Operating a new device named the Fusion Z-pinch Experiment 3, or FuZE-3, Zap Energy has now achieved plasmas with electron pressures as high as 830 megapascals (MPa), or 1.6 gigapascals (GPa) total, comparable to the pressures found deep below Earth’s crust. The results are the highest-pressure performance to date in a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch and an important marker on the path to scientific energy gain, or Q>1. FuZE-3 is Zap’s first device to incorporate a third electrode to separate the forces that drive plasma acceleration and compression. Details of the preliminary results were presented today at the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma ...

Washington, November 18, 2025—Students who enroll in short-term, job-focused training through community college noncredit programs experience modest but meaningful earnings gains and a greater likelihood of being employed after training, according to a new study published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. The study, conducted by Peter Riley Bahr of the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and Rooney Columbus of E&E Analytics, finds that workers earn about $2,000 more per year, on average, within two years of ...

November 18, 2025 – The American Pediatric Society (APS) is pleased to announce Tara O. Henderson, MD, MPH, as the recipient of the 2026 Norman J. Siegel New Member Outstanding Science Award, in recognition of her significant contributions to pediatric science. The award will be presented to Dr. Henderson during the APS Presidential Plenary at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2026 Meeting, taking place in Boston, MA, April 24-27. Established in honor of renowned nephrologist Norman J. Siegel, MD, FASN, the award celebrates early-career APS members whose scientific work demonstrates ...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating cause of memory loss and cognitive decline, for which no curative treatment is available. Among lifestyle factors, physical activity stands out as possibly one of the strongest defenders of brain health. Growing evidence links skeletal muscle function to cognitive health. Pioneering research from Florida Atlantic University and its collaborators at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research takes this evidence to the next level, revealing that the key to fighting AD may lie not just in the brain – but also in our muscles. At the center of this discovery is Cathepsin ...

A study published in Strategic Management Journal sheds light on the subtle yet significant role that unelected officials play in helping corporations secure successful contract bids. The research, led by Dr. Tony L. He of Rutgers Business School in Newark, N.J., analyzed a dataset of 14,849 public procurement contracts across 28 European countries between 2011 and 2017. “My research shows that, contrary to what many might expect, in this particular context it’s not the flashy connections to powerful elected officials that help firms most,” Dr. He explained. “Instead, ...

In a Perspective, the authors suggest that the social and humanitarian impacts of overshooting the Paris Agreement’s aspirational goal of a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in global mean temperature remain largely unknown, despite robust knowledge of physical climate impacts. Andrew Kruczkiewicz and colleagues outline five factors that policymakers and planners should take into account when considering the human impacts of climate overshoot: peak warming and duration of overshoot, localized amplification of effects, timing of arrival, adaptation limits, and dynamics of overshoot reversal. The ...

LOS ANGELES – The 2026 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC), the premier global event for optical communications and networking, will be held 15 – 19 March 2026, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California, USA. The centerpiece of the conference’s technical program is the Plenary Session, which will feature four industry luminaries: Alexis Bjorlin, Senior Vice President and General Manager for DGX Cloud, NVIDIA, USA; Julie Sheridan Eng, Chief Technology Officer, Coherent, USA; Siegbert Martin, Chief ...

A machine learning framework can distinguish molecules made by biological processes from those formed through non-biological processes and could be used to analyze samples returned by current and future planetary missions. José C. Aponte, Amirali Aghazadeh, and colleagues analyzed eight carbonaceous meteorites and ten terrestrial geologic samples using two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled with high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Using this data, the authors developed LifeTracer, a computational ...

Rhythmic electrical activity in the retina (known as pathological oscillations) has been observed in several eye diseases, including congenital stationary night blindness (CSNB) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP). These oscillations interfere with the normal transmission of visual information to the brain, often causing degraded or distorted perception. Although scientists have long known that such oscillations occur in retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the neurons responsible for sending visual signals to the brain, the cellular mechanism that drives this rhythmic activity has remained elusive. In a recent study published online in The Journal of General Physiology on October 16, ...

In magnetic materials with antisymmetric exchange interactions, novel particle-like spin textures called magnetic skyrmions can appear and be manipulated by electrons. First observed in 2009, they have been created and controlled at room temperature in many materials. Skyrmions, as nonvolatile information carriers, are key in electronic and spintronic devices. Their size can be just a few nanometers, enabling high storage densities. They require low current to move, are topologically stable, and offer nonvolatility and radiation hardness for extreme environments. Over the past decade, most published reports in the field, both experimental and theoretical, have focused on the applications ...

DARIEN, IL – The American Academy of Sleep Medicine congratulates Bairitone Health and Noctrix Health, whose innovations were selected as the people’s choice winners of the first AASM Sleep Medicine Disruptors Innovation Award. The votes were cast by attendees of Sleep Medicine Disruptors 2025, which was held in person in Austin, Texas, and livestreamed Nov. 14 - 15. Eight finalists were previously selected from among 23 entries based on the review of an expert panel of nine AASM members. The AASM assigned each ...

In light of the ongoing fifteen-year megadrought in Chile, an international team of researchers, including Francesca Pellicciotti from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), addressed a bold future scenario. Their findings: by the end of the century, the considerably worn-out glaciers will not be able to buffer a similar megadrought. They call for coordinated global climate policies to develop effective water management strategies. The results were published in Communications Earth & Environment. Could a drought have no end? Fifteen years of severe and persistent drought in Chile have already passed, and the country ...

