UC Santa Barbara engineers have modified gallium nitride microLEDs - devices the width of a hair follicle - to control their emission direction, bringing them into range as laser replacements for short-distance optical data links.

A Colorado-led 13-year study in China found that as schistosomiasis approached elimination, disease spread shifted from village-level patterns to individual household risk factors including farming practices, sanitation, and domestic animals.

Ochsner MD Anderson Cancer Center in New Orleans has administered tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy to an adult with advanced melanoma - the first such treatment in Louisiana - following FDA approval in 2024 based on trials showing five-year responses.

Rice University engineers created a multilayer coating that keeps repelling water at temperatures up to 90 degrees Celsius by placing a thermal insulator beneath a standard superhydrophobic spray, extending functional range far beyond existing water-repelling surfaces.

A neuroimaging study in JNeurosci found that expert birders have structurally denser attention and perception brain regions compared to beginners, with those differences correlating directly with bird identification accuracy.

A Waterloo research team has used a sunlight-driven photocatalyst to convert plastic waste into acetic acid at high selectivity, offering a potential route to both reducing microplastic pollution and generating a commercially valuable chemical.

Munich astronomers have imaged SN Winny, a superluminous supernova lensed into five copies by two foreground galaxies. Its time delays could yield a new, independent measurement of the Hubble constant.

A study published in Current Biology found that horses produce their characteristic whinny using two distinct acoustic mechanisms operating simultaneously: standard laryngeal vocalization and a whistle-like resonance in the nasal passages. The combination generates the whinny's distinctive mix of high and low frequencies. This represents the first clear evidence of simultaneous dual-mechanism sound production in a land mammal, revising the understanding of how vocal complexity can be achieved beyond the larynx.

U.S. birth-dose hepatitis B vaccination rates have declined by more than 10 percentage points over the past two years, according to a study published in JAMA. The drop reverses gains made over a six-year period from approximately 2016 to 2022, and raises concern among pediatric infectious disease specialists. The birth dose is considered critical because it prevents mother-to-child transmission -- which can result in chronic infection and long-term liver damage -- during a window before any scheduled vaccine appointment.

When lifestyle influencers casually include alcohol in their social media content -- pouring wine, holding beer, sipping cocktails as part of ordinary life -- young adult viewers reliably report increased desire to drink. New research found this effect across viewers with different baseline drinking habits, challenging the assumption that alcohol promotion on social media primarily affects those already inclined to drink heavily. The findings raise questions about how alcohol marketing is regulated -- or not regulated -- on digital platforms.

A study in JAMA Pediatrics found that exposure to alcohol-promoting social media content increased the desire to drink among young adults regardless of their baseline alcohol use patterns. The effect extended across participants who were light, moderate, and heavier drinkers before the study. Social media influencers emerged as a particularly notable source of exposure, and their content normalizes alcohol consumption without the labeling and placement restrictions that govern traditional advertising.

A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that access to dialysis facilities decreases in a consistent, stepwise fashion as community socioeconomic disadvantage increases. Patients with end-stage kidney disease in the most disadvantaged communities face the greatest barriers to reaching dialysis care -- a finding with direct health consequences, since missed treatments are associated with hospitalization and death. The gradient held after accounting for geographic differences in population density.

A study published in JAMA Neurology found that adults who more closely followed healthy dietary patterns -- particularly the DASH diet and diets characterized by low hyperinsulinemic potential -- scored better on multiple measures of cognitive function. The observational findings cannot establish that diet causes better cognition, but the consistency of the associations across multiple dietary indices and cognitive tests adds to a growing body of evidence for dietary factors in cognitive aging.

Research from UCLA Health found that COPD patients using dry powder inhalers had a modestly lower rate of disease exacerbations compared to those using pressurized metered-dose inhalers, while generating substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions. The study adds clinical evidence to environmental arguments for a device transition already underway in some European health systems, and challenges the assumption that greener medical choices require clinical compromise.

