From Italy and the World

Directing light from place to the place is the backbone of our modern world. Beneath the oceans and across continents, fiber optic cables carry light that encodes everything from YouTube videos to banking transmissions — all inside strands about the size of a hair. University of Chicago Prof. Jiwoong Park,…

Effluents from wastewater treatment plants have a dual effect: Some species disappear, while others benefit. Especially certain insect orders, such as stonefly and caddisfly larvae, are decimated. Certain worms and crustaceans, by contrast, can increase in number. A team from Goethe University Frankfurt led by Daniel Enns and Dr. Jonas…

Producers of infant formula employ comprehensive food safety systems, including product testing to ensure those systems are working. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign finds that some testing methods are more powerful at catching contaminants than others. Spacing out samples over time in a stratified sampling pattern…

Watermelon is a globally significant agricultural product, both in terms of the total amount produced and the total economic value generated. Scientists at the Boyce Thompson Institute have constructed a comprehensive “super-pangenome” for watermelon and its wild relatives, uncovering beneficial genes lost during domestication that could improve disease resistance and…

Flat screen TVs that incorporate quantum dots are now commercially available, but it has been more difficult to create arrays of their elongated cousins, quantum rods, for commercial devices. Quantum rods can control both the polarization and color of light, to generate 3D images for virtual reality devices. Using scaffolds…

Forensic researchers at UT Knoxville’s famous Anthropological Research Facility, popularly known as the “Body Farm,” have made headlines for decades in their discoveries of what happens to human bodies after death. Now, a multidisciplinary team — engineers, soil scientists, and biologists — digs in with them for a deeper look…

Period products come in a variety of styles — liners, pads, tampons, cups and underwear — to help people feel comfortable during a menstrual bleed. But their labels don’t usually list the ingredients, so consumers don’t know what’s in their product of choice. Now, researchers have analyzed over 100 period…

Although many Americans dutifully deposit their plastic trash into the appropriate bins each week, many of those materials, including flexible films, multilayer materials and a lot of colored plastics, are not recyclable using conventional mechanical recycling methods. In the end, only about 9 percent of plastic in the United States…

Think you know everything about a material? Try giving it a twist — literally. That’s the main idea of an emerging field in condensed matter physics called “twistronics,” which has researchers drastically changing the properties of 2D materials, like graphene, with subtle changes — as small as going from a…

Yoga and breathing control practices, in combination with aerobic training, are particularly key exercises for asthmatic people seeking to improve their lung function, a new peer-reviewed study suggests. The research which is published today in the journal Annals of Medicine highlights the importance of integrating appropriate exercise training into asthma…

Using a novel method to detect microbial activity in biological soil crusts, or biocrusts, after they are wetted, a Penn State-led research team in a new study uncovered clues that will lead to a better understanding of the role microbes play in forming a living skin over many semi-arid ecosystems…

Systems in the Universe trend toward disorder, with only applied energy keeping the chaos at bay. The concept is called entropy, and examples can be found everywhere: ice melting, campfire burning, water boiling. Zentropy theory, however, adds another level to the mix. A team led by Zi-Kui Liu, the Dorothy…

Scientists have identified two types of mole which they believe have been living undiscovered in the mountains of eastern Turkey for as many as 3 million years. The new moles — named Talpa hakkariensis and Talpa davidiana tatvanensis — belong to a familiar group of subterranean, invertebrate-eating mammals found across…

A new study presents a promising treatment method for so-called fusion-driven cancers, which are currently often difficult to cure. These fusion-driven cancers are caused by an error in cell division that creates a fusion of different genes. This fusion causes the cancer and drives the uncontrolled cell growth. Using the…

With 350 million years of evolution culminating in almost two centuries of scientific discourse, a new hypothesis emerges from the B CUBE — Center for Molecular Bioengineering at TU Dresden University of Technology. B CUBE researchers propose a new explanation for why ammonoids evolved a highly elaborate, fractal-like geometry within…

A novel catalysis scheme enables chemical reactions that were previously virtually impossible. The method developed at the University of Bonn is also environmentally friendly and does not require rare and precious metals. The researchers recorded the exact course of the catalysis in a kind of high-speed film. They did this…

Specific receptors in the ears of mosquitoes have been revealed to modulate their hearing, finds a new study led by researchers at UCL and University of Oldenburg. Scientists say, this discovery could help develop new insecticides and control the spread of harmful diseases, such as malaria. The ability of male…

Receiving therapy for problematic social media use can be effective in improving the mental wellbeing of people with depression, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The research, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, found that social media use interventions could help adults for whom social media use…

Researchers at The Jackson Laboratory have created a panel of genetically diverse mice that accurately model the highly variable human response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Together with collaborators at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories, the team uncovered differences in the innate immune and regulated proinflammatory responses, the timing and strength of which…

Maize roots secrete certain chemicals that affect the quality of soil. In some fields, this effect increases yields of wheat planted subsequent to maize in the same soil by more than 4%. This was proven by researchers from the University of Bern. While the findings from several field experiments show…

With methods of so-called geoengineering, the climate could theoretically be artificially influenced and cooled. Bernese researchers have now investigated whether it would be possible to prevent the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet by artificially “dimming the sun.” The results show that artificial influence does not work without decarbonization…

The skin, hair and eye color of more than eight billion humans is determined by the light-absorbing pigment known as melanin. An article recently published in the journal Science features research from Vivek Bajpai, Ph.D., lead author and an assistant professor in the School of Sustainable Chemical, Biological and Materials…

An experimental malaria vaccine appears safe and promotes an immune response in African infants, one of the groups most vulnerable to severe malaria disease. There is currently only one malaria vaccine, “RTS,S” that is approved by the World Health Organization and offers partial disease protection. However, in the results of…

From text-generating ChatGPT to voice-activated Siri, artificial intelligence-powered tools are designed to aid our everyday life — as long as you speak a language they support. These technologies are out of reach for billions of people who don’t use English, French, Spanish or other mainstream languages, but researchers in Africa…

Scientists have developed a synthetic extracellular matrix (ECM) that can support the growth of a mini endometrium in a dish for at least two weeks. The endometrium — the mucosal lining of the uterus — has been historically hard to model in the lab, which has limited scientists’ ability to…

Glioblastoma, the most common and deadly form of brain cancer, grows rapidly to invade and destroy healthy brain tissue. The tumor sends out cancerous tendrils into the brain that make surgical tumor removal extremely difficult or impossible. Now, Salk scientists have found the immunotherapy treatment anti-CTLA-4 leads to considerably greater…

Identification of risk factors for Parkinson’s disease (PD) is essential for early diagnosis. Dating back to the 1920s, Parkinson’s disease and parkinsonism — an umbrella term that refers to motor symptoms found in Parkinson’s disease and also other conditions — have long been described in boxers. Repetitive head impacts from…

CNN  —  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has dismissed all officials in charge of regional military recruitment centers amid a widespread corruption scandal. A scandal linked to the procurement of war-time supplies had already led to Zelensky firing a slew of senior Ukrainian officials at the start of the year, and…