Irvine, Calif., Nov. 18, 2025 — Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have identified stormlike circulation patterns beneath Antarctic ice shelves that are causing aggressive melting, with major implications for global sea level rise projections. In a paper published recently in Nature Geoscience, the scientists say their study is the first to examine ocean-induced ice shelf melting events from a weather timescale of just days versus seasonal or annual timeframes. This enabled them to match “ocean storm” activity with intense ice melt at Thwaites Glacier ...

Deep brain stimulation – implants in the brain that act as a kind of ‘pacemaker’ – has led to clinical improvements in half of the participants with treatment-resistant severe depression in an ‘open label’ trial. Significantly, the study, led by researchers in the UK and China, identified a telltale signature of brain activity that predicted how well individual patients responded to the treatment. This could be used in future to target the treatment at those patients most likely to benefit. Major ...

The background: Multicellular organisms (animals, plants, human) all have the ability to methylate the cytosine © base in their DNA. This process, a type of epigenetic modification, plays an important role in conditions such as cancer and processes such as aging. The findings: In this new paper, the researchers discovered that in more ‘primitive’ unicellular organisms, both the adenine and the cytosine bases are methylated. This would suggest that in some ways, these unicellular organisms are more complex than their multicellular peers. The team also found that methylation of the adenine ...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing health challenge, reducing the effectiveness of life-saving treatments and increasing the risk of complications from routine medical procedures.  To support global AMR research, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has launched the AMR portal, a central hub that connects bacterial genomes, resistance phenotypes, and functional annotations, all in one place.  The first release of the AMR portal is based upon a dataset from Imperial College London obtained from the Comprehensive Assessment of Bacterial-Based Antimicrobial resistance prediction ...

The weather patterns that produced some of Europe’s most extreme heat waves over the past three decades could prove far more lethal if they strike in today’s hotter climate, pushing weekly deaths toward levels seen during the COVID pandemic, according to a November 18 study in Nature Climate Change. “We showed that if these same weather systems were to occur after we’ve trapped a lot more heat in the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the intensity of the heat waves gets stronger and ...

 Feeling thirsty? Why not tap into the air? Even in desert conditions, there exists some level of humidity that, with the right material, can be soaked up and squeezed out to produce clean drinking water. In recent years, scientists have developed a host of promising sponge-like materials for this “atmospheric water harvesting.”  But recovering the water from these materials usually requires heat — and time. Existing designs rely on heat from the sun to evaporate water from the materials and condense it into droplets. But this step can take hours or even days.   Now, MIT engineers ...

Large language models can help improve questionnaires used to diagnose mental illness by optimizing symptom generalizability and reducing redundancy. They can even contribute to new conceptualizations of mental disorders. That is the result of an international study led by Professor Dr Joseph Kambeitz and Professor Dr Kai Vogeley from the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Cologne. The results of the study ‘The empirical structure of psychopathology is represented in large language models’ have been published in the journal Nature Mental Health. To ...

In stunning new time-lapse videos, biological nanoparticles scoot and flit across a starry field of glowing dots. Guided by the invisible chemistry of attraction, these microscopic travelers eventually group together to form perfectly round, glowing circles on a black surface. These mesmerizing new videos are made possible with LEVA (light-induced extracellular vesicle and particle adsorption), a groundbreaking new technology from Northwestern University and The Ohio State University.  LEVA is the first tool that enables ...

The University of Liverpool has unveiled an ambitious plan to position the Liverpool City Region and the UK as a global leader in AI-driven materials research, development, and innovation. Announced at the University’s annual Vice-Chancellor’s Conference, the new £100 million AI Materials Hub for Innovation (AIM-HI) will be a flagship national facility dedicated to accelerating the application of artificial intelligence in materials chemistry. Focusing on areas such as catalysis, materials for net-zero, soft matter, and product formulation, AIM-HI will drive innovation in sectors crucial to the UK economy and the transition to net zero. National Centre ...

  RAMAT GAN, Israel and New York, NY — November 18, 2025 — ARC Innovation at Sheba Medical Center and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (part of the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City) today announced a landmark three-year collaboration with NVIDIA to harness the power of artificial intelligence for genomic discovery through the application of large language model (LLM) technology. The initiative aims to pioneer the decoding of the majority of the human genome that remains poorly understood in order to unlock new pathways for disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Over the three-year period, the project will be supported by significant ...

SRL Editor-in-Chief Allison Bent has appointed Hongfeng Yang as the first deputy editor-in-chief of its journal Seismological Research Letters (SRL). Yang, a professor in the department of Earth and environmental sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, joined the editorial board of SRL as an associate editor in 2018. He will begin the deputy position on 1 December. “I’m looking forward to working more closely with Hongfeng in his new role as deputy editor. The dedication, thoughtfulness and good judgment he exercised as an associate editor will serve him ...

Despite determined efforts by countries and healthcare professionals, Europe is not on track to meet four of the five AMR targets set by the EU Council for 2030*, according to data released on EAAD. Rising AMR, together with a shortage of novel effective treatments, constitutes an evolving major public health crisis in Europe and globally. In an interconnected world, AMR further complicates the health challenges that stem from non-communicable diseases, demographic shifts and healthcare workforce shortages.   ‘Tackling AMR requires critical innovation on three key fronts: strong action for responsible antibiotic use, sustained and ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., and SINGAPORE, Nov 18, 2025 – Apriori Bio, a Flagship Pioneering company focused on developing prospective, variant-resilient vaccines, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research Infectious Diseases Labs (A*STAR IDL) announced a strategic research partnership to co-develop and evaluate next generation self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) vaccines targeting seasonal and pandemic influenza. The collaboration brings together Apriori’s Octavia™ platform for intelligent, ...