Research announcements from universities, hospitals and scientific institutions. Explore the stories, people and discoveries behind the headlines.
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Carbon capture and storage sites expose subsurface safety valves to temperatures far colder than oil and gas wells produce. Southwest Research Institute retooled its testing facility with a liquid nitrogen cooling system and plug-and-play design, then helped write new API standards for the conditions.
Read the releaseResearch from Vrije Universiteit Brussel shows that iron deficiency prevents immature pancreatic beta cells from completing their development into insulin-producing cells. The finding connects the world's most common nutritional deficiency to a key mechanism in metabolic disease.
Read the releaseA University of Washington team thinned about 150 acres on Cle Elum Ridge in Washington state and found snowpack increased by 30 percent on north-facing slopes. The experiment suggests that wildfire mitigation and water security can be pursued through the same management action.
Read the releaseBy treating an entire region of sky as a single blurry source of light rather than cataloging individual galaxies, astronomers built the first large-scale 3D map of Lyman alpha emissions from the early universe. The technique captured structures too faint for conventional surveys to see.
Read the releaseA McGill and Maastricht study following more than 6,000 U.S. children from ages 9 to 13 found that problematic gaming at 12 - defined by loss of control, not hours played - was linked to psychotic-like experiences one year later. Family and school support reduced the risk significantly.
Read the releaseA study on thin film fluid dynamics in everyday kitchen tasks explains why draining a wok twice prevents rust, how long to wait between dumps, and why honey behaves so differently from water in a tilted jar. The physics is surprisingly practical.
Read the releasePrinceton researchers expected to find diets that slow breast cancer. Instead they found one that speeds it up. A high-fat diet outpaced high-sugar, high-insulin, and high-ketone conditions in driving tumor growth and invasion in triple-negative breast cancer models.
Read the releaseUniversity of Oregon researchers developed TweetyBERT, a self-supervised transformer model adapted from the BERT architecture, to automatically segment and classify canary song syllables without human-labeled training data. The system matches expert annotator performance and offers a scalable platform for studying how the brain learns and produces complex vocal sequences. The work appears in the journal Patterns.
Read the releaseA Canadian cohort study found that preschool-age children with higher ultraprocessed food intake showed worse behavioral and emotional symptom scores by age 5, independent of socioeconomic factors, suggesting that dietary composition in early childhood may shape behavioral development. The findings appear in JAMA Network Open.
Read the releaseThe ISSCR named Stanford's Kyle Loh recipient of the 2026 Early Career Impact Award for developing streamlined methods to generate over 24 cell types from human pluripotent stem cells with greater than 90% purity, identifying dual progenitor origins of the brain, and connecting stem cell biology to Nipah virus infectivity patterns.
Read the releaseThe ISSCR named Alexander Meissner, director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, recipient of the 2026 Momentum Award, citing his work on epigenetic regulation of pluripotency, the development of the ScoreCard assay, and institutional leadership at the Max Planck Institute. Kathrin Plath and Joseph Wu received honorable mentions.
Read the releaseThe ISSCR named Stem Cell COREdinates and CorEUstem joint recipients of the 2026 Public Service Award, recognizing the two networks' work connecting 79 stem cell core facilities globally, harmonizing protocols, registering 3,936 patient-specific cell lines, and training more than 740 scientists annually through 350-plus hands-on sessions.
Read the releaseA Danish nationwide registry study of 1,862 patients followed through 2021 found no evidence of a difference in cancer progression between ablation and surgical resection for T1a renal cell carcinoma. Local recurrence was slightly higher with ablation (2.41% vs 1.20%) but did not worsen overall survival. Results appear in Radiology.
Read the releaseSouthwest Research Institute has completed CMMC Level 2 certification through an independent third-party assessment organization, covering its Intelligent Systems and Mechanical Engineering divisions and satisfying 110 security requirements tied to protection of controlled unclassified information in government contracts.
Read the releaseAmong 3,280 Swedish healthcare workers followed over one year, those who reported problematic alcohol or drug use in 2022 were approximately twice as likely to rate their patient care as poor by the following year, per a study in the International Journal of Nursing Studies. About 15.9% of all participants reported providing low-quality care.
Read the releaseJohns Hopkins scientists tested the desert bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans under pressures up to 2.4 gigapascals - equivalent to Mars-ejection forces - and found 60% survived, with gene expression showing active DNA repair. The PNAS Nexus study supports lithopanspermia theory and raises planetary protection concerns for Mars missions and its moons.
Read the releaseSylvia Hurtado, Distinguished Professor at UCLA and longtime AERA fellow, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association. Her research focuses on campus racial climate, equity for historically marginalized groups, and STEM pathways. She will assume the presidency after AERA's 2027 Annual Meeting.
Read the releaseMount Sinai and King Saud University Medical City announced a three-year research collaboration to study familial clustering of inflammatory bowel disease in Saudi Arabia, combining multi-omics analysis with structured biospecimen collection from families with multiple affected members to identify early diagnostic and therapeutic targets.
Read the releaseYale researcher Daniel Karell and colleagues tested 1,912 participants who read GPT-4o or Wikipedia summaries of two historical events and then reported political opinions. Default GPT-4o summaries produced more liberal responses than Wikipedia (3.57 vs 3.47 on a 5-point scale), with explicitly liberal framings pushing scores to 3.67. The paper raises questions about AI bias shaping public historical understanding.
Read the releaseAnalyzing administrative records for 897,668 births in British Columbia over two decades, researchers found children with prenatal opioid exposure incurred higher healthcare expenditures, received more special education services, performed worse academically, and had more child welfare interactions through age 18 than unexposed peers, even after adjusting for sociodemographic factors.
Read the releaseA controlled laboratory study comparing four small dogs (Chihuahuas) to three large dogs (mastiffs) found small dogs produced more airborne fine particles, likely from activity, while large dogs released more bacteria and fungi - including outdoor microorganisms not typically present from humans. The work appears in Environmental Science and Technology.
Read the releaseA Wake Forest University analysis of the INVEST in Bone Health trial found that among older adults losing weight, those wearing weighted vests and spending more time standing or stepping showed positive changes in bone mineral density, while vest-wearers who remained sedentary saw no benefit. The study appears in Frontiers in Aging.
Read the releaseJohns Hopkins scientists fired projectiles at Deinococcus radiodurans to simulate Mars-ejection pressures up to 2.4 gigapascals - 30 times the deepest ocean pressure - and found 60 percent of bacteria survived, with gene expression showing active cellular repair. The result supports the theoretical possibility of microbial transfer between planets.
Read the releasePaleomagnetic measurements of 28 particles from the asteroid Ryugu reveal magnetic signatures acquired during ancient water-driven mineral growth, offering a direct record of the solar nebula's magnetic field within the first 7 million years after solar system formation. The findings appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Read the releaseWhen USC researchers transplanted gut bacteria from older, post-reproductive mice into young females, the recipient animals showed rejuvenated ovarian gene expression, lower inflammatory markers, and higher reproductive success - an unexpected finding that points toward microbiome-based fertility therapies. The study appears in Nature Aging.
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