Anita Say Chan, an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has authored a new book that identifies how the eugenics movement foreshadows the predatory data tactics used in today's tech industry. Her book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, was released this month by the University of California Press. Over a century ago, the eugenics movement sought to eliminate "undesirable" traits in society through selective breeding (sterilization). It was biased against marginalized groups ...

EL PASO, Texas (Jan. 9, 2025) – If building strength and muscle mass is part of your New Year’s Resolution, you may want to add a new routine to your workout. Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), or electrical muscle stimulation for short, uses electrical currents to contract muscles. The stimulation devices are easy to use and widely available on the market, according to Sudip Bajpeyi, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at The University of Texas at El Paso, but he has often wondered, “Can these stimulators offer ...

The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture (UTIA) has received a $210,000 grant from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to support ongoing integrated pest management (IPM) programs across Tennessee.   An environmentally sensitive approach to pest management that emphasizes affordability and long-term sustainability, IPM practices have been implemented statewide courtesy of UT Extension specialists in fields such as agronomy, weed management, entomology, plant pathology, soil health and pesticide education. The recently ...

Key takeaways Both intuition and past research suggest that whether people deem someone trustworthy depends on that person’s past behavior and reputation for betrayal. In a series of experiments, psychologists found that subjects regarded those who previously exhibited that behavior as less trustworthy. However, when the betrayal benefited them or had no effect on them, participants regarded the betrayer as trustworthy.  This pattern was largely consistent across the types of relationships studied: friendships, romantic relationships and professional relationships. Imagine this scenario: Two people cheat on their partners with each other ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Antibiotic-resistant Salmonella is a serious public health concern that has increased in recent years as the bacteria have developed ways to survive drugs. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people can get Salmonella from eating contaminated food products or from infected people or animals — typically via unintentional contact with feces via touching hands or stroking a pet. However, a team of Penn State researchers have found that household dogs are an overlooked transmission point for zoonotic pathogens such as nontyphoidal Salmonella, which can cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps, with some ...

For decades, catalysts have been unsung heroes in daily life. These workhorses transform a starting material into a product or fuel with lower energy, like the yeast in bread making and human-made catalysts for converting raw materials into fuels more efficiently and sustainably. A promising class of these helpful substances, called single atom catalysts, has emerged, and researchers need new methods to better understand them. More specifically, they want to know how the structure of the sites where chemical reactions occur, called active sites, affects the catalyst’s ability to speed up the chemical reaction rate, known as the activity.  In an important step forward, researchers ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — While physical neglect is understudied compared to physical, sexual or emotional abuse, neglect is just as damaging to children’s social development, a new study indicates. More than 9,150 individuals, nearly 41% of whom retrospectively reported some form of maltreatment before age 12 or reaching the sixth grade, were included in the study, published in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect. The project explored the impact of abuse or neglect on three dimensions of children’s structural peer relationships — whether maltreated youth were less social/more withdrawn, less popular with or avoided by their peers and how ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Richard Alley, Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, was awarded the National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony on Jan. 3. Alley was one of 23 individuals and two organizations awarded the 2025 National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honors for achievement and leadership in science and technology. “Dr. Alley is deeply deserving of this most prestigious honor, and it is heartening to know that our nation sees in him what the Penn State community has known for decades,” said Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi. “Dr. ...

Yang Zhang, PhD, and Jinjun Shi, PhD, both of the Center for Nanomedicine and Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are co-senior authors of a paper published in ACS Nanoscience Au, “Lipid Nanoparticle Delivery of mRNA and siRNA for Concurrent Restoration of Tumor Suppressor and Inhibition of Tumorigenic Driver in Prostate Cancer.”   How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? Most cancers occur when there is an imbalance of cellular growth and inhibition, causing cells to grow rapidly and form tumors in the body. For example, ...

A research team led by the University of Oxford has carried out the most comprehensive assessment to date of how logging and conversion to oil palm plantations affect tropical forest ecosystems. The results demonstrate that logging and conversion have significantly different and cumulative environmental impacts. The results have been published today (10 January) in Science. Understanding how different aspects of tropical forests are affected by logging and conversion to oil palm plantations is important for identifying priority habitats for conservation and restoration. It can also help aid decisions on land use – for instance, whether a logged forest should be ...

Chimpanzees bear genetic adaptations that help them thrive in their different forest and savannah habitats, some of which may protect against malaria, according to a study by an international team led by UCL researchers. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing over 98% of their DNA with humans, and the scientists say that their findings, published in Science, can not only teach us about our own evolutionary history, but also about the biology of malaria infection in humans. Chimpanzees are endangered ...

Replacing conventional building materials with materials modified to store carbon dioxide could move the planet closer to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study by Elisabeth Van Roijen and colleagues. The researchers calculate that full replacement of conventional building materials with these CO2-sequestering alternatives could store as much as 16.6 ± 2.8 gigatons of CO2 each year – an equivalent to about 50% of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions in 2021. Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, along with decreasing emissions, is important for slowing ...

