Growth marks are like “’tree rings” “Many vertebrates grow in a cyclical manner. This leaves definable growth marks in their bones, and is similar to tree rings,” explains Prof Chinsamy-Turan, an expert on deciphering biological signals in the bone microstructure of extinct and extant vertebrates.  Researchers have used these rings to estimate the minimum age of extant and extinct amphibians, mammals, birds and reptiles; a study termed skeletochronology. Using this information, they deduce growth ...

Washington, March 5, 2026—The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has announced the winners of its 2026 awards for excellence in education research. “We are honored to recognize the recipients of the 2026 awards, an outstanding and inspiring group of education researchers and leaders,” said AERA Executive Director Tabbye Chavous. “Their contributions continue to advance education research and positively impact countless students, educators, and the environments in which they live, learn, and work.” AERA will honor the recipients at the Awards ...

Japanese red elder plants safeguard their own survival when they drop fruits infested by Heterhelus beetle larvae, as well as the survival of these larvae. The Kobe University study changes the narrative on how a plant and its pollinator can keep benefits balanced. When an insect pollinates a plant and then uses the fruit as a nursery for its young, biologists speak of “nursery pollination mutualism.” Kobe University botanist SUETSUGU Kenji says, “These interactions are fascinating because they sit on the boundary between cooperation and conflict.” Famous examples ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed photonic computing chips that overcome key limitations for a type of neural network known as a photonic spiking neural system. By enabling fast learning and decision making using purely light-based processes — no electronics-based computation required — the new chips could improve autonomous driving technologies and enable robotic systems that learn through real-world interactions. “Photonic spiking neural systems use brief optical pulses, or spikes, to emulate ...

Bonn / Campo Grande – An interim update to the landmark State of the World’s Migratory Species of 2024 warns that 49% of migratory species populations protected under a global treaty are declining, up 5% in just two years, and 24% of species face extinction, up 2%. The new warnings will be presented to the 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS COP15), a legally-binding UN treaty, in Campo Grande Brazil March 23-29. The week-long COP is one of the most important global meetings for wildlife conservation. With high-level political attention from host-country ...

About one in 20 infants worldwide is subjected to physical abuse by a caregiver in their first two years of life. That’s the central finding of a new study co-led by researchers from the UBC faculty of medicine and Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), the first to bring together anonymous reports from caregivers about behaviours like spanking, slapping, shaking and hitting. “About four to five per cent of parents are behaving in physically aggressive ways toward their babies,” said Dr. ...

Touching your tongue to frozen metal must be a rite of passage if you’re a five-year-old boy from a cold place. It’s possibly more irresistible than hopping in mud puddles or sampling a newly frosted cake. But it is dangerous? Anders Hagen Jarmund knows all about this particular temptation. Yes, he’s gotten his tongue stuck. “I’m from a small place called Hattfjelldal, which is quite cold in the winter,” he said. “I don’t remember if it was a signpost or a lamppost behind the school, but I remember licking it and my tongue got stuck.” Turns out he wasn’t alone. “This ...

Affecting roughly half a million Americans each year, bacterial infections caused by Clostridioides difficile—commonly known as C. diff—are a serious and persistent problem for patients and hospitals alike. The bacterium can cause severe diarrhea, life-threatening inflammation of the colon, and recurring illness that dramatically reduces quality of life—especially for older adults, who face the highest risk of complications and death. C. diff remains difficult to control for a combination of factors. The bacterium survives many disinfectants, allowing it to easily spread in health care settings, where ...

As the U.S. plans to return to the moon with the upcoming Artemis II mission, a question endures: What will future lunar explorers eat? According to new research from The University of Texas at Austin the answer might be chickpeas.  Scientists have successfully grown and harvested chickpeas using simulated “moon dirt,” the first instance of this crop produced in this medium. The research, which was conducted in collaboration with Texas A&M University, is described in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.   Sara Santos, the principal investigator of the project, said that the work ...

Teens who frequently lash out at others may face lasting physical health consequences later in life, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. The study found that aggressive behavior in early adolescence is linked to faster biological aging and higher body mass index (BMI) by age 30. “This study highlights the potential lasting health consequences stemming from social challenges that emerge in early adolescence,” said lead author Joseph Allen, PhD, of the University of Virginia. “Accelerated aging has been linked to an increased risk ...

A comprehensive new systematic review published in The Journal of Nutrition provides the latest evidence that large-scale food fortification is a highly cost-effective intervention for reducing global malnutrition. The research team, made up of scientists from Cochrane Collaboration, the Food Fortification Initiative, Emory University, and TechnoServe, examined 56 studies presenting over 200 economic analyses from 63 countries, including more than 40 low- and middle-income economies and found that the vast majority of food fortification programs deliver substantial health benefits relative to costs. Hidden ...

In the last several years, more than five billion sea stars have died around the world, with population declines exceeding 90 percent in some, once-abundant species. In the Bering Sea, over 10 billion snow crabs starved between 2018-2021, leading to the first-ever closure of one of the nation’s most lucrative fisheries. Meanwhile, in southern New England, a disease that causes shells to degrade emerged in the early 2000s just as the once-thriving lobster fishery collapsed. And the current avian flu pandemic has devastated marine mammal populations, killing 97 percent of elephant seal pups in one colony in Argentina in 2023. In some ...

The international network of gravitational wave detectors LIGO in the United States, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan (LVK) announced the publication of an updated catalogue of all gravitational events observed to date, called Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogue-4.0 (GWTC-4). The results are the fruit of in-depth analyses conducted over more than two years by scientists from the LVK Collaboration on the new signals observed, with the aim of confirming their validity and studying their most important astrophysical and cosmological implications. Although some of these have already been announced in recent months, the publication of the new catalogue offers a unique perspective ...

