Houston, we have a problem. The ‘Space City’ boasts 50 buildings over 150 meters tall. These were designed to withstand hurricanes, to which Texas is prone. But on May 16th, 2024, a derecho – a wide, long-lived windstorm associated with rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms – managed to cause unexpected damage to many of the tall buildings downtown. The socio-economic impact was significant, due to traffic disruptions, businesses temporarily closing, and the need for repairs. Why ...

Optical atomic clocks can increase the precision of time and geographic position a thousandfold in our mobile phones, computers, and GPS systems. However, they are currently too large and complex to be widely used in society. Now, a research team from Purdue University, USA, and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has developed a technology that, with the help of on-chip microcombs, could make ultra-precise optical atomic clock systems significantly smaller and more accessible – with significant benefits for navigation, autonomous vehicles, and geo-data monitoring. Today, our mobile phones, computers, ...

Scientists have now mapped the forces acting inside a proton, showing in unprecedented detail how quarks—the tiny particles within—respond when hit by high-energy photons. The international team includes experts from the University of Adelaide who are exploring the structure of sub-atomic matter to try and provide further insight into the forces that underpin the natural world. “We have used a powerful computational technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics to map the forces acting inside ...

Four young children have gained life-changing improvements in sight following treatment with a pioneering new genetic medicine through UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital, with the support of MeiraGTx. The children were born with a severe impairment to their sight due to a rare genetic deficiency that affects the AIPL1 gene. The condition, a form of retinal dystrophy, means those affected are born with only sufficient sight to distinguish between light and darkness. The gene defect causes ...

Workplace bullying affects not only the employee’s sleep but their partner’s too, according to new research published today. Exposure to bullying by superiors and/or colleagues has been linked to a variety of negative health outcomes, such as sleep problems. Now research by the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, and Complutense University of Madrid and Seville University in Spain, sheds light on the short-term consequences of workplace bullying on various indicators of sleep. These include waking up too early (sleep severity), interference with daily life (sleep impact) and dissatisfaction with own sleep (sleep satisfaction). Writing in ...

A new study led by the University of Cambridge has revealed that as our springs and summers get hotter and drier, the UK wildfire season is being stretched and intensified. More fires, taking hold over more months of the year, are causing more carbon to be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Fires on peatlands, which are carbon-rich, can almost double global fire-driven carbon emissions. Researchers found that despite accounting for only a quarter of the total UK land area that burns each year, dwarfed by moor and heathland, peatland fires have caused up to 90% of annual UK fire-driven carbon emissions since 2001 – with emissions ...

A new USC study reveals a dramatic surge in building collapses in the ancient Egyptian port city of Alexandria, directly linked to rising sea levels and seawater intrusion. Once a rare occurrence, building collapses in Alexandria — one of the world’s oldest cities, often called the “bride of the Mediterranean” for its beauty — have accelerated from approximately one per year to an alarming 40 per year over the past decade, the researchers found. “The true cost of this loss extends far beyond bricks and mortar. We are witnessing the gradual disappearance of historic coastal ...

DALLAS, Feb. 20, 2025 — The American Heart Association, a global force devoted to changing the future of health for all, and Walgreens, one of the nation's largest community-based pharmacies, are stepping up to support the Association’s Nation of Lifesavers™ movement nationwide. Walgreens will lead efforts in its stores and communities to raise awareness of CPR and drive CPR training and consumer support of the Association’s ...

One of nature’s most disliked creatures may very well unlock a breakthrough in disaster response. A multidisciplinary Purdue University research team is recreating mosquito antennae to better study their sensitivity to vibrations. Should the research prove fruitful, it could lead to improvements in monitoring and detecting natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Research groups under Purdue professors Pablo Zavattieri and Ximena Bernal conducted this work, which is published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia. “We’re still in the early stages but we’re ...

Fetal acetaminophen exposure increases the likelihood that a child will develop attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a study published Feb. 6 in Nature Mental Health.   Prior research shows that upward of 70% of pregnant women use acetaminophen during pregnancy to control pain or reduce fever. The drug, which is the active ingredient of many pain-relief medications, is one of the few considered safe to take during pregnancy by the U.S. Food and Drug ...

‘The most common number of therapy sessions people access is one’ Common in other countries but not in the U.S., single-session interventions are designed to treat patients in just one meeting Lab at Northwestern offers digital single-session interventions for youth in nine languages CHICAGO --- Seeking mental health help is a significant step, but that first intake session can often feel more like paperwork than progress, and a significant proportion of people “drop out” or never return for a second visit, previous research has shown.  “The most common number of sessions ...

A research team led by Rumi Chunara - an NYU associate professor with appointments in both the Tandon School of Engineering and the School of Global Public Health –  has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that uses satellite imagery to track urban green spaces more accurately than prior methods, critical to ensuring healthy cities. To validate their approach, the researchers tested the system in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city where several team members are based. Karachi proved an ideal test case with its mix of dense urban areas and varying vegetation conditions. Accepted for publication by the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies, ...

The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is honoring Gordon Keller, Ph.D., with this year’s ISSCR Achievement Award. Dr. Keller is the Director of the McEwen Stem Cell Institute at the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, Canada. He will present his research at the ISSCR 2025 Annual Meeting taking place in Hong Kong 11-14 June 2025. “Gordon Keller's groundbreaking work in regenerative medicine has illuminated the path to transforming human health,” said Andrea Ditadi, Group Leader, San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-TIGET), Italy, who led the nomination of Dr. Keller. “From ...

