Academic pressure during Britain's high-stakes GCSE examination years does not dissipate when the exams end. A UCL study tracking 4,714 adolescents finds it predicts depressive symptoms at every measured time point through age 22 and elevated self-harm risk extending to age 24.

Wearable health tech was designed around a wrong assumption: that sensors need to press against the skin. King's College London experiments show loose fabric amplifies body movements mechanically, producing cleaner, richer motion data than tight wristbands - at 80% lower data volumes.

Taking a structural cue from DNA's photochemically active bases, UC Santa Barbara chemists built a molecule that stores solar energy at 1.6 megajoules per kilogram - roughly double a standard lithium-ion battery - and can release it as heat on demand without any external electrical system.

Drug resistance in ovarian cancer typically develops over multiple treatment cycles. Mayo Clinic preclinical research suggests it may start much earlier - within hours of first exposure to PARP inhibitors. A lung cancer drug blocks the survival signal responsible, through signaling pathways no one expected it to target.

Ask a young man whether sex requires consent and he will almost certainly say yes. Ask him how consent actually works in a specific encounter and the process he describes looks very different from the affirmative consent frameworks taught in schools - a gap documented in a qualitative study of 35 men in Australia.

Siemens Healthineers and Mayo Clinic have signed a new collaboration agreement covering six clinical programs - from AI-assisted diagnostics for neurodegenerative disease to minimally invasive liver tumor treatment - each targeting a known gap between imaging capability and clinical practice.

Photons disappear before they can be detected - and that has long made large photonic quantum states impractical. University of Illinois physicists propose a protocol that confirms each photon's existence first, then builds the entangled state from what survives. It works on hardware that already exists.

Oregon legalized supervised psilocybin services in 2020 and opened its first licensed centers in 2023. An estimated 15,000 people have participated since then - with almost no systematic research on outcomes. A new NIH-funded study at Oregon Health and Science University is the first federal effort to change that.

A single large semiconductor fabrication facility can generate thousands of cubic meters of PFAS-contaminated wastewater daily. A new NSF-funded review synthesizing over 160 studies finds the field's detection, separation, and destruction technologies are still developing to meet that challenge.

An 18-year analysis of US vital statistics found that as states accumulated abortion restrictions, maternal death rates rose measurably - including deaths from cardiovascular causes and violence. The study tracked 22,380 deaths between 2005 and 2023.

Great Salt Lake's shrinking surface exposes sediments laced with arsenic and heavy metals to desert winds. A comprehensive University of Utah analysis now maps twelve intervention strategies alongside their costs, water demands, and ecological tradeoffs - a long-overdue accounting before crisis forces the state's hand.

The infrastructure to train scientists in policy communication already exists inside universities - lecture halls, fellowships, government affairs offices. A new practical guide from UC Santa Barbara argues that most institutions are simply not using it.

Rowan Martindale spotted wrinkle-textured Jurassic sediments in Morocco that resembled microbial mat fossils - but the geological context was all wrong. The rock had formed in deep water, nearly 600 feet below the surface, where prevailing theory said photosynthetic microbes could not survive. A new paper in Geology proposes the wrinkles were made by chemosynthetic bacterial communities nourished by underwater landslide debris - expanding where and when microbial fossil traces might be found.

A UC Davis Health and UCLA analysis of 8.6 million California births from 2001 to 2019 found that high-intensity wildfire smoke exposure during pregnancy was associated with increased autism likelihood - especially in rural areas with otherwise low background pollution, where the association reached 50% higher odds. Average smoke levels showed only weak associations; the link strengthened with intensity and was strongest for wildland-urban interface fires burning buildings and vehicles.

A 182-child NYU study compared gut microbiomes in newly diagnosed pediatric Crohn's disease patients with children diagnosed with functional gastrointestinal disorders - before any treatment. Children with Crohn's had less microbial diversity, elevated pro-inflammatory bacteria (Fusobacteria, Proteobacteria), and reduced protective species (Firmicutes, Verrucomicrobia). More severe disease corresponded with even lower diversity and higher levels of Hungatella and Veillonella.