When the densest objects in the universe collide and merge, the violence sets off ripples, in the form of gravitational waves, that reverberate across space and time, over hundreds of millions and even billions of years. By the time they pass through Earth, such cosmic ripples are barely discernible.  And yet, scientists are able to detect them, thanks to a global network of gravitational-wave observatories: the U.S.-based National Science Foundation Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (NSF LIGO), ...

Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is a clinically significant cause of infertility that affects between 1 to 3% of women of childbearing age. Symptoms include absent menses, low estrogen levels, and elevated follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) levels. Although residual primordial follicles often remain in the ovaries of women with POI, these follicles frequently fail to develop spontaneously. Because FSH levels are already high, the follicles typically do not respond to additional hormonal stimulation used in standard fertility treatments. Researchers from Juntendo University, led by Professor Kazuhiro Kawamura, previously ...

Inflammatory osteolysis is a condition involving progressive bone tissue destruction and is observed in many well-known skeletal disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, and chronic apical periodontitis. This condition is driven by immune hyperactivation, sustained immune responses, and increased numbers of bone-degrading osteoclast cells, which together cause inflammation and weakening of affected bone tissue. Copper is a vital element for the deposition of collagen in bone tissue, and hence bones contain significant traces of copper. However, excessive cellular copper disrupts glucose and glycogen metabolism pathways ...

Microplastics (MPs), defined as plastic fragments with sizes ranging from millimeters (<5 mm) to nanometers, have become a growing environmental and public health concern. First identified in the 1970s, these particles are now omnipresent in water, soil, air, and everyday products, such as detergents and cosmetics. Hundreds of these particles can be ingested or inhaled in a day, with smaller particles posing a greater risk as they may accumulate in organs such as the liver, lungs, kidneys, and even the brain. Understanding the in vivo behavior and biological effects of these irregularly shaped nano-sized MPs is therefore ...

The shape of an organism is the first way we experience most species and the subject of one of the oldest pursuits in biology. However, the application of big data and computational methods for studying organismal shape has been held back by key technical bottlenecks, making it difficult to capture and share accurate 3D morphological data on large scales. Now, researchers have broken this bottleneck with a project on ants, small but critical organisms in many ecosystems around the world. Using modern technology, researchers have ...

For more than a decade, Evan Economo’s lab has been using micro-CT machines to scan insect specimens. The resulting X-ray images help researchers study the form and structure of insects—a subfield of entomology known as morphology—but the process is costly and time-consuming. “One limitation is that you can get this rich 3D dataset, but it could take 10 hours to scan one specimen,” explained Economo, who chairs the University of Maryland’s Department of Entomology and holds the James B. Gahan and Margaret H. Gahan Professorship. As a senior author of a paper published in the journal ...

What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere. In May 2024, Earth was hit by the biggest solar storm recorded in over 20 years. It sent our planet’s atmosphere into overdrive, triggering shimmering auroras that were seen as far south as Mexico. This storm also hit Mars. Fortunately, ESA’s two Mars Orbiters – Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) – were in the right place at the right time, with a radiation monitor aboard TGO picking up a dose equivalent to 200 ‘normal’ days in just 64 hours. A new study to ...

University of Warwick and MIT scientists reveal hidden microscopic networks on catalyst surfaces that could lead to cleaner and greener chemical processes. Catalysts are essential to modern industry, accelerating reactions used to produce everything from fertilisers and fuels to medicines and hydrogen energy. But until now, scientists could not directly observe how reactions unfold across real catalyst surfaces. In a study published in Nature Catalysis, researchers from Warwick and MIT have visualised ...

Electrons can be ‘kicked across’ solar materials at almost the fastest speed nature allows, scientists have discovered – challenging long-held theories about how solar energy systems work. The finding could help researchers design more efficient ways of harvesting sunlight and converting it into electricity. In experiments capturing events lasting just 18 femtoseconds – less than 20 quadrillionths of a second – researchers at the University of Cambridge observed charge separation happening within a single molecular vibration. “We deliberately designed a system that, according to conventional ...

Mariana Bueno, an Assistant Professor at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, is the lead author of a recently published Cochrane review investigating the administration of sucrose as a form of pain management for hospitalized infants who undergo venepuncture. The review which included studies worldwide, found that sucrose administration stood out as an effective and safe option to manage pain and provide comfort to babies during venepuncture, especially when compared to no treatment. “Giving infants a pacifier in addition ...

The study is among the first to examine strengths-based indicators of well-being in a large, population-level Indigenous sample. Healthy functioning was significantly associated with never smoking, being physically active, having fewer chronic health conditions, and meeting basic financial needs. These results challenge deficit-focused narratives that blame individuals or groups rather than policies, socioeconomic conditions, and other structural issues. Instead, they underscore the value of identifying factors that support thriving in Indigenous communities. “Understanding wellness among Indigenous Peoples requires recognizing both the structural barriers created ...

The Bureaucracy Index, which tracks the growth in the volume of applicable German federal laws, has once again reached a record high. Since 2010, the volume of legislation has risen steadily, with no structural reversal in sight. The scope of legislation continued to rise in 2025. Despite commitments to reducing bureaucracy, regulation has not eased. The Bureaucracy Index is compiled jointly by university professor Dr. Stefan Wagner of the University of Vienna in collaboration with ESMT Berlin ...