When plants activate their immune systems in response to pathogens or pests, they suppress growth -- a metabolic trade-off that costs agricultural yield. New research identifies the hormonal mechanism behind this conflict and demonstrates it can be partially reversed with targeted cytokinin treatment. Plants treated with this hormone while immunologically active maintained their defenses against pathogens while recovering growth rates closer to uninflamed controls. The work remains in model plant systems and has not yet been tested in crop species.

A study from Johns Hopkins Medicine found that patients with early Lyme disease present with meaningfully different symptom profiles depending on sex and menopausal status. Women reported higher rates of certain systemic symptoms, while men showed different patterns of musculoskeletal involvement. Post-menopausal women showed symptom presentations distinct from both pre-menopausal women and men. The findings suggest that hormonal factors shape the clinical picture of early Lyme disease and that clinicians should be aware of sex-specific presentations.

A Canada-wide initiative engaged approximately 5,000 students in building and monitoring artificial bee nesting structures -- 'bee hotels' -- then used DNA barcoding to identify the wild bee species that used them. Published in Metabarcoding and Metagenomics, the study found that student-generated data was sufficiently precise for legitimate conservation science, identifying multiple species per site and detecting geographic variation in community composition consistent with known bee distributions across Canada.

Southwest Research Institute has developed a new chemical synthesis approach for producing oximes -- the primary antidotes used against nerve agent and organophosphate pesticide poisoning -- that eliminates toxic byproducts from the production process while achieving higher product yield. The advance targets a recognized gap in U.S. medical countermeasure manufacturing capacity at a time when domestic production of critical antidotes has been identified as a national security priority.

The business technology faculty at the University of Miami Herbert Business School earned the top national ranking for research productivity in information systems for 2025, measured by publications in the field's highest-tier journals. The result places Miami ahead of long-established programs at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and the University of Texas. The ranking reflects roughly a decade of deliberate investment in faculty hiring and research support, culminating in a first-time top position.

A team at the University of Colorado Boulder has fabricated optical microresonators -- tiny on-chip devices that trap and circulate light -- with quality factors reaching record levels for integrated photonic platforms. The devices hold light in a loop hundreds of thousands of times longer than ordinary optical components, enabling extreme sensitivity to physical changes in the environment. The advance could improve precision sensing for navigation, chemistry, and biomedical detection, and has potential applications in quantum information systems and optical frequency combs.

Laws named after crime or tragedy victims consistently attract higher public support than identically worded legislation with neutral names. Experimental research finds this advantage operates through sympathy for the victim, not through any change in how people evaluate the policy itself. The finding raises questions about whether emotionally activated support reflects genuine democratic preference or a mechanism that bypasses substantive policy evaluation entirely.

Earth's magnetic poles have reversed hundreds of times over geologic history, but new statistical analysis suggests the known record is systematically incomplete. Researchers applied density analysis to the geomagnetic reversal timescale and identified specific time intervals where reversal spacing is statistically anomalous -- periods that may contain reversals never captured in the geological archive. The work has implications for understanding the dynamics of Earth's core and for interpreting current changes in the geomagnetic field.

Federal criminal environmental enforcement by the EPA tends to cluster in wealthier counties rather than in communities facing the worst pollution, according to a study from Washington State University. The analysis challenges a common assumption that the agency's toughest sanctions serve as a backstop for environmental justice. Instead, the pattern suggests enforcement follows economic and legal infrastructure that makes prosecution easier, not environmental need -- an equity gap with significant policy implications.

The Korea Institute of Energy Research has developed a robotic system that evaluates catalyst performance without human intervention at any stage. The platform handles sample identification, loading, measurement, and consumables replacement at 45 times the speed of manual work, with improved precision from eliminating operator variability. The technology targets a persistent bottleneck in clean energy research: the slow, labor-intensive process of screening new materials for hydrogen production and related applications.

When Hurricane Ian struck Florida in 2022, insured losses came in at roughly double what catastrophe models had predicted. That kind of gap between model output and real-world damage is what the Consortium for Enhancing Resilience and Catastrophe Modeling (CERCat) is working to close. A joint initiative of Lehigh and Rice universities backed by Swiss Re, Munich Re, and other major industry players, CERCat held its first major convening in February 2025 to align researchers and insurers on the most critical gaps in disaster science.