Chinese scientists have found a way to make flexible tandem solar cells more efficient and durable by enhancing the adhesion of top layers to the bottom layers of the cell. Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) is a commercial semiconductor known for its outstanding adjustable bandgap, strong light absorption, low-temperature sensitivity, and superior operational stability, making it a promising candidate for bottom-cell use in next-generation tandem solar cells. Flexible perovskite/CIGS tandem solar cell combines a top layer of perovskite—a material that efficiently converts sunlight into electricity—with ...

An international research team led by Mayukh Kumar Ray, Mingxuan Fu, and Satoru Nakatsuji from the University of Tokyo, along with Collin Broholm from Johns Hopkins University, has discovered the anomalous Hall effect in a collinear antiferromagnet. More strikingly, the anomalous Hall effect emerges from a non-Fermi liquid state, in which electrons do not interact according to conventional models. The discovery not only challenges the textbook framework for interpreting the anomalous Hall effect but also widens the range of antiferromagnets ...

The use of generative AI for diagnostics has attracted attention in the medical field and many research papers have been published on this topic. However, because the evaluation criteria were different for each study, a comprehensive analysis was needed to determine the extent AI could be used in actual medical settings and what advantages it featured in comparison to doctors. A research group led by Dr. Hirotaka Takita and Associate Professor Daiju Ueda at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Medicine conducted a meta-analysis of generative AI’s diagnostic capabilities using 83 research papers published between June ...

Bottom Line: A subset of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who discontinued immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy due to immune-related adverse events (irAEs) continued to experience long-term disease control. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Authors: Senior author Mark Awad, MD, PhD, chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and first author Federica Pecci, MD, a research fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Background: Immune ...

In 1638, an earthquake in what is now New Hampshire had Plymouth, Massachusetts colonists stumbling from the strong shaking and water sloshing out of the pots used by Native Americans to cook a midday meal along the St. Lawrence River, according to contemporaneous reports. When Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, talked with local Native Americans, he reported that the younger tribe members were surprised by the earthquake. But older tribe members said they had felt similar shaking four times in the past 80 years. In his talk at the Seismological ...

Sediment cores drawn from four lakes in Guatemala record the distinct direction that ground shaking traveled during a 1976 magnitude 7.5 earthquake that devastated the country, according to researchers at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting. The earthquake, which killed more than 23,000 people and left about 1.5 million people homeless, took place along the Motagua Fault, at the boundary between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plate boundary. Severe ground shaking from the 1976 earthquake caused landslides ...

At the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting, researchers posed a seemingly simple question: how wide are faults? Using data compiled from single earthquakes across the world, Christie Rowe of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno and Alex Hatem of the U.S. Geological Survey sought a more comprehensive answer, one that considers both surface and deep traces of seismic rupture and creep. By compiling observations of recent earthquakes, Rowe and Hatem conclude that from Turkey to California, it’s not just a ...

Our immune systems weaken as we get older, making fewer cells that fight infection and help us recover from illness and injury. Scientists aren’t completely sure why. They may have a better idea now, however, thanks to a new study in GeroScience. “Immune cell changes occur during aging for a number of reasons, but we still don’t completely understand why we have fewer antibody-producing cells with age,” said Leslie Crews, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, co-leader of the Hematologic Malignancies Research ...

Smokers and people who recently quit are more likely to face complications after having an operation than non-smokers, a new study reveals.   Experts say there is an urgent need for focussed action to encourage people to stop smoking before undergoing elective surgery, after the pan-European research revealed that 19.5% of elective surgery patients are current smokers.   Backed by National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funding, researchers discovered higher smoking rates among younger patients (18-40 years: 26.8%) and male patients (22.1%). Healthy adults without long-term conditions also exhibited ...

*Note – this is an early press release from the European Congress on Obesity in Malaga, Spain, 11-14 May. Please credit the congress when using this research.* New research to be presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2025, Malaga, Spain, 11-14 May) shows that women are much more aware of knowledgeable about the obesity drugs GLP-1/GIP receptor agonists (that include semaglutide and tirzepatide). The study is by Nadja Auerbach, Voy*, London, UK and Dr Austen El-Osta, Director of the Self-Care Academic Research Unit (SCARU) at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues.  Multiple ...

Research published in the Journal of Neurochemistry has detailed the role of a protein, hnRNP A1, in the formation and stability of myelin, suggesting an important impact on neurodegenerative diseases and mental disorders such as multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia. The findings pave the way for new research and potential treatments. Myelin is a fatty substance produced by oligodendrocytes (cells of the central nervous system) that forms a sheath, like a kind of “insulator.” It “protects” the extensions of neurons (axons) and increases the conduction speed of nerve impulses that carry information ...

New York, NY | April 17, 2025 - In an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, a team led by researchers from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) say public ignorance and apathy towards bird flu (highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI) could pose a serious obstacle to containing the virus and preventing a larger-scale public health crisis. The authors, including CUNY SPH Assistant Professor Rachael Piltch-Loeb, Associate Professor Katarzyna Wyka, ...

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health contributed to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report examining autism among children who turned 4 and 8 years old in 2022. The CDC report, which includes data from 16 study sites across the U.S. including Maryland, found an overall prevalence of autism of 1 in 31 (3.2%) among 8-year-olds in 2022. The Maryland study site, led by researchers at Bloomberg School’s Wendy Klag Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities, found a prevalence of 1 in 38 (2.6%) ...

