WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Wavelogix, a manufacturer of novel, patented concrete strength sensors invented at Purdue University’s College of Engineering, has received a $500,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase IIB grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. The grant builds upon an SBIR Phase II grant awarded in 2024. The Phase IIB project is scheduled to end in December 2026. Luna Lu, Wavelogix’s ...

Californians have long dealt with wildfire smoke as a seasonal fact of life, but those fires have become more intense and frequent, raising the profile of wildfire smoke as a public health issue. Now, a study led by researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds that the time between multi-day smoke events is shrinking — leaving communities with less time to recover before smoke returns.  The new study, published March 11 in the journal GeoHealth, found that in California the window of cleaner air between smoke waves shrank by more than 60% from 2006 to 2020. The study also finds that ...

Employment can be a powerful gateway to independence, dignity and belonging. Yet for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), that gateway remains limited. Although work supports better health, social connection and a sense of purpose, only about 15% of individuals with IDD are employed in competitive, integrated work settings. This disparity persists despite federal programs like supported employment, which offers ongoing job coaching to help people with significant disabilities find and keep competitive jobs, and customized employment, which adapts job roles to match the strengths and needs of both employees and employers. This highlights a critical gap ...

Medical debt is associated with deferred dental care, medical care, and mental health care, even among people with health insurance, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study found that 42.3% of people with medical debt delayed dental care compared with 17.7% of those without—almost 2.4 times as many; 23.0% of people with medical debt delayed medical care compared with just 5.3% of those without—about 4.3 times as many; and 14% of people with medical ...

The American Association of Immunologists (AAI) is pleased to announce the appointment of Anand Balasubramani, PhD, as its inaugural Chief Scientific Programs Officer (CSPO), effective March 25, 2026. This newly established executive role reflects AAI’s commitment to strengthening its scientific programming, expanding its thought leadership, and supporting the rapidly evolving field of immunology. Dr. Balasubramani brings more than a decade of leadership experience in scientific publishing, program development, and ...

Prior authorization, a process that requires physicians to obtain approval from health care insurers before certain treatments are covered, may keep patients from filling prescriptions for two critical heart failure drugs, a new study shows.  Led by NYU Langone Health researchers, the analysis focused on angiotensin receptor-neprilysin inhibitors (ARNIs) and sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, which are pillars of modern heart failure treatment. The drugs have no generic alternatives and can cost hundreds of dollars out of pocket. While they have been shown to substantially reduce the risk of death when added to standard therapy, ...

Three principles - transparency, credit, and accountability – should form the foundation for “responsible authorship”, argues a working group comprising scholars, scientists and journal editors. In an article published March 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the group, led by PLOS’ Chief Scientific Officer Veronique Kiermer, states that contributions worthy of authorship should be determined by who has accountability for the research, and that all who claim the credit implied by authorship must assume that accountability. Who ...

Managing complex medical conditions often requires the simultaneous use of multiple different drugs, referred to as polypharmacy. While necessary, this significantly increases the risk of drug–drug interactions (DDIs), which can either enhance or decrease therapeutic effects or trigger adverse drug reactions (ADRs), potentially leading to longer hospital stays or even life-threatening outcomes. In recent years, researchers have increasingly turned to deep learning models to predict DDIs. Although these models often outperform traditional methods, they are usually tested under idealized conditions, in which training and test data are randomly split, failing to reflect real-world ...

Cerebral blood flow is essential for normal brain function and often perturbed in neurological disease. If one shines a source of coherent light on perfused tissue, the detected speckles, or “grains” of light fluctuate, or “dance”, at a rate proportional to blood flow in the volume  sampled by the light. In brain tissue, this concept can be harnessed to measure the cerebral blood flow index (CBFi). However, to date, implementations of this principle for noninvasive adult human brain monitoring—collectively known as diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS)—have achieved limited brain sensitivity. This is because the brain is 1–2 ...

Ultrashort mid-infrared (mid-IR) laser pulses are essential for applications such as molecular spectroscopy, nonlinear microscopy, and biomedical imaging, but their generation often relies on complex and power-intensive systems that are difficult to implement outside of specialized laboratories. These systems usually require high pump powers, elaborate optical setups, and precise alignment, which can limit their widespread adoption and practical use in everyday research and clinical settings. In a paper made available online on 28 November 2025 and published in Volume 62, Issue 1 of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics on 01 February 2026, ...

A collaborative research team led by Professor Kaori Sakurai at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, together with Associate Professor Hiroaki Itoh and Professor Masayuki Inoue at Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the University of Tokyo, has uncovered a previously unknown mechanism of action of yaku’amide B, a structurally complex peptidic natural product derived from deep-sea sponge found in the waters near Yakushima Island, Japan. Natural products often exhibit multifaceted biological activities due to their structural complexity, interacting transiently with multiple biomolecules. Yaku’amide B ...

Antibiotic treatments can affect the composition of the community of bacteria living in the gut, known as the gut microbiome, for a long time. A new study shows that certain types of antibiotics can be linked to changes in the gut microbiome as long as four to eight years after treatment. The findings have now been published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine. Antibiotics can be life-saving in serious infections, but epidemiological studies have also indicated links between high antibiotic use and an increased risk of certain health conditions, such as type 2 diabetes and gastrointestinal infections. The reasons for ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The effects of spinal cord injuries are complex and multifaceted. People lose not only the ability to control the movement of their limbs, but also the ability to receive sensory feedback from them. Both are critical to generate the coordinated movement involved in walking. Now, a team of researchers from Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital, and VA Providence Healthcare has shown progress in restoring two-way communication across a damaged site of the spinal cord. In a study in Nature ...

