Light can behave in very unexpected ways when you squeeze it into small spaces. In a new paper in the journal Science, Mark Brongersma, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, and doctoral candidate Skyler Selvin describe the novel way they have used sound to manipulate light that has been confined to gaps only a few nanometers across – allowing the researchers exquisite control over the color and intensity of light mechanically. The findings could have broad implications in fields ranging from computer and virtual reality displays to 3D holographic imagery, optical communications, ...

In a study published today, UNSW Sydney researchers found that the underwater songs of leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) in Antarctica share structural similarities with the nursery rhymes often sung by humans to their young. “Leopard seal songs have a surprisingly structured temporal pattern,” says Lucinda Chambers, a UNSW PhD candidate and lead author of the study. “When we compared their songs to other studies of vocal animals and of human music, we found their information entropy — a measure of how predictable or random ...

An international research team has uncovered that natural interbreeding in the wild between tomato plants and potato-like species from South America about 9 million years ago gave rise to the modern-day potato.  In a study publishing in the Cell Press journal Cell, researchers suggest this ancient evolutionary event triggered the formation of the tuber, the enlarged underground structure that stores nutrients found in plants like potatoes, yams, and taros.  “Our findings show how a hybridization event between species can spark the evolution of new traits, allowing even more ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Imagine a ball bouncing down a flight of stairs. Now think about a cascade of water flowing down those same stairs. The ball and the water behave very differently, and it turns out that your brain has different regions for processing visual information about each type of physical matter. In a new study, MIT neuroscientists have identified parts of the brain’s visual cortex that respond preferentially when you look at “things” — that is, rigid or deformable objects like a bouncing ball. Other brain regions are more activated when looking at “stuff” — liquids or granular ...

About The Study: The U.S. Congress enacted the Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act with the goal of improving veterans’ access to health care services. This study found that MISSION Act implementation was associated with substantial decreases in travel times among veterans who became geographically eligible for non-Veterans Affairs care. For these patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention or coronary artery bypass grafting, MISSION Act implementation was also associated with worsened 30-day major adverse cardiovascular events ...

A new study reveals that some men who are diagnosed with “Grade Group one” (GG1) prostate cancer may actually be at higher risk than biopsy results suggest, according to research led by Weill Cornell Medicine, University Hospitals Cleveland and Case Western University. The researchers conclude that relying on biopsy grade alone can lead to underestimating disease risk and misclassifying individuals who may benefit from definitive treatment with either surgery or radiation. Biopsies test only small areas of the prostate, so ...

About The Study: This study of Medicare enrollees age 65 or older with type 2 diabetes found an association between semaglutide use and an increased risk of nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy. There was risk variation among the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs); semaglutide and liraglutide were associated with higher risks.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Kin Wah Fung, MD, email kfung@mail.nih.gov. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2025.2299) Editor’s ...

ALEXANDRIA, VA —The American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery Foundation (AAO-HNSF) published the Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG): Adult Sinusitis Update today in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery. The purpose of this multidisciplinary guideline is to identify quality improvement opportunities in managing adult sinusitis and to provide explicit and actionable guidance that can be implemented across all clinical practices. "With sinusitis affecting about one in eight adults in the United States each year, this CPG update empowers both patients and their healthcare providers with ...

Big Data Begins to Crack the Cold Case of Endometriosis Records from millions of patients at UC health centers found correlations between endometriosis, one of the most common diseases in women, and a bounty of other diseases.  Scientists at UCSF have found that endometriosis — a painful chronic disease affecting 10% of women that often goes undiagnosed — often occurs alongside conditions like cancer, Crohn's disease, and migraine. The research could improve how endometriosis is diagnosed and, ultimately, how it is treated; and it paints the sharpest portrait yet of a condition that is ...

Sucralose is a popular sugar substitute for people who are cutting calories or managing blood sugar levels, but new research by the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center suggests that the artificial sweetener may not be the best choice for patients undergoing cancer immunotherapy. Publishing today in Cancer Discovery, a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, the study found that patients with melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer who consumed high levels of sucralose had worse ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have created a microphone that listens with light instead of sound. Unlike traditional microphones, this visual microphone captures tiny vibrations on the surfaces of objects caused by sound waves and turns them into audible signals. “Our method simplifies and reduces the cost of using light to capture sound while also enabling applications in scenarios where traditional microphones are ineffective, such as conversing through a glass window,” said research team leader Xu-Ri Yao from Beijing ...

(WASHINGTON, July 31, 2025) — In patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), regular treatment with immunoglobulin replacement therapy was not associated with a reduced risk of serious infections requiring hospitalization, according to a study published in Blood Advances. “This is the first large, real-world study to follow patients with CLL who are regularly receiving immunoglobulin replacement,” said lead study author Sara Carrillo de Albornoz, health economist and a PhD candidate at Monash University in Australia. “Given its high cost and variable use in clinical ...

AURORA, Colo. (July 31, 2025) – The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus will lead a groundbreaking national clinical trial—supported by a $29 million grant from Octapharma—to evaluate whether early replacement of fibrinogen, a critical blood clotting mechanism in the body, can improve outcomes for trauma patients experiencing life-threatening bleeding. This investigator-initiated study is one of the largest clinical trial grants in campus history. The EFFECT Trial (Early ...

