The connections between particles and their mass, the composition of the universe out of matter and antimatter and the search for previously unknown particles such as the so-called “dark matter” are the focus of researchers at the research center CERN in Geneva, which is celebrating its 70th birthday this year with events all around the world. In four large-scale experiments, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are getting to the bottom of the secrets of the universe. This particle accelerator offers researchers ...

Associate Professor Justine Tigno-Aranjuez will use a five-year grant of more than $1 million to study how influences on the production of lipid mediators to better understand impacts on inflammation. A College of Medicine researcher has received a prestigious U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support her research into the cellular causes of inflammation, discoveries that could be pivotal for treating  conditions like Crohn’s disease and arthritis. Justine Tigno-Aranjuez’s lab has been researching lipid mediators — ...

Overdose rates in Colombia involving illegal opioids, hallucinogens, stimulants and sedative psychotropic medication increased greatly during 2018-2021, mainly caused by overdoses in young women, according to a study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Drug overdoses increased by 356 percent from 8.5 to 40.5 percent per 100,000 individuals from 2010 to 2021. The findings are published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study is the first to describe national ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In the roughly 20 years since e-cigarettes were introduced in the United States, use among young people has grown substantially. By 2022, more than one in five high school seniors reported they had vaped nicotine in the past month. Household smoking bans — rules against anybody smoking inside a home — are an effective tool for delaying or preventing teen cigarette smoking, according to Jennifer Maggs, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, and her collaborators, so they examined if the same might hold true for vaping. They assessed how many households with teenage children in the ...

Have you ever tried to convince a conspiracy theorist that the moon landing wasn’t staged? You likely didn’t succeed, but ChatGPT might have better luck, according to research by MIT Sloan School of Management professor David Rand and American University professor of psychology Thomas Costello, who conducted the research during his postdoctoral position at MIT Sloan. In a new paper “Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI” published in Science, the researchers show that large language models can effectively reduce ...

Embargoed: Not for Release Until 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time Thursday, 12 September 2024   ‘Even the deepest of rabbit holes may have an exit’   Pathbreaking psychology study reveals conversations with AI models can reduce conspiracy theory beliefs   (WASHINGTON, D.C.) Sept. 12, 2024 – ‘They’re so far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that they’re lost for good’ is common thinking when it comes to conspiracy theorists. This generally accepted notion is now crumbling. In a pathbreaking research study, a team of researchers from American University, ...

Personalized conversations with a trained artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot can reduce belief in conspiracy theories – even in the most obdurate individuals – according to a new study. The findings, which challenge the idea that such beliefs are impervious to change, point to a new tool for combating misinformation. “It has become almost a truism that people ‘down the rabbit hole’ of conspiracy belief are almost impossible to reach,” write the authors. “In contrast to this pessimistic view, we [show] that a relatively brief conversation with a generative AI model can produce ...

In a Policy Forum, Mark McCabe and Frank Mueller-Langer explore how new open access (OA) mandates and agreements are changing how scientists share their work. They outline key contemporary unknowns in the open access landscape, as well as avenues for continued research. Since 2003, many national governments and international organizations have supported the Berlin Declaration on Open Access (OA) to Knowledge. More recently, some governments and organizations have introduced mandates to ensure open access ...

State-level bans on commercial organic waste disposal have largely failed to reduce landfilled waste across the U.S., with one state standing out as the lone success, according to a new study. Massachusetts alone achieved a significant reduction in landfilled waste when it implemented food waste bans. The findings underscore the importance of well-designed and enforced policies, with Massachusetts offering a potential model for effective waste management. “Our study shows that food waste bans are far from guaranteed to be successful,” ...

In 2023, a massive rockslide in East Greenland, driven by glacial melt, triggered a towering tsunami and a rare global seismic signal that resonated for nine days, according to a new study. The study provides insights into how climate change-induced events like glacial thinning can lead to significant geophysical phenomena with impacts extending throughout the Earth system. Due to climate change, steep slopes are increasingly vulnerable to landslides. In Arctic regions – which are undergoing the most rapid warming globally ...

In September 2023, scientists around the world detected a mysterious seismic signal that lasted for nine straight days. An international team of scientists, including seismologists Alice Gabriel and Carl Ebeling of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography came together to solve the mystery. A new study published today in Science provides the stunning solution: In an East Greenland fjord, a mountaintop collapsed into the sea and triggered a mega-tsunami about 200 meters (650 feet) tall. The giant ...

Of the first five U.S. states to implement food waste bans, only Massachusetts was successful at diverting waste away from landfills and incinerators, according to a new study from the University of California Rady School of Management. The paper, published today in Science, suggests a need to reevaluate current strategies, citing Massachusetts' approach as a benchmark for effective policy implementation. Between 2014 and 2024, nine U.S. states made it unlawful for commercial waste generators—such as grocery chains—to dispose of their food waste in landfills, expecting a 10–15% waste reduction.                                                                                “We ...

Mega ocean warming El Niño events were key in driving the largest extinction of life on planet Earth some 252 million years ago, according to new research. The study, published today in Science and co-led by the University of Bristol and China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), has shed new light on why the effects of rapid climate change in the Permian-Triassic warming were so devastating for all forms of life in the sea and on land. Scientists have long linked this mass extinction to vast volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. The resulting carbon dioxide emissions rapidly accelerated climate warming, resulting in widespread stagnation and the collapse ...