New research suggests that calming the brain’s immune cells might prevent or lessen the damaging inflammation seen in Alzheimer’s disease. The study points to the key role of the hormone and neurotransmitter norepinephrine, and this new understanding could pave the way for more focused treatments that start earlier and are tailored to the needs of each person. “Norepinephrine is a major signaling factor in the brain and affects almost every cell type. In the context of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, it ...

Laurie Manjikian has been promoted to vice president of rehabilitation services and outpatient operations at Hebrew SeniorLife. In her new position, she will provide operational oversight of home and community-based services and outpatient therapy clinics, as well as manage inpatient rehabilitative services and staff.  “With over 20 years of experience at Hebrew SeniorLife, Manjikian has been an exceptional leader and will bring deep expertise to her new role with the home- and community-based services team,” said Ernest I. Mandel, MD, SM, executive vice president of health care, chief medical ...

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Small organisms can have a big impact. That’s why researchers explored nearly a dozen nontraditional yeast strains to find out which ones could brew the best nonalcoholic beers for a rapidly growing market. The Center for Beverage Innovation and Lafontaine Lab — including researchers with the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas and the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station — evaluated 11 commercially available yeasts to identify their strengths based ...

A study by the Stanford Prevention Policy Modeling Lab (PPML) finds that almost 30% of privately insured individuals in the United States, or nearly 40 million people, use at least one of the free preventive health services guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But those services are now under threat by an ongoing legal challenge. On April 21, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management Inc. to decide whether to uphold the ruling from a Texas district court that the ACA preventive services mandate was unconstitutional. The ACA requires that private insurers cover specific preventive services at no cost to ...

How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? We wanted to study any changes in firearm incidents—both hunting-related and non-hunting-related—brought on by deer hunting season. We looked at four years’ worth of data across 10 states where hunting is popular. We found an unsurprising increase in hunting-related firearm incidents, but we also saw increases in the rates of non-hunting related firearm incidents, including those categorized as suicide, involving alcohol or other substances, domestic violence, home invasion or robberies, and defensive use; meanwhile, there were no changes in incidents involving police officers or children. What ...

HOUSTON – (April 17, 2025) – A team of Rice University researchers has developed a new way to control light interactions using a specially engineered structure called a 3D photonic-crystal cavity. Their work, published in the journal Nature Communications, lays the foundation for technologies that could enable transformative advancements in quantum computing, quantum communication and other quantum-based technologies. “Imagine standing in a room surrounded by mirrors,” said Fuyang Tay, an alumnus of Rice’s Applied Physics Graduate Program and first author of the study. “If you shine a flashlight inside, the light will bounce back and ...

A study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital provides solutions to the pressing need to identify factors that influence Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk or resistance while providing an avenue to explore potential biological markers and therapeutic targets. The researchers integrated computational and functional approaches that enabled them to identify not only specific genes whose alterations predicted increased AD risk in humans and behavioral impairments in AD fruit ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new smart insole system that monitors how people walk in real time could help users improve posture and provide early warnings for conditions from plantar fasciitis to Parkinson’s disease. Constructed using 22 small pressure sensors and fueled by small solar panels on the tops of shoes, the system offers real-time health tracking based on how a person walks, a biomechanical process that is as unique as a human fingerprint.  This complex personal health data can then be transmitted via Bluetooth to a smartphone for quick and detailed analysis, said Jinghua Li, co-author of the study and an assistant ...

Brazil is the world’s largest producer of soybeans and one of the reasons is the incorporation of bio-inputs, microorganisms that promote biological nitrogen fixation. Without this practice, this essential nutrient would have to be supplemented with fertilizer. By managing fertilizer use, Brazilian growers can save an estimated USD 15 billion per year. The main bio-input used commercially today is bacteria of the genus Bradyrhizobium spp. (rhizobia). In a study supported by FAPESP, this strategy was combined with a new bacterial isolate (PGPR, which stands for plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria). The results were published in the journal Microbiology ...

At the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies’ 15th annual Undergraduate Design Competition, the future of global health innovation was on full display. Rice University welcomed 22 student teams from 18 universities across eight countries, both in-person and virtually, to present affordable, practical solutions designed to improve health care in low-resource settings at the April 11 event. Far from just another student competition, the event serves as a global stage where future ...

In a physics first, a team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created a way to make beams of neutrons travel in curves. These Airy beams (named for English scientist George Airy), which the team created using a custom-built device, could enhance neutrons’ ability to reveal useful information about materials ranging from pharmaceuticals to perfumes to pesticides — in part because the beams can bend around obstacles.  A paper announcing the findings appears in today’s issue of Physical Review Letters. ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Two women meeting for the first time can judge within minutes whether they have the potential to be friends — guided as much by smell as any other sense, new Cornell University research on friendship formation finds. “The Interactive Role of Odor Associations in Friendship Preferences,” published in Scientific Reports, adds to our understanding of the complex picture of what goes on when meeting someone for the first time — and judging the potential for future interactions. In a study of heterosexual women, the researchers found that personal, idiosyncratic preferences based on a person’s everyday scent, captured on ...