At UC Berkeley, researchers in Sergey Levine’s Robotic AI and Learning Lab eyed a table where a tower of 39 Jenga blocks stood perfectly stacked. Then a white-and-black robot, its single limb doubled over like a hunched-over giraffe, zoomed toward the tower, brandishing a black leather whip. Through what might have seemed to a casual viewer like a miracle of physics, the whip struck in precisely the right spot to send a single block flying out from the stack while the rest of the tower remained structurally sound. This task, known as ...

Woods Hole, Mass. (August 20, 2025) -- A newly published study challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of urban civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, suggesting that the rise of Sumer was driven by the dynamic interplay of rivers, tides, and sediments at the head of the Persian Gulf. Published today in PLOS ONE, the study, Morphodynamic Foundations of Sumer, is led by Liviu Giosan, Senior Scientist Emeritus in Geology & Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and Reed Goodman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Science at Baruch Institute of Social Ecology and Forest Science (BICEFS), Clemson ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2025 MINNEAPOLIS — Having a larger waistline, high blood pressure and other risk factors that make up metabolic syndrome is associated with an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease, according to a study published on August 20, 2025, in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that metabolic syndrome causes Parkinson’s disease; it only shows an association. Metabolic syndrome is defined as having three or more of the following risk factors: excess belly fat, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, higher than normal triglycerides, ...

We’re often told it is “unscientific” or “meaningless” to ask what happened before the big bang. But a new paper by FQxI cosmologist Eugene Lim, of King's College London, UK, and astrophysicists Katy Clough, of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Josu Aurrekoetxea, at Oxford University, UK, published in Living Reviews in Relativity, in June 2025, proposes a way forward: using complex computer simulations to numerically (rather than exactly) solve Einstein’s equations for gravity in extreme situations. The team argues that numerical relativity should be applied increasingly in cosmology to probe ...

SAN ANTONIO — August 20, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has constructed its first facility outside of its San Antonio headquarters in Warner Robins, Georgia. The 33,000-square-foot, $18.5 million building, equipped to advance national defense technology, is strategically located 3 miles from Robins Air Force Base to bolster SwRI’s longstanding support for the U.S. Air Force. Institute leadership welcomed government and community leaders to the grounds on August 20 for a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tours to mark the grand opening of the new structure, which houses offices, conference rooms and laboratories. SwRI employees based in Warner Robins ...

Ad hominem attacks are the most common way users confront content they perceive as wrong in comment sections beneath news videos, with over 40% of analyzed comments relying on reputation-based insults to oppose earlier replies Article URL: http://plos.io/4os0Tkc Article title: Beyond ad hominem attacks: A typology of the discursive tactics used when objecting to news commentary on social media Author countries: U.S. Funding: This research was funded by the National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (NSF, Funding number: 2106476). Full ...

California's dwarf Channel Island foxes mostly have relatively bigger brains than their larger mainland gray fox cousins, which may reflect island-specific evolutionary pressures Article URL: http://plos.io/4m6uyhk Article title: Increased brain size of the dwarf Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis) challenges “Island Syndrome” and suggests little evidence of domestication Author countries: U.S. Funding: Funding for this project and Kimberly's PhD research was provided by Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California; the Wrigley Institute for Environmental ...

Embargoed until 2:00 PM ET on August 20, 2025 COLUMBUS, Ohio – Older adults often don’t realize how vulnerable they are to extreme heat and most aren’t prepared for long periods of hot weather, according to a review of more than 40 studies.   In the review, researchers found that most studies focused on how older adults react when heat waves strike, such as staying hydrated or moving to cooler locations.   But there is less research on how they plan for prolonged heat events, which may be evidence of low-risk ...

Stanford Medicine scientists investigating the neurological underpinnings of autism spectrum disorder have found that hyperactivity in a specific brain region could drive behaviors commonly associated with the disorder. Using a mouse model of the disease, the researchers identified the reticular thalamic nucleus — which serves as a gatekeeper of sensory information between the thalamus and cortex — as a potential target for treatments. Moreover, they were able to reverse symptoms similar to those ...

Fewer than half of all adolescents with major depressive episode (MDE) received mental health care in the US in 2022, with the odds of specialist treatment being even lower among marginalized groups, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Mental Health by Su Chen Tan and colleagues at University of Tennessee, USA. The prevalence of adolescent depression has increased following the COVID-19 pandemic and is often under-treated. Depression experienced during adolescence can be linked to more severe social and psychological consequences ...

Toronto, ON — A new national study led by researchers from Carleton University and the University of Toronto reveals that older adults living in greener neighborhoods were less likely to experience depression during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from over 13,000 urban-dwelling participants in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), researchers found that access to nearby green spaces — from public parks and playing fields to tree canopy cover and private gardens along ...

Patients with some cancers, autoimmune diseases, and metabolic disorders often endure time-consuming intravenous (IV) infusions to receive the best protein-based treatments available. Because these protein therapeutics require high doses to be effective and are typically formulated at low concentrations to remain stable, IV infusion has been, until now, the only option. Researchers at Stanford have developed a new delivery platform that allows these drugs to be stored and delivered in much higher concentrations. With this new formulation method, published Aug. 20 in Science Translational Medicine, many protein therapeutics could be injected quickly ...

