When asked to think of a chemical reaction, you might picture bubbling liquids in a beaker, or maybe applying heat to a mixture until something transforms. But some of the most important reactions in nature and industry don’t need heat or solvents. Instead, they need force. Mechanochemistry is where physical pressure or stress triggers chemical reactions. Imagine molecules being rammed together like bumper cars, or shaken up in a giant cocktail shaker. That shaking and colliding happens every day inside ...

Teeth may seem like static fixtures, but a new collaboration between engineers and clinicians is proving just how dynamic, informative and medically significant our teeth can be. In a recent study, published in the American Chemical Society’s ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, engineers and dentists come together to uncover how teeth, as biological material, hold key information for understanding rare craniofacial disorders that develop during childhood. Kyle Vining, Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and in Preventative and Restorative Science at Penn Dental Medicine, leads ...

Most children seeking emergency department (ED) care due to vomiting are discharged home. Although they usually feel better when they leave the ED, the vomiting recurs in nearly one-third of children. Dr. Stephen Freedman, MD, a pediatric ED physician, led a national study to evaluate if sending children who present for care with frequent vomiting from an acute intestinal infection are better off when provided with an anti-vomiting medication to take, as needed, at home. “When children are really sick, it’s ...

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, hosted from 1976 to 2015, brought together lesbian feminists for a celebration of culture and activism. Today, the festival is perhaps best known for its controversial "womyn-born-womyn” attendance policy, which excluded trans women from participation. A new article in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society examines the fight for trans inclusion at Michfest and positions it within a rich history of activism at the festival, including antiracist activism by women of color. In 1991, a woman named Nancy Jean Burkholder was expelled from the Michfest grounds on the basis ...

A newly discovered pathway in a plant process could help farmers grow more successful crops, particularly in places where harsh, high light stresses plants. The pathway complements the main workflow of photorespiration, indicating photorespiration is more flexible than it seems. Xiaotong Jiang, a post-doctoral fellow in Jianping Hu’s lab at the Michigan State University-Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, and colleagues recently published their results in the journal Nature Communications. Photorespiration ...

In a major step forward for sustainable energy technology, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), led by Professor Yan Wang, William B. Smith Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, have developed a new, scalable method to recycle lithium-ion batteries in a way that is both efficient and environmentally friendly.  The team’s research, titled Upcycling Mixed Spent Ni-Lean Cathodes into Ni-Rich Polycrystalline Cathodes, was recently published in Energy Storage Materials, a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal focused on the topics of materials and energy. The paper details an innovative hydrometallurgical upcycling approach that offers both environmental ...

July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or SNIFS. Delivered to space via a Black Brant IX sounding rocket, SNIFS will explore the energy and dynamics of the chromosphere, one of the most complex regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. The SNIFS mission’s launch window at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico opens on Friday, July 18.  The chromosphere is located between the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, and its outer ...

Researchers are creating new moiré materials at the nanometer scale using advanced DNA nanotechnology: DNA moiré superlattices form when two periodic DNA lattices are overlaid with a slight rotational twist or positional offset. This creates a new, larger interference pattern with completely different physical properties. A new approach developed by researchers at the University of Stuttgart and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research not only facilitates the complex construction of these superlattices; ...

Cleaning products, candles, cribs, and cosmetics are just a few of the common household items that emit formaldehyde, a colorless, odorless chemical that when present in the air at levels higher than 0.1 parts per million has been found to be a risk to human health.  To make indoor air quality monitoring more accessible, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a low cost, long-lasting, indoor formaldehyde sensor. A unique polymer coating on the MXene-based sensor not only extends its half life by 200%, but also enables it to regenerate when performance begins to degrade. MXene is a class of compounds that has shown promise in energy storage and gas sensing because ...

An engineer with the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture has received one of three Gold Medal awards for 2025 from the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE). Robert T. Burns, a distinguished professor in the UT Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science, was honored at the ASABE Annual Meeting on July 16. Burns received the Cyrus Hall McCormick – Jerome Increase Case Gold Medal, which recognizes exceptional and meritorious engineering achievement in agriculture that has resulted in new concepts, products, processes or methods that advanced the development of agriculture. His current academic efforts include coordinating the ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 17, 2025 CONTACT: Camille Jewell cjewell@vancomm.com or 202-248-5460   NASHVILLE — Three studies presented today at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery’s (SNIS) 22nd Annual Meeting discussed whether using GLP-1 inhibitors could lessen the impacts of stroke and related brain injuries or reduce the risk of stroke altogether. These medications, which lower blood sugar and often cause weight loss, are commonly prescribed for type 2 diabetes and obesity and ...

Currents can affect marine animals’ locomotion, energy expenditure and ability to navigate; the force of currents may cause them to drift off-course of their intended trajectory. A study published July 17th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Richard Michael Gunner at the Max-Planck-Institut für Verhaltensbiologie, Germany, suggests that Magellanic penguins can sense current drift and maximize navigation efficiency by alternating between traveling in a direct route in calm conditions and swimming with the flow of strong currents ...

Using a novel dome-shaped structural design, researchers present a chemically diverse collection of aerogels that remain elastic and mechanically intact under extreme temperatures. The findings open the door for the fabrication of new aerogel materials suited to extreme environments required for applications in space, aerospace, energy, and high-temperature industries. Aerogels are an advanced class of materials characterized by their extremely low density and high porosity, which makes them ideal for a wide range of applications. However, despite improvements in design and fabrication, aerogels still face challenges in maintaining thermomechanical ...

