Painted lady butterflies are world travelers. The ones we encounter in Europe fly from Africa to Sweden, ultimately returning to areas north and south of the Sahara. But what determines whether some butterflies travel long distances while others travel short distances? A group of scientists, including from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), shows that the different migration strategies are shaped by environmental conditions rather than being encoded in the butterfly’s DNA. It is a warm summer day in June. A group of scientists with sunhats and nets is hiking along a trail in the Catalan mountains. They meticulously search for painted ladies—vibrant orange ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [February 4, 2025] — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) is joining people and organizations across the globe to commemorate World Cancer Day today. World Cancer Day is a global initiative to improve awareness and knowledge of cancer risks and actions for better prevention, detection, and treatment. It is led and organized by the Union of International Cancer Control (UICC) every February 4.  World Cancer Day 2025 marks the start of the ‘United by Unique’ campaign to highlight how every experience with cancer is unique, even as people touched by cancer ...

Medical implants have transformed healthcare, offering innovative solutions with advanced materials and technologies. However, many biomedical devices face challenges like insufficient cell adhesion, leading to inflammatory responses after their implantation in the body. Apatite coatings, particularly hydroxyapatite (HA)—a naturally occurring form of apatite found in bones, have been shown to promote better integration with surrounding tissues. However, the biocompatibility of artificially synthesized apatite nanoparticles often falls short of expectations, primarily due to the nanoparticles’ limited ability to bind effectively with biological tissues. To overcome ...

A new study debunks claims that a magnitude 4.5 earthquake in Iran was a covert nuclear weapons test, as widely alleged on social media and some mainstream news outlets in October 2024, a period of heightened geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Led by Johns Hopkins University scientists, the study warns about the potential consequences of mishandling and misinterpreting scientific information, particularly during periods of international conflict. The findings appear in the journal Seismica. “There was a concerted misinformation and disinformation campaign around this event that promoted the idea this was a nuclear test, ...

Physicists have performed a groundbreaking simulation they say sheds new light on an elusive phenomenon that could determine the ultimate fate of the Universe.  Pioneering research in quantum field theory around 50 years ago proposed that the universe may be trapped in a false vacuum – meaning it appears stable but in fact could be on the verge of transitioning to an even more stable, true vacuum state.  While this process could trigger a catastrophic change in the Universe's structure, experts agree that predicting the timeline ...

How Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer to Death  Scientists transformed energy-storing white fat cells into calorie-burning ‘beige’ fat. Once implanted, they outcompeted tumors for resources, beating back five different types of cancer in lab experiments. Liposuction and plastic surgery aren’t often mentioned in the same breath as cancer.  But they are the inspiration for a new approach to treating cancer that uses engineered fat cells to deprive tumors of nutrition.  Researchers at UC San Francisco used the gene editing technology CRISPR to turn ordinary white fat cells into “beige” fat cells, which voraciously consume calories to make ...

  Brain cancer is the second-leading cause of death in children in the developed world. For the children who survive, standard treatments have long-term impacts on their development and quality of life, particularly in small children and infants.   Research out of Emory University and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Queensland, Australia, has shown that a potential new targeted therapy for childhood brain cancer is effective in infiltrating and killing tumor cells in preclinical models tested in mice.   In ...

Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have discovered a way to stop tumour growth before it starts for a subtype of medulloblastoma, the most common childhood malignant brain cancer.  Brain cancer presents a unique set of challenges for researchers – by the time a person experiences symptoms, the tumours are often so complex that the fundamental mechanisms driving the tumour growth are no longer easy to identify. A research team led by Dr. Peter Dirks is working to combat ...

Preventing the cell’s protein factories from making the notorious cancer-causing protein MYC could stop out-of-control tumors. For decades, scientists have tried to stop cancer by disabling the mutated proteins that are found in tumors. But many cancers manage to overcome this and continue growing.  Now, UCSF scientists think they can throw a wrench into the fabrication of a key growth-related protein, MYC, that escalates wildly in 70% of all cancers. Unlike some other targets of cancer therapies, MYC can be dangerous simply due to its abundance. In a paper that appears Feb. 4 in Nature Cell Biology, researchers at UC San Francisco ...

SPOKANE, Wash. — Washington State University scientists have created genetically-engineered mice that could help accelerate anti-aging research. Globally, scientists are working to unlock the secrets of extending human lifespan at the cellular level, where aging occurs gradually due to the shortening of telomeres–the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that function like shoelace tips to prevent unraveling. As telomeres shorten over time, cells lose their ability to divide for healthy ...

The new EU-funded consortium “ForMovFluid” will study how fluids transformed the materials inside the Earth's crust. Thanks to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Doctoral Networks programme, ForMovFluid will fund the doctoral studies of 18 researchers, and train them to become elite experts in the field of geoscience. Moreover, this project will allow us to understand the origin of the so-called critical raw materials, of vital importance for the energy transition. Over a period of four years, ForMovFluid “Marie Curie” researchers ...

FRONTIERS announces a new call for applications for its Science Journalism in Residency Programme, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). This third call is exclusively aimed at early-career journalists and will remain open until May 6, 2025, at 17h00 CEST. Science journalists with up to five years of experience are invited to apply for a residency at a research institution of their choice, in an EU Member State or a country associated with the EU’s Horizon Europe Programme. The residencies, lasting between three to five months, should focus on frontier science topics, in collaboration with scientists.  The ...