The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is honoring Yonatan Stelzer, Ph.D. with the 2025 ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award. Dr. Selzer is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. The award recognizes the exceptional achievements of an investigator in the early part of his or her independent career in stem cell research. Dr. Stelzer will present his work at the ISSCR 2025 Annual Meeting taking place in Hong Kong 11-14 June 2025. “Yonatan Stelzer’s innovative approach to real-time, single-cell ...

U.S. outpatient prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin increased 2- to 10-fold above pre-pandemic rates, respectively, to treat COVID-19, despite strong evidence disproving their effectiveness, new UCLA-led research shows. Nearly three million COVID-related prescriptions were issued in the three and a half years between January 30, 2020 and June 30, 2023, totaling $272 million in estimated spending. Usage was three times higher among adults aged 65 and older compared with those aged 18 to 64. Ivermectin use in particular was higher among people living in the most socially vulnerable neighborhoods and markedly higher in the Southern ...

Respiratory diseases are a challenging problem to treat. Inhalable medicines are a promising solution that depend on the ability to deliver tiny particles known as aerosols to the correct location in the lungs at the correct dosage.  How effectively this works can get complicated, depending on the drug, delivery method and patient. This is because it is difficult to predict just how much medicine gets in and where it goes in the lung. Similar challenges exist when thinking about measuring an ...

Six Lehigh University professors have been named Senior Members of the National Academy of Inventors. The 2025 cohort comprises 162 academic inventors representing 64 NAI Member Institutions across the United States. Collectively, they are named inventors on over 1200 U.S. patents. “This year’s class comes from a multitude of impressive fields and research backgrounds from across the world,” said NAI President Paul R. Sanberg. “We applaud their pursuit of commercialization to ensure their groundbreaking technologies ...

A team of researchers has outlined a new approach for better understanding the depths of animal consciousness, a method that may yield new insights into the similarities and differences among living organisms.   The essay, which appears in the journal Science, describes a “marker method” that scientists can use to assess animal consciousness. It involves identifying behavioral and anatomical features associated with conscious processing in humans and searching for similar properties in nonhumans. By making progress in the science of animal consciousness, the authors propose, we can make progress on foundational questions about the nature of consciousness, ...

Inspired by the cooperation of cells in tissues, researchers have developed a robotic collective system capable of transitioning between rigid and solid structures that can also support hundreds of times its own weight. The advancement overcomes a core challenge in the development of so-called “robotic materials” – cohesive networks of individual robotic units that function as a single dynamic, adaptive structure. Realizing these systems presents a fundamental challenge: this “material” must at once be strong and stiff enough to support loads, ...

A novel machine learning framework – Mal-ID – can decipher an individual’s immune system’s record of past infections and diseases, according to a new study, providing a powerful tool with the potential for diagnosing autoimmune disorders, viral infections, and vaccine responses with precision. Traditional clinical diagnostic methods for autoimmune diseases or other immunological pathologies tend to rely on a combination of physical examination, patient history, and various laboratory testing for cellular or molecular abnormalities – a lengthy process often complicated by initial misdiagnoses and ambiguous systems. These approaches make limited use of data from ...

Researchers have reported a method for breaking down commercial polymers like Plexiglass into monomers, a form more desirable for reuse. This could help alleviate the growing plastic waste stream. Most current plastic recycling methods rely on macroscopic mechanical shredding, cleaning and reprocessing. As a result, the properties degrade relative to the virgin polymer. Chemical decomposition to the original monomer would enable more thorough purification and then repolymerization to restore ideal performance. Here, Hyun Suk Wang and colleagues report the discovery that in dichlorobenzene solvent, violet light irradiation ...

High-performance computing (HPC) systems – advanced computing ensembles that harness deliver massive processing power – are used for a range of applications, and the demand for them has increased with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). However, for both traditional uses and to advance the power of AI, technical advances in HPC are greatly needed, say Ewa Deelman and colleagues in a Policy Forum. “With international competition for leadership in computing intensifying, without a renewed commitment, ...

Scientists have discovered a potentially greener way to produce a crucial industrial chemical used to make many everyday products from plastics and textiles to antifreeze and disinfectants, according to a new study published in Science and co-authored by  Tulane University chemical engineer Matthew Montemore. The breakthrough could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacture of ethylene oxide, which has an estimated $40 billion global market. The current production process requires chlorine, which is toxic and ...

Safety critical components for aircraft and Formula 1 racing cars could one day be 3D printed via a new technique, developed by researchers at UCL and the University of Greenwich, that substantially reduces imperfections in the manufacturing process. The technique was developed after the team used advanced X-ray imaging to observe the causes of imperfections that formed in complex 3D printed metal alloy components. If this technique becomes widely deployed it could make a range of these components, from artificial hip joints to aircraft parts, stronger and more durable. The study, published in Science, observes the forces at play during ...

Rapid, localized heat management is essential for electronic devices and could have applications ranging from wearable materials to burn treatment. While so-called thermoelectric materials convert temperature differences to electrical voltage and vice versa, their efficiency is often limited, and their production is costly and wasteful. In a new paper published in Science, researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) used a 3D printing technique to fabricate high-performance thermoelectric materials, reducing production costs significantly. Thermoelectric coolers, also called solid-state ...