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Environment21 Mar 2025

Shrinking Andean glaciers threaten water supply of 90 million people, global policy makers warne

Shrinking Andean glaciers threaten water supply of 90 million people, global policy makers warned Shrinking glaciers in the Andes threaten the water supplies of 90 million people Andean glaciers are thinning by 0.7 metres a year, 35 percent faster than the global average Climate change is threatening the stability of the Andean glaciers as a water source and the water security of the people who rely on them Scientists argue we are not doing enough to curb the carbon emissions fueling climate change Scientists from the University of Sheffield will warn policymakers that the shrinking glaciers of the Andes threaten ...

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Medicine21 Mar 2025

Women’s earnings fall 10% four years after menopause diagnosis

Women experience a significant fall in earnings in the years following a menopause diagnosis, with more women stopping work and others working fewer hours, according to a new UCL study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Economists at UCL, University of Bergen, Stanford University and University of Delaware calculated that women experience a 4.3% reduction in their earnings, on average, in the four years following a menopause diagnosis, with losses deepening to 10% by the fourth year. This 10% reduction in earnings is approximately half of the estimated 23% loss of earnings experienced by new mothers, also ...

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Physics20 Mar 2025

Researchers capture first laser-driven, high-resolution CT scans of dense objects

A research team led by Colorado State University has achieved a new milestone in 3D X-ray imaging technology. The scientists are the first to capture high-resolution CT scans of the interior of a large, dense object – a gas turbine blade – using a compact, laser-driven X-ray source. The findings, published this week in Optica, describe the science and engineering behind this new radiographic imaging capability and its potential benefits to a range of industries, from aerospace to additive manufacturing. The project is a years-long collaboration between researchers at CSU’s Departments ...

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Medicine20 Mar 2025

Cambridge team uses powerful new MRI scans to enable life-changing surgery in first for adults with epilepsy

A new technique has enabled ultra-powerful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to identify tiny differences in patients’ brains that cause treatment-resistant epilepsy. In the first study to use this approach, it has allowed doctors at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, to offer the patients surgery to cure their condition. Previously, 7T MRI scanners – so called because they operate using a 7 Tesla magnetic field, more than double the strength of previous 3T scanners – have suffered from signal blackspots in crucial parts of the brain. But in research ...

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Space20 Mar 2025

NRL's narrow field imager launches on NASA's PUNCH mission

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Narrow Field Imager (NFI) was launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as a part of NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission on March 11 and deployed from Falcon 9 on March 12. PUNCH is a four-satellite constellation, collecting observations in low Earth orbit. It will conduct global, 3D observations of the inner heliosphere to investigate the solar corona's evolution into the solar wind. The mission is scheduled to conduct science for the next two years, following a 90-day commissioning period. The NRL-developed NFI, sponsored ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

Galapagos birds exhibit ‘road rage’ due to noise

A new study has discovered that birds in the Galápagos Islands are changing their behaviour due to traffic noise, with those frequently exposed to vehicles showing heightened levels of aggression. Published in the journal Animal Behaviour and led by experts from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and the Konrad Lorenz Research Centre at the University of Vienna, the research examined the impact of vehicle noise pollution on Galápagos yellow warblers (Setophaga petechia aureola), a songbird widespread on the archipelago. The Galápagos Islands, ...

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Technology20 Mar 2025

Groundbreaking study finds AI-driven interviews with children may boost accuracy in witness accounts

Groundbreaking Study Finds AI-Driven Interviews with Children May Boost Accuracy in Witness Accounts In a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by scholars from New York University Shanghai and Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland explored the potential of artificial intelligence to assist in sensitive child investigative interviews. The study compared how effectively a Large Language Model (LLM), specifically ChatGPT, and untrained human interviewers were able to interview children about a mock event ...

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Technology20 Mar 2025

New framework to measure economic well-being considers new and free goods and services; addition of digital goods boosts growth

Welfare measurement is among the most fundamental questions in economics. Policymakers and others use gross domestic product (GDP) as a proxy for welfare, but this application does not reflect the benefits of introducing new and free goods and services, such as digital goods, and may result in misunderstanding the economy. In a new study, researchers developed a framework to measure the welfare contributions of new and free goods and services and quantify their benefits. By applying the framework to several examples (e.g., Facebook, Smartphone cameras), the study found that these goods and services significantly increase welfare. The study ...