In this Policy Forum, John Bistline and colleagues analyze the potential impacts of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finalized power plant rules regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Using nine models of the U.S. electric sector and energy systems, the researchers found that the rules would speed up the reduction of emissions in the power sector. Under the rules, the levels of carbon dioxide emitted by the sector would be 61%-81% below 2005 levels by 2040. Under current policies, emission levels would be 51% to 83% below 2005 levels by 2040, ...

Samuel Arman and colleagues’ close examination of tooth microwear among living and extinct kangaroo species suggests that most of the species living in Australia during the Late Pleistocene had a broad, generalist diet rather than being specialized grazers. This broad diet likely allowed them to survive the glacial-interglacial cycles that drove fluctuations in vegetation on the continent. The findings add more evidence to the idea that human hunting, rather than failure to adapt to climate changes, ...

Male and female mice both prefer social interaction with female mice under normal conditions, but both switch to preferring males when their survival is threatened, according to a new study by Anqi Wei and colleagues. These preferences are mediated by different neuronal circuitry in male and female mice related to dopaminergic neurons in the brain’s ventral tegmental area, the researchers found. The findings offer a clearer picture of the underlying biology of socio-sexual preferences. These preferences are essential for successful reproduction, ...

Eight years of work. A collaboration between the Laboratory of Neuroethology of Non-Human Primates of the Department of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Parma, led by Luca Bonini, and a team from the Biorobotics Institute of the Sant'Anna School of Pisa, coordinated by Alberto Mazzoni, principal investigator at the Computational Neuroengineering Lab, with the contribution of Silvestro Micera, professor in Bioingeneering. Support from three projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and as many Italian national projects, including MNESYS and BRIEF. These are just some of the elements of a groundbreaking study published in ...

Construction materials such as concrete and plastic have the potential to lock away billions of tons of carbon dioxide, according to a new study by civil engineers and earth systems scientists at the University of California, Davis and Stanford University. The study, published Jan. 10 in Science, shows that combined with steps to decarbonize the economy, storing CO2 in buildings could help the world achieve goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “The potential is pretty large,” said Elisabeth Van ...

By Beth Miller In mechanobiology, cells’ forces have been considered fundamental to their enhanced function, including fast migration. But a group of researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found that cells can generate and use lower force yet move faster than cells generating and using high forces, turning the age-old assumption of force on its head. The laboratory of Amit Pathak, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, found that groups of cells moved faster with lower force when adhered to soft surfaces with aligned collagen fibers. Cells have been thought to continually generate ...

Researchers led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a breakthrough technique that could lay the foundations for detecting the universe’s “dark matter” and bring scientists closer than before to uncovering the secrets of the cosmos. The things we can see on Earth and in space – visible matter like rocks and stars – make up only a small portion of the universe, as scientists believe that 85 per cent of matter in the cosmos comprises invisible dark matter. This mysterious substance ...

AMES, Iowa – Neal Iverson started with two lessons in ice physics when asked to describe a research paper about glacier ice flow that has just been published by the journal Science.   First, said the distinguished professor emeritus of Iowa State University’s Department of the Earth, Atmosphere, and Climate, there are different types of ice within glaciers. Parts of glaciers are at their pressure-melting temperature and are soft and watery.   That temperate ice is like an ice cube left on a kitchen counter, with meltwater ...

Prehistoric kangaroos in southern Australia had a more general diet than previously assumed, giving rise to new ideas about their survival and resilience to climate change, and the final extinction of the megafauna, a new study has found. The new research, a collaboration between palaeontologists from Flinders University and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), used advanced dental analysis techniques to study microscopic wear patterns on fossilised kangaroo teeth. The findings, published in Science, suggest that many species of kangaroos were generalists, able to adapt to diverse diets in response to environmental changes. More ...

The US National Academy of Inventors (NAI) announced the 2024 Class of Fellows on December 10, 2024. Professor Kaibin Huang of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), Faculty of Engineering, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), was elected a 2024 Fellow in recognition of his inventions and contributions in tackling real-world issues. Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on ...

Professor Charles Schencking, Professor of History of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), has been elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (the Academy). The Australian Academy of the Humanities was established in 1969 by Royal Charter to advance knowledge of, and the pursuit of excellence in, the Humanities. It is an independent, not-for-profit organisation with a Fellowship of over 730 distinguished humanities researchers, leaders, and practitioners ...

A study of more than 400 Asian, Black and Hispanic women who had recently given birth found that racism through microaggressions may be linked to higher blood pressure during the period after their baby was born, according to a new study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. More than one-third of the mothers reported experiencing at least one microaggression related to being a woman of color during or after their pregnancy. The research conducted with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania ...

About The Study: In this nationwide cohort study in the Republic of Korea, postdiagnosis weight gain was associated with an increased risk of heart failure after breast cancer development, with risk escalating alongside greater weight gain. The findings underscore the importance of effective weight intervention in the oncological care of patients with breast cancer, particularly within the first few years after diagnosis, to protect cardiovascular health. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Dong Wook Shin, MD, DrPH, MBA, email dwshin@skku.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this ...