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Breast cancer screening can sometimes identify cancers that would never have caused symptoms or threatened a woman’s health during her lifetime. This phenomenon is known as overdiagnosis, and it has long been considered one of the potential drawbacks of screening. For decades, researchers have debated how often overdiagnosis actually occurs.…
A room that smells like citrus, pine, or flowers is often associated with cleanliness. Those familiar scents, however, can signal chemical reactions taking place in the air. Research led by Brandon Boor at Purdue University found that fragrance compounds released by both conventional cleaners and botanical essential oil-based products can…
Around 2.5 to 2 billion years ago, Earth underwent the largest chemical transformation ever recorded at its surface. Oxygen began accumulating in the atmosphere, setting in motion changes that eventually helped make possible the rise of complex organisms such as plants and animals about half a billion years ago. As…
Douglas Seiler went to unusual lengths to recreate an ancient mystery. He obtained papyrus and reed pens from Egypt, along with traditional lampblack ink from Japan. Then he paid high school students to write on the papyrus using passages from “Star Wars,” the Bible, and a quote from the 1960s…
Researchers led by the Duke Quantum Center (DQC) have used a quantum simulator to observe string breaking dynamics connected to particle antiparticle formation, marking one of the earliest demonstrations of its kind in quantum physics. The work, published September 23 in Nature Physics, shows how trapped ion quantum computers could…
New research led by scientists at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Mount Sinai suggests that Phelan-McDermid syndrome (PMS) may be much more common than earlier estimates indicated. The findings, published in Autism Research, estimate that the condition affects roughly 1 in 7,300 people. Phelan-McDermid syndrome is…
For some of the most aggressive blood cancers, a stem cell transplant may be the only treatment with the potential to cure the disease. Even so, cancers can return after transplantation, leaving doctors with limited options. A new clinical trial led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in…
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) stretches 27 km around and relies on thousands of magnets of different types – dipoles, quadrupoles, sextupoles, octupoles, decapoles, etc. – to steer and control its particle beams. Each type performs a specialized task. Some of the most important are known as inner triplets. These…
A practical quantum computer must eventually be able to handle any type of quantum algorithm, much like a conventional laptop can run many different kinds of software. Researchers have now demonstrated a new way to reach that level of flexibility using unusual quantum objects known as non-Abelian anyons. Scientists from…
Scientists have captured an unusually detailed view of a major tectonic system beneath the Pacific Northwest beginning to come apart. The discovery, reported in Science Advances, shows a subduction zone actively breaking into pieces. Subduction zones form where one tectonic plate is forced beneath another and pushed deep into Earth.…
Researchers led by Prof. An Xu at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found that a magnetotactic bacterium (MTB) called Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1 (AMB-1) can extend healthy lifespan in the Caenorhabditis elegans model. The team also identified the main mechanism behind the effect…
Stars can produce powerful shock waves when gas and dust streaming away from them collide with material in the surrounding space. Astronomers have now captured a striking example around the dead star RXJ0528+2838 using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT). The discovery is puzzling because, based on…
About 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system began as an enormous cloud of gas and dust. Over the next several million years, this “solar nebula” changed dramatically. The cloud collapsed and flattened into a disk, eventually giving rise to the sun at its center and the planets that formed…
A molecular geneticist at Montana State University has uncovered a previously unknown survival mechanism that allows mammalian cells to produce the amino acid cysteine even when the cellular systems normally responsible for supplying it stop working. Scientists once thought this kind of survival was impossible. The finding, published in Nature…
New research suggests that the characteristics of children and teenagers receiving attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses have shifted over the past decade. The study, led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the “la Caixa” Foundation, and Aarhus University, found…
Sometimes what we see does not immediately make sense. A shadow can briefly resemble a face, or one object can momentarily be mistaken for another. New research suggests that the brain may resolve these visual conflicts by allowing different regions to compare their interpretations until a more consistent picture emerges.…
Physicists at TU Dortmund University showed in January 2024 that a continuous time crystal could persist inside a semiconductor, with its oscillations remaining stable for hours. Now, in a new study published inNature Communications, Prof. Alex Greilich and his colleagues have found that multiple time crystals can emerge within the…
For more than seven decades, doctors have used the drug 6-thioguanine (6-TG) to treat leukemia. Its effects in patients are well documented, but researchers are still working to understand the molecular details that determine why some cells are killed by the drug while others manage to withstand it. A team…
A new discovery from the University of Missouri is revealing an overlooked reason muscles can lose strength with age. The findings could eventually lead to treatments designed to help older adults remain active and independent, from walking safely to continuing everyday activities with family. W. David Arnold, executive director of…
Two newly identified snail species have expanded the known diversity of European land snails. The species, Cochlostoma komarnica and Cochlostoma dobrido, are described in a new study published in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal. Neither species has an English common name yet. Both are small, with cone-shaped shells measuring about…
Evidence is building that Uranus’ moon Ariel may once have contained a vast ocean beneath its frozen exterior. Research published in Icarus explores how that hidden ocean may have changed over time and suggests it could once have been more than 100 miles (170 kilometers) deep. By comparison, the Pacific…
Astronomers are finding that the first generations of galaxies do not always behave the way existing models predict. One possible reason is that their most massive stars may have evolved very differently from massive stars in the modern Milky Way. A new survey led by the University of Utah is…
Greater amounts of REM and deep sleep were associated with lower risks of dozens of diseases, and less than 5 hours of total sleep was associated with high risks of disease, according to a new study published September 17th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Shengzhi Sun of…
Children taking GLP-1 medications for weight loss, prediabetes, or type 2 diabetes may face an important nutritional concern. A new study published in Childhood Obesity found that nearly one in six young patients (16.8%) were diagnosed with a nutritional deficiency during the first year after starting treatment. Vitamin D deficiency…
A fractured rib from Scotty, the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered, is giving researchers a rare look at dinosaur biology from 66 million years ago. Preserved inside the bone is something almost never found in the fossil record: evidence of an injury that was still healing when the animal…
Two of the most closely watched fault systems on North America’s West Coast may be more connected than scientists previously realized. A recent study suggests that the Cascadia subduction zone and the San Andreas fault can become synchronized, with a major earthquake on one fault potentially followed by seismic activity…
Rare infections that can pass from a pregnant woman to a developing fetus are associated with higher risks of autism and intellectual disability later in childhood, according to a large study from Karolinska Institutet published in JAMA Pediatrics. “It is important to emphasize that it is unusual for these infections…
A drug designed to remove aging, damaged cells may help older skin recover from wounds more quickly, according to research published in Aging (Aging-US). The study, titled “Topical ABT-263 treatment reduces aged skin senescence and improves subsequent wound healing,” examined a drug called ABT-263 and its effects on wound repair…
Plants have evolved several ways to use sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into energy-rich sugars and oxygen (photosynthesis). But when water becomes scarce, that process can become much more difficult. Researchers led by Wolfram Weckwerth at the University of Vienna have now uncovered how one especially water efficient…
For most of the satellite record, the Arctic sea ice melt season kept getting longer. Around 2010, however, that long-running trend unexpectedly flattened. For decades, Arctic sea ice generally began melting earlier in the spring and did not freeze again until later in the fall. Together, those changes extended the…