The efficient conversion of solar energy into storable forms of chemical energy is the dream of many engineers. Nature found a perfect solution to this problem billions of years ago. The new study shows that quantum mechanics is not just for physicists but also plays a key role in biology. Photosynthetic organisms such as green plants use quantum mechanical processes to harness the energy of the sun, as Prof. Jürgen Hauer explains: “When light is absorbed in a leaf, for example, the electronic excitation energy is distributed over several states ...

A new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, published by Oxford University Press, shows customer service workers using artificial intelligence assistance become more productive and work faster. The effects vary significantly, however. Less experienced and lower-skilled employees improve both the speed and quality of their work, while the most experienced and highest-skilled workers see small gains in speed and small declines in quality. The researchers also found that AI assistance can help worker learning and improve English fluency, particularly for international workers. Computers and software have transformed the economy with their ability to perform certain tasks with far ...

BELMONT, Massachusetts, USA, 4 February 2025 - In a comprehensive Genomic Press Interview, Dr. Kerry Ressler, Chief Scientific Officer at McLean Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, unveils groundbreaking advances in understanding the neurobiological basis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related anxiety conditions. Dr. Ressler's research bridges the gap between molecular neuroscience and clinical psychiatry, focusing on how the amygdala processes fear and trauma at cellular and genomic levels. "Most proximally, I hope that our work may lead to novel approaches to fear- and trauma-related disorders, perhaps even to prevent ...

International collaborative research led by Aakash Project* researchers at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) show an unequivocal contribution of crop residue burning (CRB) to air pollution in the rural/semi-urban regions of Punjab and Haryana, and a relatively lower contribution than previously thought to the Delhi national capital region (NCR). We have installed 30 units of compact and useful PM2.5** in situ instrument with gas sensors (CUPI-Gs) and have continuously recorded air pollutants in 2022 and 2023. New analytical methods have been developed to assess ...

A groundbreaking University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa study on the freezing of water droplets suspended in air sheds light on a key process in Earth’s water cycle: the transformation of supercooled water into ice. Conducted using a novel cryogenically cooled ultrasonic levitation chamber, the research captures real-time molecular-level changes during the freezing process, mimicking conditions in the Earth’s atmosphere. This innovative setup enables researchers to observe how water droplets transition to ice at subzero temperatures, providing ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) have uncovered how perceptual memories linked to positive emotions, such as joy or happiness, are strengthened during sleep. The study, published in the scientific journal Neuron, could help scientists understand the neurological basis for overcoming conditions like drug or sexual addiction. Why do emotional events, whether positive or negative, create strong, long-lasting memories of external information such as music, scene smells and textures received at the events? We know that sleep is essential for memory consolidation, the process that turns new events into memories, but do not ...

A 3D model accurately mimicking the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) in a laboratory environment has been successfully developed by research teams led by Professor Jinah Jang from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Life Sciences, IT Convergence Engineering, and the Graduate School of Convergence at POSTECH, and Professor Sun Ha Paek from the Department of Neurosurgery at Seoul National University Hospital.  This study was recently published in Biomaterials Research, an international academic journal on materials science.   Neurodegenerative diseases, ...

Children are nearly three-quarters (71%) more likely to develop mental health problems between the ages of five and 18, if the firstborn child in their family experienced adversity during their first 1,000 days, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The first-of-its-kind study, published in The Lancet Public Health and funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Policy Research Programme, found that mothers whose firstborns had experienced adverse childhood experiences had a 71% increased risk of having children (aged five -18) with mental health problems, compared to mothers whose firstborn did not experience adversity. This ...

BOZEMAN – In a new publication in the journal Nature Communications, Montana State University scientists in College of Agriculture highlight fresh knowledge of how ancient microorganisms adapted from a low-oxygen prehistoric environment to the one that exists today. The work builds on more than two decades of scientific research in Yellowstone National Park by MSU professor Bill Inskeep. The article, titled “Respiratory Processes of Early-evolved Hyperthermophiles in Sulfidic and Low-oxygen Geothermal Microbial Communities” was published Jan. 2. Authors Inskeep, a professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, and Mensur ...

Generative AI, a technology that is developing at breakneck speed, may carry hidden risks that could erode public trust and democratic values, according to a study led by the University of East Anglia (UEA).  In collaboration with researchers from the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) and Insper, both in Brazil, the research showed that ChatGPT exhibits biases in both text and image outputs — leaning toward left-wing political values — raising questions about fairness and accountability in its design.   The study revealed ...

A new international study highlights the severity of climate change impacts across African mountains, how farmers are adapting, and the barriers they face – findings relevant to people living in mountain regions around the world.   "Mountains are the sentinels of climate change,” said Julia Klein, a Colorado State University professor of ecosystem science and sustainability and co-author of the study. “Like the Arctic, some of the first extreme changes we're seeing are happening in mountains, from glaciers melting to extreme events. There's greater warming at higher elevations, so what's happening in mountains is foreshadowing what's going ...

Air pollution is a well-known risk factor for respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, its contribution to lower respiratory infections —those that affect the lower respiratory tract, including the lungs, bronchi and alveoli— is less well documented, especially in adults. To fill this gap in knowledge, a team from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation, assessed the effect of air pollution ...

Understanding how tumors change their metabolism to resist treatments is a growing focus in cancer research. As cancer cells adapt to therapies, their metabolism often shifts, which can help them survive and thrive despite medical interventions. This process, known as metabolic reprogramming, is a key factor in the development of treatment resistance. However, current methods to study these changes can be costly, complex, and often destructive to the cells being studied. Researchers at the University of Kentucky have developed a new, simpler approach to observe these metabolic shifts in cancer cells, offering a more accessible and effective tool for cancer research. As ...