Newly sequenced ancient genomes from Yunnan, China, have shed new light on human prehistory in East Asia. In a study published in Science, a research team led by Prof. FU Qiaomei at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed data from 127 ancient humans, dating from 7,100 to 1,400 years ago. The results show that this region is pivotal to understanding the origin of both Tibetan and Austroasiatic (i.e., ethnic groups with a shared language group in South and Southeast Asia) population groups. The team found that a 7,100-year-old individual from Yunnan was as genetically distinct from most present-day ...

In brief: Even if the rise in global temperatures were to stabilise at its current level, it is projected that the world would lose around 40 per cent of its glaciers. If global warming can be limited to +1.5 °C, it may be possible to preserve twice as much glacier ice as in a scenario where temperatures rise by +2.7 °C. This conclusion was reached by a research team with participation of ETH Zurich researchers, based on a new, multi-centennial analysis of global glacier evolution. The findings, published today in the prestigious journal, Science, are striking. Even ...

Scientists at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland have developed a powerful new tool for finding the next generation of materials needed for large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing. The significant breakthrough means that, for the first time, researchers have found a way to determine once and for all whether a material can effectively be used in certain quantum computing microchips. The major findings have been published today in the academic journal Science and are the result of a large international collaboration which includes leading theoretical work from Prof. Dung-Hai Lee in University of California, Berkeley, and material synthesis from professors Sheng Ran and Johnpierre ...

Spring in the Arctic brings forth a plethora of peeps and downy hatchlings as millions of birds gather to raise their young. The same was true 73 million years ago, according to a paper featured on the cover of this week’s edition of the journal Science. The paper documents the earliest-known example of birds nesting in the polar regions. “Birds have existed for 150 million years,” said lead author Lauren Wilson, a doctoral student at Princeton University who earned her master’s degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “For half of the time they have existed, ...

Scientists at the Institut Pasteur and McMaster University have discovered that the evolution of a gene in the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, may have prolonged the duration of two major pandemics. They have demonstrated that modifying the copy number of a specific virulence gene increases the length of infection in affected individuals. It is thought that this genetic change may prompt longer periods of contagiousness in less densely populated environments, in which the time of transmission from one individual to another is inevitably longer. This genetic variation has been observed in strains of each of the two major plague pandemics, ...

Long considered a disease brought to the Americas by European colonizers, leprosy may actually have a much older history on the American continent. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur, the CNRS, and the University of Colorado (USA), in collaboration with various institutions in America and Europe, reveal that a recently identified second species of bacteria responsible for leprosy, Mycobacterium lepromatosis, has been infecting humans in the Americas for at least 1,000 years, several centuries before the Europeans arrived. These findings will be published in the journal Science on May 29, 2025. Leprosy is a neglected disease, ...

Leprosy has been present in the Americas for more than 1,000 years, long before the arrival of European settlers, according to a groundbreaking new finding published this week in the journal Science. The major international study was co-led by scientists at Colorado State University and the Institut Pasteur in France, in collaboration with Indigenous communities and more than 40 scientists from institutions across the Americas and Europe. The study reframes the history of leprosy in the Americas and has implications for better understanding how infectious diseases spread, persist and evolve in human and animal populations over time. “This ...

An international study has found that Earth’s glaciers will lose 76% of their 2020 mass under current climate policy pledges made by nations. Those pledges would lead to a global mean temperature 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels.  Consequences of the glacier mass loss include a 9-inch sea level rise, changes in biodiversity and increased natural hazards, the research finds. Alaska, one of 19 glacier regions designated by the international team, would lose 69% of its glacier mass. Of those regions, which don’t include the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, Alaska has the third-highest glacier mass today, at 16,246 gigatons. ...

Innovative Rehabilitation System Boosts Traditional Hand Recovery Methods In a significant advancement for hand rehabilitation, researchers from Zhengzhou University have introduced a non-hand-worn, load-free VR hand rehabilitation system that could boost therapy development for patients recovering from conditions like stroke and osteoarthritis. The system, developed by a team led by Yanchao Mao, integrates deep learning with ionic hydrogel electrodes to recognize hand gestures based on electromyographic (EMG) signals. The ...

Organisms in nature have developed distinctive morphologies, structures, components, behaviors, and functions to thrive in intricate natural environments. This inspiration from nature has influenced the design concepts, fabrication techniques, and applications of various artificial systems. Generally, nature-inspired design can be divided into five categories: morphology, structure, behavior, function, and their combination. Smart biomimetic design is very helpful and significant to explore new propulsion modes, superior functions and novel mechanisms for the smart construction of artificial micro/nanomotors with intelligence. The unique characteristics enable the nature-inspired ...

May 29, 2025 — A "fine-tuned" artificial intelligence (AI) tool shows promise for objective evaluation of patients with facial palsy, reports an experimental study in the June issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "We believe that our research offers valuable insights into the realm of facial palsy evaluation ...

A virus responsible for damaging cotton crops across the southern United States has been lurking in U.S. fields for nearly 20 years – undetected. According to new research, cotton leafroll dwarf virus (CLRDV), long believed to be a recent arrival, was infecting plants in cotton-growing states as early as 2006. The findings, published in Plant Disease by USDA Agricultural Research Service researchers and cooperators at Cornell University, challenge long-standing assumptions about when and how the virus emerged in U.S. cotton. They also demonstrate how modern data-mining tools can uncover hidden threats in samples collected ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Being cut off in traffic, giving a presentation or missing a meal can all trigger a suite of physiological changes that allows the body to react swiftly to stress or starvation. Critical to this “fight-or-flight” or stress response is a molecular cycle that results in the activation of Protein Kinase A (PKA), a protein involved in everything from metabolism to memory formation. Now, a study by researchers at Penn State has revealed how this cycle resets between stressful events so the body is prepared ...