The American Chestnut Foundation has spent decades breeding resistant hybrids, but the process is slow because trees must grow and be exposed to blight before resistance can be measured. A Science study shows genomic selection - predicting resistance from DNA sequence data alone - can bypass years of field waiting. Combining this approach with long-term resistance data from thousands of trees, researchers project the next generation will double average resistance while retaining 75% American chestnut ancestry.

M31-2014-DS1 in the Andromeda Galaxy was once among that galaxy's most luminous stars. Between 2005 and 2023, telescopes watched it brighten in infrared, then fade to one ten-thousandth of its original visible brightness. Flatiron Institute-led researchers combined those observations with convection models to produce the most physically complete account of how a massive star collapses directly into a black hole - and why the dust glow will be visible for decades.

Elephant trunks carry thousands of fixed whiskers that cannot move independently, yet serve as highly sensitive tactile tools for precise manipulation. A new study using micro-CT, electron microscopy, and mechanical modeling finds that the whiskers' sensing ability derives from a material gradient - stiff and porous at the base, soft and dense at the tip - that amplifies differences in signal power along the whisker's length and helps elephants localize where contact occurs.

The star M31-2014-DS1 brightened briefly in infrared, then faded until it became essentially invisible in optical wavelengths - leaving only a faint dust-shrouded remnant. Kishalay De and colleagues analyzed years of NEOWISE data to confirm the event as a failed supernova: a massive star that collapsed its core directly into a black hole without detonating. The findings appear in Science alongside evidence that an earlier candidate event, NGC 6946-BH1, followed the same pattern.

China's 2021 commercial fishing ban on the Yangtze River - the most sweeping freshwater conservation intervention ever attempted - has produced measurable early results. Fish biomass more than doubled, species richness modestly increased, and the Yangtze finless porpoise population grew from 445 to 595 individuals between 2017 and 2022. Structural modeling identified the fishing ban as the dominant driver, outweighing all other concurrent environmental management measures.

The American chestnut was effectively wiped out by a fungal pathogen introduced in the late 19th century. A new genomic study in Science assembled complete reference genomes for three key founder chestnuts, revealing that blight resistance is genetically complex, involves copy number variation and metabolic compounds, and requires recurrent multi-generational selection rather than straightforward backcross breeding to achieve meaningful resistance alongside high American ancestry.

The same signaling molecule, thermospermine, governs two opposing fates in plant vascular development - promoting one transcription factor while inhibiting another. The key is a specific chemical modification on ribosomes. Without it, thermospermine cannot bind, the balance breaks down, and plants overproduce water-conducting vessels at the expense of storage cells. The finding, published in Science, links ribosome chemistry to agricultural traits including root crop yield and wood formation.

When massive stars die, they are supposed to explode. The star M31-2014-DS1 in the Andromeda Galaxy did not. It brightened in infrared light for about three years beginning in 2014, then faded dramatically and essentially disappeared. A Columbia-led team analyzing archival NEOWISE data identified it as the most compelling evidence yet for direct collapse - a star becoming a black hole without first detonating as a supernova.

When a cell destroys a faulty messenger RNA, related backup genes sometimes become more active to compensate - a phenomenon observed but poorly understood. A new study identifies the protein ILF3 as a key link in this chain, and small RNA fragments left after decay as the molecular 'address' that directs ILF3 to the correct target genes in the nucleus.

When China imposed a 10-year commercial fishing ban across the entire Yangtze River basin in 2021, it was the most ambitious freshwater conservation measure of its kind. Analysis of monitoring data from 2018 to 2023, published in Science, shows the ban has halted seven decades of biodiversity decline - with fish biomass rising substantially, threatened species showing initial recovery, and structural equation modeling confirming the ban as the primary driver.