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Most electronics are built on flat, stiff boards, which makes it incredibly difficult to fit them onto curved and irregular shapes we find in the real world, such as human limbs or curved aircraft wings. While flexible electronics have made some progress, they are often not durable enough or are too complex to manufacture for everyday use.

A multi-institutional study led by the University of California, Davis, finds that living in urban areas with a higher percentage of visible trees is associated with a 4% decrease in cardiovascular disease. By comparison, living in urban areas with a higher percentage of grass was associated with a 6% increase in cardiovascular disease. Likewise, a higher rate of other types of green space, like bushes or shrubs, was associated with a 3% increase in cardiovascular disease.

Astronomers have long sought evidence to explain why comets at the outskirts of our own solar system contain crystalline silicates, since crystals require intense heat to form and these "dirty snowballs" spend most of their time in the ultracold Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Now, looking outside our solar system, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has returned the first conclusive evidence that links how those conditions are possible.

A remarkable prehistoric hammer made from elephant bone, dating back nearly half a million years ago, has been uncovered in southern England and analyzed by archaeologists from UCL and the Natural History Museum, London.

So-called forever chemicals or PFAS compounds are a growing environmental problem. An innovative approach to treating PFAS‐contaminated water and soil now comes from accelerator physics: high‐energy electrons can break down PFAS molecules into harmless components through a process called radiolysis.

Using information in medical records for more than 1,100 emergency room visits, researchers at Johns Hopkins Children's Center say they have developed a scoring tool that helps more accurately predict potential shunt failures and need for revisions in children with hydrocephalus.

A nanostructure made of silver and an atomically thin semiconductor layer can be turned into an ultrafast switching mirror device that may function as an optical transistor—with a switching speed around 10,000 times faster than an electronic transistor.

Ammonia is an essential chemical used across many industries worldwide. Beyond its traditional role as a fertilizer, it is also a promising liquid hydrogen carrier and low-carbon fuel that could help reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

A new portable reactor based on a solid oxide fuel cell solves thermal management and safety issues, as reported by researchers from Japan. This miniaturized reactor can start up rapidly within five minutes at room temperature and demonstrate electric power generation. Featuring an innovative structural design with high thermal insulation and a multilayered insulation system, this microreactor design could be used to power a wide variety of edge devices.

Overuse of antibiotics has accelerated the development of bacterial resistance to conventional drugs, a global health crisis projected to result in more than 10 million deaths annually by 2050. The multidrug-resistant bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa accounts for approximately one-fifth of hospital-acquired pneumonia cases and is associated with severe illness and increased mortality.

Starchy residue preserved in ancient stone tools may rewrite the story of crop domestication in the American Southwest, according to research led by the University of Utah.

An artificial intelligence-based tool can predict the medical trajectories of individual premature newborns from blood samples collected soon after they are born, a Stanford Medicine-led study has shown.

A new medical large language model (LLM) achieved over 91% accuracy in identifying female participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder after analyzing a short WhatsApp audio recording where participants described their week, according to a study published in PLOS Mental Health by Victor H. O. Otani, from Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences and Infinity Doctors Inc., Brazil, and colleagues.

YouTube announced plans on Wednesday to allow its users this year to create AI versions of themselves for video sharing, matching a feature from Sora, the video-creation app from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

Smokers who quit with the help of e-cigarettes often continue vaping, but it is not known whether this promotes or prevents relapse back to smoking.

We now have direct images of two supermassive black holes: M87* and Sag A*. The fact that we can capture such images is remarkable, but they might be the only black holes we can observe. That is, unless we take radio astronomy to a whole new level.

A team of researchers led by the University of Warwick has developed the first unified framework for detecting "spacetime fluctuations"—tiny, random distortions in the fabric of spacetime that appear in many attempts to unite quantum physics and gravity.

Can a small lump of metal be in a quantum state that extends over distant locations? A research team at the University of Vienna answers this question with a resounding yes. In the journal Nature, physicists from the University of Vienna and the University of Duisburg-Essen show that even massive nanoparticles consisting of thousands of sodium atoms follow the rules of quantum mechanics. The experiment is currently one of the best tests of quantum mechanics on a macroscopic scale.

It's one of astronomy's great mysteries: how did black holes get so big, so massive, so quickly. An answer to this cosmic conundrum has now been provided by researchers at Ireland's Maynooth University (MU) and reported today in Nature Astronomy.

What if the earliest signs of skin cancer could be identified sooner—before a dermatology appointment?

Baby pictures are some of a family's most cherished artifacts. The same thing can be said of the Hubble Space Telescope and the infant stars it immortalizes in its scientific portraits. But while we know how babies are conceived and how they form in great detail, the same can't be said for star formation.

Abnormal clumps of proteins like α-synuclein, amyloid beta and tau are associated with neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, but a waste removal mechanism called the glymphatic pathway can clear these proteins and other metabolic byproducts from the brain.

A group of volunteers spent days locked in a small hotel room with people actively infected with flu. They played games, shared objects and exercised together in conditions designed to help the virus spread. Yet not a single person caught influenza.

A landmark UK study involving tens of thousands of families has shown that childhood screening for type 1 diabetes is effective, laying the groundwork for a UK-wide childhood screening program.

Scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have discovered that atomic-scale substitutional dopants in ultra-thin two-dimensional (2D) materials can act as stable quantum systems operating at terahertz (THz) frequencies.