It was a single lightning flash that streaked across the Great Plains for 515 miles, from eastern Texas nearly all the way to Kansas City, setting a new world record. “We call it megaflash lightning and we're just now figuring out the mechanics of how and why it occurs,” said Randy Cerveny, an Arizona State University President’s Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. Cerveny and colleagues used space-based instruments to measure the megaflash, which took place during a major thunderstorm in October 2017. Its astonishing horizontal reach surpasses by 38 miles the previous record of 477 miles recorded during ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Even a toddler knows that plants need water. It’s perhaps the first thing we learn about these green lifeforms. But how plants budget this resource varies considerably. The kapok trees of the Amazon have adopted vastly different strategies than the switchgrass of the American plains. Unfortunately, it’s hard to directly measure which ones prevail in different ecosystem types and how they shift under changing conditions. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and San Diego State University recently developed a metric ...

The lives of our earliest hominin ancestors are often shrouded in mystery, but recent research on the consumption of windfallen fruit may shed light on one of humanity's oldest and most savored activities: sharing a good meal (and a tipple) with kith and kin. In a "Notes from the Field" article in the journal BioScience, Nathaniel Dominy (Dartmouth College), Catherine Hobaiter (University of St Andrews), and colleagues coin a new term for gathering and eating fallen fruit: scrumping. The term calls to mind scrumpy, a rustic unfiltered cider popular in the West Country of England. And just as ...

If scientists are to better understand whether the genes that let us safely welcome the weekend with a cold beer or enjoy a bottle of wine with dinner began with apes eating fermented fruit, then the habit needs a name, according to a new study. "Scrumping" is the name coined in a paper led by researchers at Dartmouth and the University of St Andrews in Scotland for the fondness apes have for eating ripe fruit from the forest floor. These primates' palate for picked-up produce has taken on new importance in recent years, the researchers report in the journal BioScience. But scientists cannot fully understand the significance of this behavior—particularly ...

New research from the University of St Andrews and Dartmouth College examines the crucial, but until now, overlooked, role of ‘scrumped’ fruit in the lives of great apes and the origins of human feasting.  Published today (Thursday 31 July) in BioScience, this pioneering study is the first to tackle the mystery of why humans are so astoundingly good at metabolising alcohol.  The findings show that feeding on fermented fruits gathered from the forest floor is an important behaviour in the lives of African apes, ...

Scientists have discovered a new way that matter can exist – one that is different from the usual states of solid, liquid, gas or plasma – at the interface of two exotic, materials made into a sandwich. The new quantum state, called quantum liquid crystal, appears to follow its own rules and offers characteristics that could pave the way for advanced technological applications, the scientists said. Reporting in the journal Science Advances, a Rutgers-led team of researchers described an experiment that focused on the interaction between a conducting material called the Weyl semimetal and an insulating magnetic material known as spin ice when both ...

*Embargoed paper available on request*  Published in Frontiers in Science, the map of ‘agri-food system microbiomes’ reveals how players at every stage of the food system can restore and protect dwindling microbiomes to help boost human and planetary health.  When microbiomes are diverse and balanced, they keep our food safe, nutritious, and sustainable, and our planet healthy—but the quality of these networks is declining across the whole system. This can be seen in the uptick of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), crop failures, loss of microbial diversity in soil, water, and the human gut, and ...

Our intestines are home to trillions of microorganisms that produce substances capable of regulating all the body’s organs via the bloodstream and the gut’s nervous system. Yet, only little is known about the effects of most of the bacteria that make up our microbiome. Now, an international team of scientists led by the University of Copenhagen has identified a common specific bacterial strain that may open the door to an entirely new class of therapeutics. This bacterium produces two proteins that partly resemble ...

For decades, scientists and conservationists have been using aboveground plant biodiversity as a metric for conserving ecosystems. Now a new study finds that there is a major mismatch between aboveground plant diversity and Earth’s underground fungal biodiversity. A new analysis published in Nature Communications on July 31 focused on the biodiversity mismatches between aboveground vegetation and mycorrhizal fungi – a group of underground fungi that form symbiotic relationships with the roots of 90% of land plants. These fungi help regulate the climate and global nutrient cycles, ...

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) has long been a pioneer in developing and applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to advance genomics, structural biology, and drug discovery. One of the standout examples is AlphaFold – developed by Google DeepMind and trained on data provided by EMBL-EBI and collaborators – which has revolutionised protein structure prediction. With EMBL-EBI’s support, AlphaFold2 predictions were made freely available to researchers worldwide.  Alongside its major contributions to AI in structural biology, EMBL is also leading the way in applying AI to all types of biological data analysis and scientific research, including ...

By Beth Miller Nature is often the best model for science. For nearly a century, scientists have been trying to recreate the ability of some mammals and birds to survive extreme environmental conditions for brief or extended periods by going into torpor, when their body temperature and metabolic rate drop, allowing them to preserve energy and heat. Taking inspiration from nature, Hong Chen, professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and of neurosurgery at WashU Medicine, and an interdisciplinary team induced a reversible torpor-like state in mice by using focused ultrasound to stimulate the ...

A new study in the academic journal Machine Learning: Health discovers that ChatGPT can accelerate patient screening for clinical trials, showing promise in reducing delays and improving trial success rates. Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Centre used ChatGPT to assess whether patients were eligible to take part in clinical trials and were able to identify suitable candidates within minutes. Clinical trials, which test new medications and procedures on the public, are vital for developing and validating new treatments. But many trials struggle to enrol enough participants. According to a recent study, up to 20% of National Cancer Institute (NCI)-affiliated ...