Engineered gut bacteria designed to treat kidney stones successfully colonized the gut microbiome and reduced oxalate levels in animal models and early clinical trials in humans, researchers report. The findings offer a promising, yet still imperfect, step toward microbial therapies. Efforts to manipulate the gut microbiome using engineered bacteria for therapeutic purposes have shown promise in animals, but often fail in clinical settings due to being hindered by inconsistent colonization. To overcome this challenge, Weston Whitaker and colleagues focused on Phocaeicola vulgatus, a common gut bacterium, and engineered it to consume the seaweed-derived nutrient, porphyran. ...

Tropical cyclones in Madagascar lead to sharp spikes in malaria infections – particularly in children – due to interruptions in control efforts, according to a new study. However, the findings show that newly introduced long-lasting vaccines can help to mitigate these gaps. This points to pathways to climate-resilient control strategies in malaria-prone regions. Malaria, already a persistent global health challenge, poses new threats from climate change, not only through rising temperatures that shift mosquito dynamics but also via extreme weather events like tropical cyclones. Such disasters can severely ...

A global Android smartphone-based earthquake detection and early warning system can detect seismic activity in real time and deliver life-saving alerts with effectiveness rivaling that of traditional seismic networks, according to a new study. Despite our ability to predict where they are likely to occur, earthquakes continue to pose a serious threat to communities worldwide. Large-scale events can result in widespread loss of life and injury. These risks underscore the urgent need for protective measures including earthquake ...

For his work to help capture and view dynamic small-scale behaviors of biomolecules that have gone unseen – and which are critical to applications like drug development – Zhuoran Qiao has been awarded the inaugural Chen Institute and Science Prize for Al Accelerated Research. The prize recognizes innovative young researchers who apply techniques in artificial intelligence to help the research community solve important problems and accelerate their work. “I was thrilled to partner with the Chen Institute to launch this new prize initiative,” said Yury V. Suleymanov, senior editor at Science. “Our winner, ...

Q: How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? Cells contain helper molecules called transfer RNAs (tRNAs), which carry building blocks (amino acids) to make proteins. These tRNAs can be broken down into smaller pieces called tRNA-derived RNAs (tsRNAs or tDRs) that have new jobs - to help cells deal with stress and challenging situations. In this study, we focused on one specific tDR, called tRNA-Asp-GTC-3’tDR, which becomes more abundant during stress. tRNA-Asp-GTC-3’tDR is present at baseline in kidney cells and increases in response to disease-related stress signals in cell culture and several mouse models of kidney diseases. ...

Raghu R. Chivukula, MD, PhD, a physician-investigator in the Departments of Medicine & Surgery and the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, is the senior author of a paper published in Science, “Polyglycine-mediated aggregation of FAM98B disrupts tRNA processing in GGC repeat disorders.”   Q: How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? Neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, are devastating and incurable diseases. Although many neurodegenerative ...

Quicker health diagnoses, smarter energy supplies, tackling climate change and improved public service delivery – just some huge potential benefits of the new compute roadmap, launched by DSIT and UKRI. The roadmap heralds a significant increase in publicly accessible compute capacity. Investments include up to £2 billion to deliver a holistic and user-centred compute ecosystem with  £1 billion to expand the AI Research Resource 20-fold by 2030. It also provides up to £750 million for UKRI to invest in a new national supercomputing service at Edinburgh. UKRI is further ...

South San Francisco, CA (July 17, 2025) - A new study sponsored by Mirvie, which is the first to evaluate U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) guidelines for preeclampsia risk and aspirin prescription in a single, nationally representative, prospective population, found while high-risk factors had sufficient value in estimating risk, there’s limited value for the moderate risk category - leading to nonspecific recommendations for aspirin use, a recognized prevention tool.    This cohort study of 5684 participants, culled from the multi-center Miracle of Life prospective study, found the guidelines ...

A new study by a Tulane University researcher casts doubt on a widely used shortcut in rectal cancer drug trials, raising concerns that some treatments may be fast-tracked for approval without evidence they help patients live longer. The study, published in JAMA Network Open in collaboration with researchers at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, found that the absence of detectable tumors after treatment – a key metric in clinical cancer drug trials known as pathologic complete response or pCR – does not reliably predict an improvement in long-term survival for patients diagnosed with ...

Q: How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? Dr. McElrath: Preeclampsia (PE) is a hypertensive disease that complicates 7-10% of pregnancies. While recent advances in understanding the underlying causes of PE have been made, predicting its occurrence has historically been difficult because it is a complex condition that likely results from a variety of causes and can present in different ways. To address this challenge, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) reviewed ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon State University pigment researchers are using a rare mineral discovered in Norway more than a century ago as a road map for creating new yellows, oranges and reds that are vibrant, durable, non-toxic and inexpensive. The new pigments also carry energy-saving potential: Their ability to reflect heat from the sun means that buildings and vehicles coated in them will require less air conditioning. The study led by Mas Subramanian, who made color history in 2009 with the discovery of a vivid blue pigment now known commercially as YInMn Blue, was published in Chemistry of Materials. Funded by the National Science Foundation, ...

Increased transparency from countries about how they use AI to manage migration is needed to boost trust and strengthen the rule of law, a new study says. Any overuse of AI in migration management may perpetuate biases and errors, promoting excessive reliance on technology and undermining trust in decision‑making processes, an expert has warned. Adequate cybersecurity measures are also needed to protect sensitive data about vulnerable migrants. However, using AI for migrant management could present opportunities such as freeing up caseworkers’ time to focus on other critical areas, ...