LA JOLLA (May 28, 2025)—Cannabis has been a globally important crop for millennia. While best known today as marijuana for its psychoactive cannabinoid THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), historically, cannabis has been a cornerstone of human civilization, providing seed oil, textiles, and food for more than 10,000 years. Today, cannabis remains an understudied and underutilized resource, but United States legislation passed in 2014 and 2018 have re-energized cannabis crop development for medicinal, grain, and fiber applications. Researchers from the Salk Institute have created the most comprehensive, high-quality, and detailed genetic atlas of cannabis to date. The team analyzed ...

Researchers from University of South China, Tsinghua University and Technical University of Munich have developed a whole system uncertainty model and an Intelligent optimized power control system of the space nuclear reactor with faster response, higher control accuracy and stronger adaptability under uncertainty conditions. These research results provide new ideas and solutions for improving the intelligence level and autonomous control capability of advanced nuclear energy systems in complex ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon State University scientists have improved artificial intelligence’s ability to identify wildlife species in photos taken by motion-activated cameras. Their study, which introduces a less-is-more approach to the data on which an AI model is trained, opens the door to wildlife image analysis that’s more accurate and also more cost effective. Motion-activated cameras are an important wildlife monitoring tool, but reviewing thousands of images manually can be prohibitively time consuming, and current AI models are at times too inaccurate to be useful for scientists and wildlife managers. “One ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Reducing travel speeds and using an intelligent queuing system at busy ports can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from oceangoing container vessels by 16-24%, according to researchers at UC Santa Barbara. Not only would those relatively simple interventions reduce emissions from a major (?), direct source of greenhouse gases, the technology to implement these measures already exists. “Arguably the most impactful thing we can do to slow climate change is to cut CO2 emissions,” said Rachel Rhodes, a project scientist at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, and lead author of a paper that appears in the journal Marine ...

A relatively new therapy used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension in those with mild to moderate disease was found to be effective at preventing death in those with more advanced disease. Results were published on Wednesday, May 28,  in The New England Journal of Medicine and could have “transformative implications” for patients, according to an editorial that accompanied the study written by Bradley Maron, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Hypertension Program at the University ...

A dysfunction in muscle blood vessels could be to blame for the weak muscles and weight loss that most cancer patients experience, according to a new study from University of Illinois Chicago researchers. The discovery may help cancer survivors regain their muscle strength, which could contribute to better outcomes for these patients, said Dr. Jalees Rehman, senior author of the new paper and the Benjamin J. Goldberg Professor and head of the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the College of Medicine. Up to 80% of patients with cancer experience muscle ...

Earthquakes create ripple effects in Earth's upper atmosphere that can disrupt satellite communications and navigation systems we rely on. Nagoya University scientists and their collaborators have used Japan's extensive network of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers to create the first 3D images of atmospheric disturbances caused by the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake. Their results show sound wave disturbance patterns in unique 3D detail and provide new insights into how earthquakes generate these waves. The results were published in the journal Earth, Planets and Space. Mapping electron density ...

A new deep learning-based approach has been developed to overcome one of the critical limitations in fluorescence microscopy: severe image degradation caused by noise in dynamic in vivo imaging environments. The technique, recently published in PhotoniX (May 23, 2025), introduces a self-supervised denoising network—TeD (Temporal-gradient empowered Denoising)—that improves image quality without requiring clean reference images, representing a breakthrough for applications involving rapid biological ...

More than three decades ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) as the first immunotherapy against cancer. And it is still used today to treat early-stage bladder cancer. Now, a team of researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Weill Cornell Medicine is expanding the understanding of how the treatment works — an understanding that could help improve the effectiveness of immunotherapies more broadly. BCG is a weakened strain of the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis, which is used worldwide as a vaccine against childhood tuberculosis. ...

Immediate recovery efforts receive the most attention after severe natural disasters, yet new data from researchers at Drexel University and the University of Maryland suggests these climate events often also leave a critical long-term — and often unaddressed — problem in declines in access to health care. The team found a statistically significant link between severe natural disasters, such as heatwaves, droughts, floods and wildfires, and loss of health care infrastructure — including hospitals and outpatient ...

Tsukuba, Japan—Due to the sudden rupture of the aortic wall, aortic dissection is a life-threatening condition that requires immediate medical attention, as it can lead to vascular collapse. Individuals with inherited connective tissue disorders, such as Marfan syndrome, are particularly at risk, often developing the condition at a young age. This highlights the urgent need for effective preventive and therapeutic strategies. However, the molecular mechanisms that drive the onset and progression of aortic dissection remain poorly understood. In a recent study, an international research team led by the University of Tsukuba created a mouse ...

Most experts and those experiencing the potentially debilitating features of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), which affects one in eight women, want greater awareness and a name change to improve care and outcomes. A new Monash University-led research paper reveals those involved are keen to overcome the misleading implication that it is only an ovarian or gynaecological condition. PCOS carries risks of higher body weight, diabetes, heart disease, fertility issues and pregnancy complications, endometrial cancer, ...