors to release compounds that can change the bacterial composition of the soil. This plant-soil communication helps the plants defend against the increased risk of pests and predation found in high-density plantings, Guo et al. conclude. The findings could aid agricultural researchers looking for ways to sustainably optimize crop yield through different planting patterns and possibly through targeting linalool production. ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A team of agricultural economists, environmental scientists and policy experts envisions a path toward a carbon-neutral agricultural future by expanding the reach of policies designed to promote low-carbon biofuels for transportation and aviation. In a new paper in the journal Science, the researchers propose policies that would reward farmers for adopting “climate-smart” practices when growing biofuel crops and remove the hurdles that currently thwart such efforts. Climate-smart practices include techniques that build soil carbon, like cover-cropping, not tilling fields after harvest and adding biochar ...

University of Oregon bioengineer Calin Plesa has developed technology that creates massive, high-quality biological datasets at unprecedented speed and scale, solving a critical bottleneck that has prevented AI from tackling biology's biggest challenges—from studying cancer-associated genes to designing new proteins to accelerating drug development. In research detailed in the latest edition of Science Advances, Plesa used this technology to uncover genetic factors behind antimicrobial resistance, demonstrating how to generate the vast datasets needed to train powerful machine learning systems faster and cheaper than ever before.   END ...

Images available via the multimedia section. Chemists have demonstrated the synthesis of a new molecular form of carbon. The new molecule – cyclo[48]carbon, made up of 48 carbon atoms in an alternating single/triple bond pattern – is stable enough to be studied in liquid solution form at room temperature. The study – only the second example of a new type of molecular carbon allotrope that can be studied under normal laboratory conditions – has been published today (14 August) in Science. In a new study led by Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, chemists have demonstrated the synthesis ...

Roughly two-thirds of all emissions of atmospheric methane — a highly potent greenhouse gas that is warming planet Earth — come from microbes that live in oxygen-free environments like wetlands, rice fields, landfills and the guts of cows. Tracking atmospheric methane to its specific sources and quantifying their importance remains a challenge, however. Scientists are pretty good at tracing the sources of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, to focus on mitigating these emissions. But to trace methane’s origins, scientists often have to measure the isotopic composition of methane's component atoms, carbon and hydrogen, to ...

Guideline Highlights: Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. have high blood pressure (≥130/80 mm Hg), which is the #1 preventable risk factor for cardiovascular disease, including heart attack, stroke and heart failure, as well as kidney disease, cognitive decline and dementia. A new joint guideline from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology advises earlier treatment that includes lifestyle modification and medications as appropriate, recommends close blood pressure ...

"Every Brilliant Thing”, the interactive one-person play with a suicidality theme now making its West End debut, reduced suicide-associated stigma among university students who attended, even up to 30 days later. +++ Article URL: https://plos.io/411ECQu Article Title: A performing arts intervention to decrease suicide stigma on campus: A three time point assessment of “Every Brilliant Thing” Author Countries: United States Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this ...

A new CU Boulder-led study has revealed that recent changes in North Pacific Ocean temperatures—long believed to be the result of natural variability—are in fact being driven by human-generated greenhouse gas and industrial aerosol emissions. These oceanic shifts are directly linked to the prolonged megadrought gripping the American Southwest, and this research published August 13th in Nature suggests it may not ease for another 30 years. “Our results show that the drought and ocean patterns we’re seeing today are not just natural fluctuations—they’re largely driven by human activity,” ...