The transition to agriculture in Europe involved the coexistence of hunter-gatherers and early farmers migrating from Anatolia. To better understand their dynamics of interaction, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the University of Fribourg and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, combined computer simulations with ancient genetic data. The results show that population mixing increased locally over time during the Neolithic expansion, at each stage of the farmers’ advance along the “Danube route” toward Central Europe. Published in Science Advances, the study offers new insight into this pivotal period in human history. The shift ...

Wolf hunting has prevented livestock loss in a measurable way, but it is by no means a silver bullet, according to an international research team led by the University of Michigan. "Hunting, on the whole, is not removing negative impacts associated with wolves. It does have some effect on rates of livestock loss, but the effect is not particularly consistent, widespread or strong," said Neil Carter, associate professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and senior author of the new study published in the journal Science Advances.  As governmental protections ...

Philadelphia, August 20, 2025 – In a new study led by the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), researchers found that mitochondrial dysfunction in the blood-brain barrier (BBB) may lead to neuropsychiatric disease in some patients with 22qDS. The researchers also demonstrated that a class of FDA-approved cholesterol drugs could potentially be repurposed to treat this dysfunction. These encouraging findings were published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The BBB is a specialized ...

Kyoto, Japan -- The size of our universe and the bodies within it is incomprehensible for us lowly humans. The sun has a mass that is more than 330,000 that of our Earth, and yet there are stars in the universe that completely dwarf our sun. Stars with masses more than eight times that of the sun are considered high mass stars. These form rapidly in a process that gives off stellar wind and radiation, which could not result in stars of such high mass without somehow overcoming this loss of mass, or feedback. Something is feeding these stars, but how exactly they can accumulate so much mass so quickly has remained a mystery. Observations of enormous disk-like structures that form around ...

For decades, scientists believed animals on islands evolved smaller brains relative to body size to save energy. But most Channel Islands foxes — tiny predators no bigger than a house cat – defied that rule, evolving larger brains than their mainland cousins. The findings, published in PLOS One by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, suggest brain size may hinge less on isolation and more on the demands of survival.  Island syndrome refers to a suite of traits including reduced size, brain shrinkage, loss of flight in birds and tamer behavior. Until ...

Stylolites — irregular seams that occur in limestone — have been found to affect how acoustic waves move through rock samples. Laboratory-based insights from KAUST researchers offer an improved understanding of how these features impact acoustic imaging techniques, which are used to analyze induced microseismic events during hydraulic fracturing[1]. Carbonate-based sedimentary rocks like limestone often hold gas and oil reserves within their layers. Researchers commonly use sound (acoustic) waves to interrogate subsurface rocks and identify rock types, reservoir ...

When water drains from the bottom of a vertical tube, it is followed by a thin film of liquid that can adopt complex and beautiful shapes. KAUST researchers have now studied exactly how these “fluted films” form and break up, developing a mathematical model of their behavior that could help improve the performance, safety, and efficiency of industrial processes[1] “At first glance, water draining from a tube seems like an everyday process driven by gravity,” says Abhijit Kushwaha, a member of the team behind the work. “It is only with high-speed imaging that we can slow ...

To overcome this limitation, Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) a classical information multiplexing technique in communication systems offers a promising solution. As early as 1997, Professor Takeda has introduced FDM into FPP, enabling two fringe patterns of different frequencies to be superimposed onto a single image, thus allowing simultaneous phase demodulation and unwrapping. Similarly, in off-axis digital holography, researchers overlapped holograms captured at different time points within a single exposure, enabling multi-temporal holographic reconstruction from just one multiplexed ...

With just 1.2% of the world’s one million described insect species assessed for extinction risk, biodiversity assessment and conservation measures remain severely constrained. Sufficiently extensive datasets and new statistical methods could enhance the reach of extinction risk classification. Invertebrates, including insects, are poorly represented on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List. The Red List, the world’s most comprehensive information source on global conservation status, is dominated by better-known vertebrates, such as mammals ...

A sweeping new study from the University of Florida and University College London has found that daily reading for pleasure in the United States has declined by more than 40% over the last 20 years — raising urgent questions about the cultural, educational and health consequences of a nation reading less. Published today in the journal iScience, the study analyzed data from over 236,000 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2023. The findings suggest a fundamental cultural shift: fewer people are carving out time in their day to read for enjoyment. “This is not just a small dip — it’s ...

All cells in the body contain the same DNA, but different cell types express different genes; skin cells express genes for the skin, liver cells express liver genes, and so on. This coordination is crucial to help cells differentiate into their assigned roles, but a new study from researchers at the University of Chicago shows how cells can randomly “shake up” regions of the genome to express genes normally reserved for other cell types. The study, published this week in Nature, suggests that randomness or variability in the way DNA is packaged can create a kind of “epigenetic noise,” enabling cells to take on the identify of different ...

Antarctica is at risk of abrupt and potentially irreversible changes to the continent’s ice, ocean and ecosystems that could have profound implications for Australia and beyond, unless urgent action is taken to curb global carbon emissions.  That’s according to new research published today in the journal Nature, from researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in collaboration with scientists from each of Australia’s major Antarctic research centres.   The ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 16:00 BST / 11:00 ET WEDNESDAY 20 AUGUST 2025 More images available to download via the link in the notes section A new study led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, University of Greenwich, and the Technical University of Denmark could provide a cost-effective and sustainable solution to help tackle the devastating decline in honeybees. An engineered food supplement, designed to provide essential compounds found in plant pollen, was found to significantly enhance colony reproduction. The results have been published today (20 August) in the journal Nature. The challenge: addressing ...