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Medicine20 Mar 2025

Augmented reality guidance for placing intracranial drains now clinically validated

March 20, 2025 — Placing an external ventricular drain (EVD) at bedside using augmented reality (AR) guidance is more precise than freehand placement and is associated with fewer reinterventions and complications, according to a clinical pilot study of a novel system. Frederick Van Gestel, MD, a neurosurgery resident at Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel and PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium, and colleagues report first-in-human results in Neurosurgery, the official publication of the Congress ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

How feathers develop in chickens

Inhibiting the sonic hedgehog (Shh) pathway strongly perturbs feather development in chickens by restricting feather bud outgrowth, invagination and branching, according to a study published March 20th, in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Rory Cooper and Michel Milinkovitch from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Avian feathers are intricate appendages whose forms vary substantially across species and body areas, and between juvenile and adult stages. Understanding both the developmental and evolutionary mechanisms underpinning this morphological diversity has long fascinated biologists. The morphological intricacies ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

Insomniac fruit fly mutants show enhanced memory despite severe sleep loss

Fruit fly mutants that have severe sleep deficits perform better at olfactory learning and memory tasks, according to a study published March 20th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Sheng Huang and Stephan Sigrist from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and colleagues. The paradox of enhanced memory despite sleep loss could be explained by protein kinase A (PKA) signaling in the mushroom body of the fly brain. Sleep is a dynamic process conserved from invertebrates to mammals and humans. Although sleep is thought to serve many purposes, it is often studied for its restorative roles, which ...

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Medicine20 Mar 2025

Seals can sense their own circulating blood oxygen and it keeps them from drowning

Marine mammals may have a secret weapon to survive long dives – an ability to directly sense their own circulating blood-oxygen levels that most mammals lack – allowing them to stay submerged longer and resurface before hypoxia leads to drowning, researchers report. Air-breathing marine mammals have developed a range of physiological adaptations to survive in aquatic environments, including thermoregulation to endure the pressures of the deep. However, one of the most critical evolutionary challenges for diving mammals is avoiding drowning. Despite adaptations for larger oxygen storage and tolerance to low oxygen levels, these animals still risk drowning if they ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

Infants encode short-lived hippocampal memories

Challenging assumptions about infant memory, a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows that babies as young as 12 months old can encode memories, researchers report. The findings suggest that infantile amnesia – the inability to remember our first few years of life – is more likely caused by memory retrieval failures rather than an inability to form memories in the first place. Despite infancy being a period of rapid learning, memories from this time do not persist into later childhood or adulthood. In ...

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Environment20 Mar 2025

Mountain uplift and dynamic topography shapes biodiversity over deep time

Rising mountains do more than reshape the landscape – they also drive evolutionary change, according to a new study. By simulating millions of years of tectonic uplift, researchers have uncovered a link between mountain building and biodiversity, shedding light on how Earth’s dynamic topography shapes biodiversity over deep time. Mountain ranges are widely recognized as global hotspots of terrestrial biodiversity yet only cover a relatively small proportion of the Earth’s surface, suggesting a strong connection between topographic evolution and species diversity. Mountainous terrain can promote speciation by isolating populations, ...

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Environment20 Mar 2025

Majority of carbon sequestered on land is locked in nonliving carbon reservoirs

Challenging long-held assumptions about global terrestrial carbon storage, a new study finds that the majority of carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbed by ecosystems has been locked away in dead plant material, soils, and sediments, rather than living biomass, researchers report. These new insights, which suggest that terrestrial carbon stocks are more resilient and stable than previously appreciated, are crucial for shaping future climate mitigation strategies and optimizing carbon sequestration efforts. Recent studies have shown that terrestrial carbon stocks are increasing, offsetting ...

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Earth Science20 Mar 2025

From dinosaurs to birds: the origins of feather formation

Feathers are among the most complex cutaneous appendages in the animal kingdom. While their evolutionary origin has been widely debated, paleontological discoveries and developmental biology studies suggest that feathers evolved from simple structures known as proto-feathers. These primitive structures, composed of a single tubular filament, emerged around 200 million years ago in certain dinosaurs. Paleontologists continue to discuss the possibility of their even earlier presence in the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs (the first flying vertebrates with membranous wings) around 240 million years ago. Proto-feathers are ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

Why don’t we remember being a baby? New study provides clues

Though we learn so much during our first years of life, we can’t, as adults, remember specific events from that time. Researchers have long believed we don’t hold onto these experiences because the part of the brain responsible for saving memories — the hippocampus — is still developing well into adolescence and just can’t encode memories in our earliest years. But new Yale research finds evidence that’s not the case. In a study, Yale researchers showed infants ...