Electron movement and structures described in quantum physics allow researchers to better understand how and why materials like superconductors behave as they do. Rice University researchers Jianwei Huang and Ming Yi have developed a new capability, magnetoARPES, building on angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) that allows researchers to study quantum behaviors they have been unable to resolve using ARPES alone.  MagnetoARPES adds a tunable magnetic field, external to the sample, to ARPES. This allows researchers to probe the full electronic response to a magnetic field, giving insights into why certain collective behaviors of electrons develop. Magnetic ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – Drug delivery researchers have vastly improved the potential of genetic therapies by overcoming the challenge of consistently getting genes and gene-editing tools where they need to be within cells. Findings of the study spearheaded by Oregon State University College of Pharmacy graduate student Antony Jozić were published today in Nature Biotechnology. When gene therapies enter a cell, they are often sent to lysosomes, the cell’s trash and recycling centers, where therapeutic genetic material is broken down ...

Mussels baked by the billions. Insect larvae cooked inside scorched cherries. Baby birds plummeted to their deaths from their overheating nests. But some species did just fine during the 2021 North American heat wave, according to a new study published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution. With such events projected to become more frequent and intense due to climate change—and 2026 on track to be the hottest year ever—understanding these differing effects is vitally important, the researchers say. “The heat wave had widespread ecological effects, including an almost 400-per-cent increase in wildfire activity and negatively affecting more than three-quarters ...

A certain blood protein regarded as an early indicator of Alzheimer’s disease also appears to play a role in other disorders. Researchers at DZNE and the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH) at the University of Tübingen have found that elevated levels of phosphorylated tau protein (pTau) also occur in two lesser-known conditions that primarily affect the heart and kidneys. These findings open up new perspectives for improved diagnostics and were published this week in the journal “Nature Medicine”. They are based on data from 280 older individuals from Germany, ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 10:00 GMT / 06:00 ET WEDNESDAY 11 MARCH 2026 New research from the University of Oxford published today (11 March) shows that cold snaps and heavy rain can stunt growth and reduce survival prospects in UK great tit nestlings. However, breeding earlier within a season appears to buffer against many of these weather-related effects. The study relies on 60 years of data for over 80,000 individual wild great tits in Oxford’s Wytham Woods, combined with daily historical weather records. Researchers identified the coldest, wettest and hottest days of ...

The climate measures currently in place are unlikely to meet Paris Climate Agreement targets. Whether further political measures can move us closer to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees and combating climate change depends heavily on public opinion and political support. Researchers at ETH Zurich led by Keith Smith, Senior Researcher in Professor Thomas Bernauer's research group, conducted a large-scale survey across 13 EU countries to find out which measures are publicly and politically acceptable, and why.  The study aimed not only to gauge ...

Building protection against infectious diseases with nanostructured vaccines Wyss Institute’s DoriVac combined vaccine and adjuvant technology uses nanoscale precision enabled by DNA origami to induce broad immunity against infectious viruses By Benjamin Boettner (Boston) — The COVID-19 pandemic brought messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to the forefront of global health care. After their clinical trial stages, the first COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was administered on 8 December 2020 and mathematical models suggest that mRNA vaccines prevented at ...

Embargoed copy of the research paper available on request Scientists have uncovered the first robust evidence of a black hole and neutron star crashing together but orbiting in an oval path rather than a perfect circle just before they merged. This discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how these cosmic pairs form and evolve. Researchers from the University of Birmingham, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics published their findings today (11 Mar) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Most neutron star-black hole pairs are expected to adopt circular orbits ...

A new study in Health Economics indicates that the rapid expansion of online sports betting in the US may be increasing risky alcohol consumption among young men. Using national survey data and modern policy‐evaluation methods, investigators compared substance use across US states that have legalized sports betting since 2018 versus those that have not. The team found that legalizing online sports betting has led to a significant rise—around 10%—in binge‐drinking frequency in men aged 35 years and younger who already report binge drinking, while not affecting smoking rates. The authors noted that their data rely on self-reported ...

North Korean defectors who resettled in South Korea share genetics but markedly contrasting early-life exposures with South Korean residents. Research published in the Journal of Internal Medicine compared overall and site-specific cancer incidence rates between North Korean defectors and native South Koreans. Using the Korean National Health Insurance database, researchers matched 25,798 North Korean defectors and 1,276,601 South Korean residents. Defectors had higher risks of infection-related cancers (such as liver and cervical cancers) and lower risks of breast, colon, and prostate ...

A study in Economic Inquiry reveals how total abortion bans are reshaping public health systems and safety‐net programs in the United States. Using state‐level data from 2017–2023, Lilly Springer, a PhD candidate at the University of Kansas, found that states with full abortion bans (after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion with the Dobbs decision in 2022) experienced a 1.6% increased birth rate in 2023. They also experienced 4.3% and 2.1% increases in participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program ...

Weather prediction has rapidly changed in recent years with the emergence of forecasting systems that leverage artificial intelligence. Such AI models display an impressive computational speed-up of weather forecasts compared with traditional models. New research published in Weather assessed the energy consumption, and therefore the carbon footprint, of such weather forecasting models. Investigators found that the training aspect of AI models consumes considerable energy, but this consumption is offset by the models’ ...