Every medication in your cabinet, every material in your phone's battery, and virtually every compound that makes modern life work started as a molecular guess, with scientists hypothesizing that a particular arrangement of atoms might do something useful—kill a bacterial infection, store electrical charge, or absorb sunlight efficiently.

U.S. forests have stored more carbon in the past two decades than at any time in the last century, an increase attributable to a mix of natural factors and human activity, finds a new study.

Lithium, a widely used treatment for bipolar disorder and other mood disorders, has shown early promise in suppressing HIV, McGill University researchers report.

A research team led by Prof. Li Bing from the Institute of Metal Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with collaborators, has overcome a longstanding bottleneck in refrigeration technology. Their findings, published in Nature on January 22, introduce a novel cooling method based on the "dissolution barocaloric effect," which offers a promising zero-carbon alternative to traditional refrigeration.

When Arinze Nkemdirim Okere, PharmD, MBA, worked as the pharmacist for a hospital in Tallahassee, Florida, he noticed that discharged patients would regularly return, often for issues that could have been easily treated.

In a new study, an international group of researchers has found that chiral phonons can create orbital current without needing magnetic elements—in part because chiral phonons have their own magnetic moments. Additionally, this effect can be achieved in common crystal materials. The work has potential for the development of less expensive, energy-efficient orbitronic devices for use in a wide array of electronics.

Experts have long known that strong social networks and physical activity help older adults stay healthier. Until now, however, little has been known about how these two factors interact to affect the health and well-being of this group.

New research into the impact of climate change on snow sports provides recommendations to increase the climate-resilience of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

University of Otago—Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka nutrition experts are calling for dietary fiber to be officially recognized internationally as an essential nutrient—the first "new" essential nutrient in more than 50 years.

Proteins form the building blocks of life, but when they form unusual clumps inside the brain, they raise an alarm that something isn't right.

Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the metaverse was meant to reimagine how we interact with each other and the world, providing us with an immersive world where we could seamlessly combine digital and physical information.

More than 200 years ago, the steam boiler helped spark the Industrial Revolution. Since then, steam has been the lifeblood of industrial activity around the world. Today the production of steam—created by burning gas, oil, or coal to boil water—accounts for a significant percentage of global energy use in manufacturing, powering the creation of paper, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food, and more.

Emotions are a fundamental part of human psychology—a complex process that has long distinguished us from machines. Even advanced artificial intelligence (AI) lacks the capacity to feel. However, researchers are now exploring whether the formation of emotions can be computationally modeled, providing machines with a deeper, more human-like understanding of emotional states.

Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar with the Ralph O'Connor Sustainable Energy Institute and attorney, studies and advises academics, industry, and state and federal regulators on barriers to the clean energy transition, including the impacts of data centers on both power grids and on consumers, with a focus on the mid-Atlantic region. Silverman facilitates the Northeast States Collaborative on Interregional Transmission, made up of representatives from 10 states who are working collaboratively on their transmission grid expansion efforts, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Flue gas is exhausted from home furnaces, fireplaces and even industrial plants, and it carries polluting carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. To help mitigate these emissions, researchers reporting in ACS Energy Letters have designed a specialized electrode that captures airborne CO2 and directly converts it into a useful chemical material called formic acid. The system performed better than existing electrodes in tests with simulated flue gas and at ambient CO2 concentrations.

Next-generation technology requires next-generation materials that can be tailored to exact mission requirements. Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, has already revolutionized industries like aerospace engineering by enabling previously unthinkable component designs. However, this technique has been largely limited to pre-existing metallic alloys. This is due to the inherent complexity of the process that leads to far-from-equilibrium microstructures and results in mechanical properties that are hard to predict.

Like something out of the Addams Family, scientists have created a detachable robotic hand that can crawl and grab objects. The design enables tasks such as retrieving objects beyond normal reach and performing multi-object handling, offering potential applications in industrial, service, and exploratory robotics.

A new chip aims to dramatically reduce energy consumption while accelerating the processing of large amounts of data.

Gemstones like precious opal are beautiful to look at and deceivingly complex. As you look at such gems from different angles, you'll see a variety of tints glisten, causing you to question what color the rock actually is. It's iridescent thanks to something called structural color—microscopic structures that reflect light to produce radiant hues.

A UCLA-led, multi-institution research team has discovered a metallic material with the highest thermal conductivity measured among metals, challenging long-standing assumptions about the limits of heat transport in metallic materials.

A speech study by a research team from The University of Texas at El Paso has identified an underappreciated aspect of speech in English and Spanish speakers that could lead to improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) spoken dialogue systems.

The key to future technologies can sometimes be found in the past. What Ravi Kishore is working to perfect, for example, has its origins in the 19th century imaginations of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.

A new material provides high-performance conversion of heat into electricity, offering a way to make electronic devices more efficient.

Ice detection technology developed by researchers at the University of Toronto could speed up the de-icing process for aircraft and other aerospace vehicles, helping to prevent costly flight delays.

The war in Ukraine sent shockwaves through Europe's energy system, exposing how deeply the region depends on imported natural gas, and how vulnerable that dependence can be during geopolitical crises. A new Cornell-led study finds that Europe could sharply reduce that vulnerability while accelerating climate action by expanding renewable energy and clean technologies already within reach.