Contact: Kate McAlpine, 734-647-7087, kmca@umich.edu  ANN ARBOR—A thousand times faster than conventional testing, an ion beam approach to qualifying materials for use in the cores of advanced nuclear reactors is advancing through stages of approval by the industry standards organization ASTM.  The methodology, developed with leadership by University of Michigan Engineering, will be presented at a special event hosted by the Electric Power Research Institute, March 10-11 in Charlotte, North ...

February 25, 2026 – SEATTLE, Wash. –  Over two decades, medical care improvements increased health spans in the U.S. by 1.3 years and medical spending by $234,000 per person over their lifetime – or about $182,000 per additional healthy year of life gained – when measured from birth. These are among the key findings in a new in-depth national study published today in Value in Health. Researchers examined how improvements in medical care changed health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) and lifetime health care spending by evaluating changes in 132 causes of disease across all ages between ...

The 2026 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference highlighted AI, both as a challenge and a solution. A case in point was the opening plenary session, which featured presentations on high performance memory and diversified manufacturing. The challenge of AI played a large role in the first talk. The existence of ultra large AI models with trillions of parameters, up from billions a few years ago, is improving AI capabilities. Those enormous models, though, pose a problem because they demand higher performing chips. At one time, the limitation was processing power, but that’s no longer the case. “The ...

The Care Bears taught a generation of kids that sharing is caring, but few carried this principle into adulthood. Researchers at Michigan State University have found a new angle to promote cooperation — artificial intelligence (AI). The results of this study are published in npj Complexity. “Cooperation is everywhere in nature,” said Christoph Adami, professor at Michigan State University and senior author on the study. “But the mathematics of how cooperation can persist is not easy to understand.” The project revolves around the concept of the “tragedy of the commons” ...

Irvine, Calif., Feb. 25, 2026 — University of California, Irvine computer scientists have discovered a critical security vulnerability in autonomous target-tracking drones that could have far-reaching implications for public safety, border security and personal privacy. The UC Irvine team demonstrated how attackers could use an ordinary umbrella to manipulate drones, drawing the aircraft close enough to capture them or cause them to crash. The researchers developed a novel physical-world attack framework that they call FlyTrap. It exploits deficiencies in camera-based, ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2026 MINNEAPOLIS — A new study of smokers finds that currently smoking is associated with a lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, but quitting smoking was associated with a lower risk of death. The study was published on February 25, 2026, in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that smoking prevents Parkinson’s; it only shows an association. “The severe ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2026 Highlights: A new study of former American football players looked at how a history of repetitive head impacts may be associated with cognitive and behavioral symptoms later in life. Researchers found higher levels of inflammation were associated with worse brain structure, which in turn was associated with poorer memory. The study does not prove cause and effect. It only shows associations. MINNEAPOLIS — In former college and professional football players, a new study has found higher levels of inflammation ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2026 Highlights: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare, progressive disease characterized by the degeneration of nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. The study does not show cause and effect; it only shows an association. A new study of half a million people compared early birds who are more productive in the morning to night owls who are more productive later in the day. It found being an early bird was associated with a 20% lower risk of ALS when compared to being a night owl. The study also looked at physical activity and found being more physically active was associated with a 26% lower ...

A new, daily oral tablet that combines two current HIV treatment medications, bictegravir and lenacapavir (BIC/LEN), may be able to effectively replace more complicated HIV treatment regimens used by people living with HIV who are long-term survivors, according to the results of a new phase 3 clinical trial published in The Lancet. The trial, which included more than 550 people living with HIV across 15 countries, showed that the new single-pill treatment was highly effective in maintaining HIV suppression (HIV virus levels below 50 copies/mL). Nearly 96% of participants who switched to this simplified regimen maintained ...

A phase 3 clinical trial, led by Professor Chloe Orkin of Queen Mary University of London, has shown that a new, daily oral tablet that combines two current HIV treatment medications – bictegravir and lenacapavir (BIC/LEN) – may simplify treatment significantly for people with HIV who currently take very complex treatments.   The findings were presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections 2026 in Denver, ...

Firearm homicide death rates have long been disproportionately higher for Black Americans compared to White Americans, and a new analysis across 45 years suggests that, in recent years, this disparity has grown. Alex Knorre of the University of South Florida, U.S., and John MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on February 25, 2026. An abundance of prior research has firmly established that Black Americans face long-standing social and economic inequalities, including the Black-White racial disparity in firearm ...

Flagging claims about cancer treatment on social media as potentially false might help reduce spreading of misinformation, per online experiment with 1,051 US adults Article URL: https://plos.io/4cccZdV Article title: Intervening and reducing sharing of false cancer treatments on social media: Online experiment Author countries: U.S. Funding: This work was supported by a UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center Developmental Award which is supported in part by P30 CA016086 Cancer Center Core Support Grant. ...

Even in the womb, where all oxygen is provided by the parental placenta, fetuses can—and do—yawn. More yawns during observation were associated with a lower weight at birth—potentially indicating mild fetal stress in the womb, according to a study published February 25, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Damiano Menin, of the Università degli Studi di Ferrara in Italy, and colleagues. Yawning is a behavior found across vertebrates—and no one quite knows why. In humans, ...