A landslide in a remote part of Greenland caused a mega-tsunami that sloshed back and forth across a fjord for nine days, generating vibrations throughout Earth, according to a new study involving UCL researchers. The study, published in the journal Science, concluded that this movement of water was the cause of a mysterious, global seismic signal that lasted for nine days and puzzled seismologists in September 2023. The initial event, not observed by human eye, was the collapse of a 1.2km-high mountain peak into the remote Dickson Fjord beneath, causing a backsplash of water 200 metres in the air, with a wave up to 110 metres high. This ...

Woods Hole, Mass. (September 13, 2024) - The movement of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the surface of the ocean, where it is in active contact with the atmosphere, to the deep ocean, where it can be sequestered away for decades, centuries, or longer, depends on a number of seemingly small processes. One of these key microscale processes is the dietary preferences of bacteria that feed on organic molecules called lipids, according to a journal article, "Microbial dietary preference and interactions affect the export of lipids to the deep ocean," published in Science. "In ...

Aluminum oxide (Al2O3), also known as alumina, corundum, sapphire, or ruby, is one of the best insulators used in a wide range of applications: in electronic components, as a support material for catalysts, or as a chemically resistant ceramic, to name a few. Knowledge of the precise arrangement of the surface atoms is key to understanding how chemical reactions occur on this material, such as those in catalytic processes. Atoms inside the material follow a fixed arrangement, giving rise to the characteristic shapes ...

ATLANTA — A new three-year, $3.5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation will foster new research at Georgia State’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array by astronomers from around the world. The grant will fund open-access time at the CHARA Array through the NSF National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NSF NOIRLab). The program offers astronomers the opportunity to apply for observing time at the CHARA Array to investigate all kinds of objects ...

The interactions between quantum spins underlie some of the universe’s most interesting phenomena, such as superconductors and magnets. However, physicists have difficulty engineering controllable systems in the lab that replicate these interactions. Now, in a recently published Nature paper, JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Jun Ye and his team, along with collaborators in Mikhail Lukin’s group at Harvard University, used periodic microwave pulses in a process known as Floquet engineering, to tune interactions between ultracold potassium-rubidium molecules in a system appropriate for studying fundamental magnetic ...

Researchers from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands have been able to initiate a controlled movement in the very heart of an atom. They caused the atomic nucleus to interact with one of the electrons in the outermost shells of the atom. This electron could be manipulated and read out through the needle of a scanning tunneling microscope. The research, published in Nature Communications today, offers prospects for storing quantum information inside the nucleus, where it is safe from external disturbances.   For weeks on end, the researchers studied a single titanium atom. “A Ti-47 atom, to be precise,” ...

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of mortality in Western Europe, accounting for 1/3 of deaths in 2019. Diet is thought to be responsible for around 30% of such deaths. Nutrition-related prevention policies therefore constitute a major public health challenge for these diseases. In an article to be published on 11 September 2024 in Lancet Regional Health - Europe, researchers from the Nutritional Epidemiology Research Team (CRESS-EREN), with members from Inserm, Inrae, Cnam, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and Université Paris ...

Landmark new research shows Ice Age teens from 25,000 years ago went through similar puberty stages as modern-day adolescents. In a study published today in the Journal of Human Evolution of the timing of puberty in Pleistocene teens, researchers are addressing a knowledge gap about how early humans grew up. Found in the bones of 13 ancient humans between 10 and 20 years old is evidence of puberty stages. Co-led by University of Victoria (UVic) paleoanthropologist April Nowell, researchers found specific markers in the bones that allowed them to assess the progress of adolescence. “By analyzing specific areas of the skeleton, we inferred things like menstruation ...

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), encompassing Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract that significantly impacts the quality of life of patients. With an incidence of approximately one in 200 individuals in developed countries and a rising trend in developing and newly industrialized nations, IBD poses a substantial burden on healthcare systems. Due to the nonspecific nature of its clinical manifestations and the lack of a gold-standard diagnostic test, managing IBD effectively remains a challenge. Therefore, reliable and widely available biomarkers ...

Researchers in Germany can harvest protein and vitamin B9 from microbes by feeding them nothing much more than hydrogen, oxygen, and CO2. The technology, published September 12 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Biotechnology, runs on renewable energy to produce a sustainable, micronutrient-enriched protein alternative that may one day make it to our plates. “This is a fermentation process similar to how you make beer, but instead of giving the microbes sugar, we gave them gas and acetate,” says corresponding author Largus Angenent of the University of Tübingen, Germany. “We knew that yeast could produce vitamin B9 on their own with sugar, however, we didn’t ...

Neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (NPD) including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, and depression are detrimental to individuals, their families and society as a whole, and in many cases still lack effective treatments. It’s becoming more and more clear that genetic mutations in certain genes can increase the likelihood of developing NPD, and several hundreds of those “risk genes” have been identified to date, but their role related to NPD remains a mystery. “Very little is known about the basic function of most of these genes, and what we do know ...

About The Study: This case report describes a woman who presented with bilateral blurry vision a few days after dyeing her hair with hair dye containing aromatic amines.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Nicolas Chirpaz, MD, email nicolas.chirpaz@chu-lyon.fr. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2024.3453) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial ...