On March 28, 2025, a catastrophic earthquake of magnitude 7.7 struck central Myanmar, marking the most devastating seismic event in the region since 1912. Originating along the Sagaing Fault — a 1,400-km-long dextral strike-slip boundary separating the Burma Microplate and Sunda Plate — the earthquake propagated a supershear rupture over 460 km with surface displacements exceeding 6 meters. The shallow (10 km depth) strike-slip mechanism unleashed violent shaking (Modified Mercalli Intensity IX) across densely populated urban centers, including Mandalay, Sagaing and Naypyidaw, while amplifying seismic energy in distant locations such as Bangkok, Thailand. The human toll was ...

Composites of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) are widely used in various fields requiring ballistic protection due to their lightweight and high-strength. However, the theoretical developments in ballistic response in case of UHMWPE composite have not kept pace with its applications in practical engineering. This makes it difficult to provide insightful guidance for the design optimization of protective structures.In a study published in Defence Technology, a research team from China provided ...

DALLAS, May 16, 2025 — A striking Banksy artwork—a red heart-shaped balloon covered in bandages—will soon find a new home. This unique Banksy, a famed street artist known for stenciled works that blend dark humor with political and social commentary, is a 7,500-pound section of a Brooklyn warehouse wall. Following a public viewing the wall will be auctioned by Guernsey’s, an auction house for extraordinary properties, on May 21, with proceeds benefiting the American Heart Association, devoted to changing the future to a world of healthier lives for all. The piece was created in the fall of 2013. The then 59-year-old Vassilios Georgiadis, a Brooklyn ...

Scientists highlight the evidence of increasing public health impacts from exposure to synthetic chemicals in food. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine, the article discusses the types and sources of synthetic food contaminants focusing on food contact chemicals from food packaging and food processing, and their increased presence in ultra-processed foods. Considering a wide range of scientific studies and regulatory initiatives, the article provides an overarching look at the issue, outlines future research needs, and shares existing options and novel approaches to aid the sustainable transition ...

Dementia usually affects older people, so when it occurs in middle age, it can be hard to recognize. The most common form is frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which is often mistaken for depression, schizophrenia, or Parkinson’s disease before the correct diagnosis is reached.  Now, as part of an NIH-funded study, researchers at UC San Francisco have found some clues about how FTD develops that could lead to new diagnostics and get more patients into clinical trials. The findings appear in Nature ...

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have discovered how a parasite that causes malaria when transmitted through a mosquito bite can hide from the body’s immune system, sometimes for years. It turns out that the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, can shut down a key set of genes, rendering itself “immunologically invisible.” “This finding provides another piece of the puzzle as to why malaria has been so difficult to eradicate,” said Dr. Francesca Florini, research associate in microbiology and immunology ...

Stem cells can produce any other cell type, it is just a matter of telling them in the right way. From a biological perspective, this means activating the proper genetic programme by pressing the right keys, this is, the right genes, at the right moment. Quite often, blood cancer patients require the replacement of their blood stem cells in the bone marrow, the tissue producing blood cells where their cancer grows. Unfortunately, finding a compatible donor happens to be too challenging sometimes. What if we could produce the cells that make blood in the lab, right from basic stem cells, and use them to regenerate a new and healthy ...

A University of Queensland study has shown scientific knowledge on the conservation of endangered species is often overlooked when not presented in English. PhD candidate Kelsey Hannah examined articles about the protection and management of birds, mammals, and amphibians and compared how often those in English and 16 other languages were cited in further work. “The 500 papers in my study were published in peer-reviewed journals and available internationally to people working in conservation,” Ms Hannah said. “Across the board, the non-English language papers had significantly fewer citations. “The English-language articles had a median of 37 citations while the ...

Having school dinners rather than packed lunches could encourage picky eating 13-year-olds to eat a wider variety of foods, according to a new University of Bristol-led study.  The findings are published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics today [15 May]. The research showed when children who were picky eaters as preschoolers got to choose their own food (school dinners) at lunchtime, they were less picky in what they ate, compared with a packed lunch. To the research team’s knowledge, this is the first time that lunchtime food behaviours in picky children have been studied outside of the home, and ...

A study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by ”la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with the Clínic-IDIBAPS, has shown for the first time, how lung capacity evolves from childhood to old age. The findings, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, provide a new basic framework for assessing lung health. Until now, it was thought that lung function increased until it peaked at around 20–25 years of age, after which it stabilised. It was also thought that in later adulthood, lung function begins to decline as the ...

DALLAS, May 14, 2025 — Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the No. 1 killer of women and nearly 45% of women over age 20 are living with some form of cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association, a global force changing the future of health for all. Katrina (Kat) Ascencio-Holmes, the Heart Association’s 2025 National Woman of Impact™ Winner, from Sacramento, California, is working to change that. She’s shining a spotlight on women’s health while raising funds to fuel the lifesaving mission of the American Heart Association, a global force changing the future of all health, through the Go Red for Women® movement. As ...

About The Study: Although Medicare Advantage (MA) plans offer and directly market supplemental benefits for dental and vision services, veterans enrolled in MA used these services with the same frequency as veterans in traditional Medicare (TM). Moreover, MA plans spent only modestly more on dental services and vision services for veterans than TM, including for emergency dental services. After accounting for private insurance plans used by TM enrollees and out-of-pocket spending, total spending on dental services was no different for veterans in MA vs TM.  Corresponding Author: To contact ...

Women’s health experts from the Raquel and Jaime Gilinski Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will present new research at the 2025 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Annual Clinical and Scientific Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota from May 16–18. Please let me know if you would like to coordinate an interview about their forthcoming presentations. Mount Sinai obstetricians and gynecologists are also available to comment on breaking ...

New Haven, Conn. — Humans perceive and navigate the world around us with the help of our five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. And while scientists have long known that these different senses activate different parts of the brain, a new Yale-led study indicates that multiple senses all stimulate a critical region deep in the brain that controls consciousness. The study, published May 15 in the journal NeuroImage, sheds new light on how sensory perception works in the brain and may fuel the ...

Whether bismuth is part of a class of materials highly suitable for quantum computing and spintronics was a long-standing issue. Kobe University research has now revealed that the true nature of bismuth was masked by its surface, and in doing so uncovered a new phenomenon relevant to all such materials. There is a class of materials that are insulators in their bulk, but robustly conductive at their surface. As this conductivity does not suffer from defects or impurities, such “topological materials,” as they are called, are expected ...

LA JOLLA, CA and NEW YORK, NY—A decades-long scientific challenge in HIV vaccine development has been finding a way to train the immune system to produce antibodies that can target many variants of the virus. Traditional approaches haven’t worked—largely because HIV mutates rapidly and hides key parts of itself from the immune system. Now, a new study combining data from two separate phase 1 clinical trials shows that a targeted vaccine strategy can successfully activate early immune responses relevant to HIV, and, in one trial, further advance them—a key step toward a long-sought goal in vaccine development. ...

The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) — the nation’s oldest and largest interdisciplinary organization focused on aging — has named Stephen Ewell, MBA, MS, of the Consumer Technology Association Foundation as an at-large member of its Board of Directors. GSA’s Board of Directors provides governance oversight, establishes Society policy, sets the organization’s strategic plan, and oversees implementation thereof. It comprises 12 members representing the broad diversity of the Society’s membership. Ewell’s three-year term became effective January 1. Ewell is ...

A large-scale genomic study of over 1,500 individuals from 139 underrepresented Indigenous groups across northern Eurasia and the Americas sheds new light on the ancient migrations that shaped the genetic landscape of North and South America. The results reveal distinct ancestry patterns and early diversification of Indigenous South American populations. The late Pleistocene saw the migration of humans from North Asia into North and South America beginning by at least 23,000 years ago, according to archaeological evidence. This expansion was rapid – genetic evidence suggests northern and southern Native American ...

A large-scale genomic analysis reveals Brazil as one of the most genetically diverse countries on Earth – shaped by centuries of colonization, forced migration, and Indigenous heritage, researchers report. The study, which leveraged newly generated whole-genome sequences of over 2,700 individuals, uncovered more than 8.7 million previously undocumented genetic variants, including those potentially affecting population health. The colonization of Brazil by Europeans from the 15th to 20th centuries resulted in one of the most profound population displacements in history; around five million European settlers and at least five million enslaved Africans were forcibly brought ...

Mountain ecosystems may be more resilient to climate change than previously believed, according to a new study, which reports little empirical support for the widely recognized “escalator to extinction.” The findings challenge long-standing assumptions about range shift-driven extinction and instead introduce biotic homogenization as a more immediate concern facing mountain plants and animals. Mountain ecosystems worldwide are undergoing profound change due to rapid climate change. As temperatures increase, species are expected to shift their ranges upslope to take advantage of cooler habitats. However, while mountains offer vertical refuge for species ...

An international genomics study led by scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) at the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) and Asian School of the Environment (ASE) has shown that early Asians made humanity’s longest prehistoric migration. These prehistoric humans, roaming the earth over a hundred thousand years ago, would have traversed more than 20,000 kilometres on foot from North Asia to the southernmost tip of South America. This journey would have taken multiple generations ...

An often-ignored type of cell in the brain plays a dynamic and surprisingly complex role in our ability to process information, according to new research from Oregon Health & Science University. The study, published today in the journal Science, provides direct evidence for the real-time action of a star-shaped type of glial cell, known as astrocytes, in the live brains of fruit flies. The abundant cell type — roughly 35% of all cells in the human brain — appears to be a key part of orchestrating a complex network governing brain function. “We hope this begins to fundamentally change how the field thinks about astrocytes and their role in mediating ...

Did you know that more than 75% of new infectious diseases affecting humans originally come from animals? Bats, in particular, are natural hosts to some of the world’s most dangerous viruses, including those responsible for COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), MERS-CoV, influenza A, and hantavirus outbreaks. Yet, despite their importance, scientists have long struggled to study how these viruses behave inside bats, simply because the right biological tools didn’t exist. Until now, most research has used either generalized cell samples or organoids made from just one type ...

Since the human genome was first sequenced in 2003, the world’s scientific community has been racing to decipher this “book” written in an alphabet of four letters. The applications of these discoveries range from disease detection and the design of personalised treatments to increasing our understanding of human evolution. However, much of the genetic information generated over these decades lacks ethnic diversity. This under-representation limits the benefits of medical genomic research for many populations and leaves much of our evolutionary history in the dark. For the first time, an international ...

Worldwide, an estimated 40 million people live with HIV. Two-thirds of this group on the African continent. In 2023, more than 600,000 people died from HIV-related causes and 1.32 million were infected. There is no vaccine against the world's second most deadly infection, after TB. However, researchers from Amsterdam UMC have set an important first step in reaching that goal. The results of their phase one trial are published today in Science. "In short, for a preventative HIV-vaccine to work it should induce broadly neutralising antibodies against all the diverse strains of the virus. We've seen that ...