Conservation agriculture, including no-dig, crop-rotation and mulching methods, reduces water runoff and soil loss and boosts crop yield by as much as 122%, in Ethiopian trial Article URL: https://plos.io/4tvwcNF Article title: Conservation agriculture enhances soil and water conservation and crop yield in the Ethiopian highlands Author countries: Ethiopia Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Climate change has caused some tropical plants to flower earlier or later than they used to, in some cases by a matter of weeks or even months, according to a study of 8,000 flowers across more than two centuries, published February 25, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Skylar Graves and Erin Manzitto-Tripp of the University of Colorado-Boulder, U.S. Among the documented impacts of recent climate change are the shifting flowering times of some plant species. Such changes to plant reproductive behaviors can have wide-ranging ecological consequences, particularly for pollinators and ...

New research shows that, off the U.S. West Coast, humpback whales face a higher risk of getting entangled in fishing equipment during years with lower availability of cool-water habitat, where the whales feed. Jarrod Santora of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Climate on February 25th. Many kinds of fishing gear, such as gillnets and traps, can entangle whales, injuring or even killing them. Before 2014, annual reported entanglements off the U.S. West Coast were below 10, but reports have risen, with 31 reported in ...

Suitable habitat for migrating monarch butterflies will shift southwards because of climate change, according to a study publishing February 25th in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Francisco Botello and Carolina Ureta at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and colleagues. One of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring phenomena in nature is the mass migration of the brightly colored monarch butterfly. Each year, millions of monarchs travel thousands of kilometers from their breeding grounds in Canada and the U.S. to overwintering sites in central Mexico. Conservationists have raised concerns over dramatic declines in the number of migrating monarchs, ...

When removing cancerous tissue in the brain, neurosurgeons often use “awake brain mapping” to minimize the risk of causing unintended disruptions to a patient’s quality of life while removing as much tumor as possible. This practice, which has been used for decades, involves waking a patient up mid-surgery to test their neurocognitive functions in real time by stimulating the brain surface and assessing for functional changes. A new study soon to be published in the journal Science Advances details ...

Almost 1-in-3 American adolescents has diabetes or prediabetes, with waist-to-height ratio the strongest independent predictor of prediabetes/diabetes, reveals survey of 1,998 adolescents (10-19 years) from 2021-2023 Article URL: https://plos.io/3MEkobs Article title: Prevalence and predictors of prediabetes/type 2 diabetes mellitus among adolescents in the United States: NHANES (2021–2023) Author countries: U.S., Ghana. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Researchers have investigated the role of a certain enzyme in regulating energy in muscle and exercise performance for decades, but a new study by Virginia Tech scientists has identified more precisely than ever how this mechanism works. Scientists working at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC focused on a triggering event that leads to the activation AMPK, which is a master energy senso known as Adenosine Monophosphate-Activated Protein Kinase. It is a regulator of energy production in response to the tremendous energetic demands of exercise. The study, published Wednesday, Feb. 25, in Science Advances, confirmed role of AMPK phosphorylation ...

Many therapeutic molecules used in cancer treatments are highly toxic, often harming healthy tissues and causing significant side effects. This creates a critical need for strategies that localize their toxic activity to tumors. What if cancer drugs could stay dormant until they reach cancer cells? A new study by Syracuse University researchers demonstrates a promising chemistry-based strategy that could do just that. Xiaoran Hu, assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Arts & Sciences (A&S), and his team introduced a prototyping “lock-and-key” system that holds therapeutic drugs in an inactive, caged form until a separate chemical trigger ...

February 25, 2026--  Benzodiazepine treatment declined among U.S. adults between 2018 and 2022, with the steepest drop among adults ages 56 and older, according to a new study by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Despite the overall decrease, co-prescribing with other central nervous system (CNS) depressants — including opioids — remains common, particularly among adults in poor health or experiencing serious psychological distress. The ...

Dining on the moon or Mars might seem like a fantasy reserved for science fiction, but researchers are investigating how it could become a reality. Their efforts to recycle plant and human waste into a fertilizer material — turning the barren surfaces of the moon and Mars into fertile fields that might be suitable for extraterrestrial agriculture — are described in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry. “In lunar and Martian outposts, organic wastes will be key to generating ...

When artificial intelligence systems began acing long‑standing academic assessments, researchers realized they had a problem: the tests were too easy. Popular evaluations, such as the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) exam, once considered formidable, are no longer challenging enough to meaningfully test advanced AI systems. To address this gap, a global consortium of nearly 1,000 researchers, including a Texas A&M University professor, created something different — an exam so broad, so challenging and so deeply rooted in expert human knowledge that current AI systems consistently fail it. “Humanity’s Last Exam” (HLE) introduces ...

Quantum technologies are anticipated to transform computing, communication and sensing by harnessing the unusual behavior of matter at the atomic scale. Translating quantum’s promise into practical devices will require physical systems that have desirable quantum properties and can be easily manufactured. Silicon, the material behind today’s computer chips, is highly attractive as a platform because it plays to the strengths of the trillion-dollar semiconductor industry that has already been built. Identifying quantum building blocks — qubits —in silicon is, therefore, an important frontier research ...