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Medicine20 Mar 2025

The cell’s powerhouses: Molecular machines enable efficient energy production

Mitochondria are the powerhouses in our cells, producing the energy for all vital processes. Using cryo-electron tomography, researchers at the University of Basel, Switzerland, have now gained insight into the architecture of mitochondria at unprecedented resolution. They discovered that the proteins responsible for energy generation assemble into large “supercomplexes”, which play a crucial role in providing the cell’s energy. Most living organisms on our planet-whether plants, animals, or ...

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Environment20 Mar 2025

Most of the carbon sequestered on land is stored in soil and water

Recent studies have shown that carbon stocks in terrestrial ecosystems are increasing, mitigating around 30% of the CO2 emissions linked to human activities. The overall value of carbon sinks on the earth's surface is fairly well known—as it can be deduced from the planet's total carbon balance anthropogenic emissions, the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere and the ocean sinks—yet, researchers know very little about carbon distribution between the various terrestrial pools: living vegetation—mainly forests—and nonliving carbon pools—soil organic matter, sediments at the bottom of lakes and rivers, wetlands, ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

New US Academic Alliance for the IPCC opens critical nomination access

WASHINGTON — The American Geophysical Union and the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC today open calls for U.S. researchers to self-nominate as experts, authors and review editors for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Seventh Assessment Report through a new application portal. The IPCC nomination period opened in early March and will close in mid-April. USAA-IPCC is a newly established network of U.S. academic institutions registered as observers with the IPCC. Both observer organizations and governments may nominate experts for ...

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Medicine20 Mar 2025

Breakthrough molecular movie reveals DNA’s unzipping mechanism with implications for viral and cancer treatments

Scientists at the University of Leicester have captured the first detailed “molecular movie” showing DNA being unzipped at the atomic level – revealing how cells begin the crucial process of copying their genetic material. The groundbreaking discovery, published in the prestigious journal Nature, could have far-reaching implications, helping us to understand how certain viruses and cancers replicate. Using cutting edge cryo-electron microscopy, the team of scientists were able to visualise a helicase enzyme (nature’s DNA unzipping machine) in the process of unwinding DNA. DNA helicases are essential during DNA replication because ...

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Medicine20 Mar 2025

New function discovered for protein important in leukemia

The protein (Exportin-1) is often found in high levels in patients with leukemia, other cancers Protein was previously known to move materials out of a cell’s nucleus New findings suggest protein may also stimulate transcription, which if hijacked, could contribute to abnormal cell division (cancer) Future anti-cancer therapies that target Exportin-1’s role in transcription may be less toxic or more effective than current therapies EVANSTON, Ill. --- Researchers from Northwestern University have stumbled upon a previously unobserved function of a protein found in the cell nuclei of all flora and fauna. In addition to exporting ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

Tiny component for record-breaking bandwidth

Plasmonic modulators are tiny components that convert electrical signals into optical signals in order to transport them through optical fibres. A modulator of this kind had never managed to transmit data with a frequency of over a terahertz (over a trillion oscillations per second). Now, researchers from the group led by Jürg Leuthold, Professor of Photonics and Communications at ETH Zurich, have succeeded in doing just that. Previous modulators could only convert frequencies up to 100 or 200 gigahertz ...

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Science20 Mar 2025

In police recruitment efforts, humanizing officers can boost interest

Many U.S. police departments face a serious recruiting and staffing crisis, which has spurred a re-examination of recruitment methods. In a new study, researchers drew on the field of intergroup communication to analyze how police are portrayed in recruitment materials to determine whether humanizing efforts make a difference. The study found that presenting officers in human terms boosted participants’ interest in policing as a career. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Texas State University (TXST), ...

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Technology20 Mar 2025

Fully AI driven weather prediction system could start revolution in forecasting

A new AI weather prediction system, Aardvark Weather, can deliver accurate forecasts tens of times faster and using thousands of times less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems, according to research published today (Thursday 20 March) in Nature. Aardvark has been developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, providing a blueprint for a completely new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to transform current practices. The ...

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