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When you toss a coin, you put it into a higher-energy state until it falls back down again. It can then end up in one of two possible states: heads or tails. No matter which state the coin was in before, after the toss both outcomes are equally likely. A team at TU Wien has analyzed a quantum system that also has two equivalent ground states. By supplying energy through ion bombardment, this state can be changed.

Pyrochlore oxides—a class of advanced dielectric materials—represent a promising next-generation approach to efficient energy storage. Their structural flexibility and tunable chemical composition make them prime candidates for dielectric energy storage applications.

Green hydrogen is considered to be an important part of the global climate transition, especially as a fuel and energy carrier for heavy transport and industry. However, large-scale green hydrogen production requires sustainable ways of managing water resources to avoid giving rise to water shortages and conflicts with agriculture over access. This has been shown in a unique study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, that connects local water supply with a range of scenarios for future hydrogen needs in Europe.

If you were one of the many amateur bakers who learned to bake sourdough bread during lockdown, you'll know how complex a single loaf can be. The rise of the bread, moisture, firmness and even crumb structure can make or break a baker's creation. It's why Latifeh Ahmadi, professor in the Brescia School of Food and Nutritional Sciences, studied each of those factors—and more—in an attempt to perfect the science of sourdough bread. But unlike your homemade loaf, Ahmadi was using a special ingredient of her own: acid whey.

Researchers have investigated the role of a certain enzyme in regulating energy in muscle and exercise performance for decades, but a new study by Virginia Tech scientists has identified more precisely than ever how this mechanism works. Scientists working at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC focused on a triggering event that leads to the activation of AMPK, a master energy sensor known as adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase. It is a regulator of energy production in response to the tremendous energetic demands of exercise.

When removing cancerous tissue in the brain, neurosurgeons often use "awake brain mapping" to minimize the risk of causing unintended disruptions to a patient's quality of life while removing as much tumor as possible. This practice, which has been used for decades, involves waking a patient up mid-surgery to test their neurocognitive functions in real time by stimulating the brain surface and assessing for functional changes.

The human body is a dynamic place. Blood pumps, spinal fluid flows, oxygen comes in and carbon dioxide goes out. Deeper still, charged molecules pass through cell walls, quietly keeping the body's systems in balance. A new study from Northeastern University researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences now unlocks a primary mechanism in how the body maintains its electrochemical balance through chloride ions, important in our most basic cellular functions. An imbalance in the body's electrochemistry can lead to diseases as diverse as high blood pressure or asthma.

A new, daily oral tablet that combines two current HIV treatment medications, bictegravir and lenacapavir (BIC/LEN), could effectively replace more complicated HIV treatment regimens used by people living with HIV who are long-term survivors, according to the results of a new phase 3 clinical trial published in The Lancet.

A pair of disturbances common in Western Canada's boreal forests, when combined, may have an unexpected benefit of limiting the spread of non-native plant species, a University of Alberta study shows. The research gauged the interactive effect that natural wildfires and the presence of seismic lines—narrow clearings cut into forests for oil and gas exploration—had on the establishment and spread of non-native plants growing beside roads.

As the electric vehicle era enters full scale, demand is increasing for batteries that can travel farther and last longer. Lithium-metal batteries have been attracting attention as a next-generation technology capable of surpassing the capacity limits of existing lithium-ion batteries. However, during the charging process, needle-shaped crystals called dendrites grow, shortening battery life and increasing the risk of fire, which has been identified as the biggest obstacle to commercialization. A Korean research team has developed a key technology that can solve this challenge.

As the global population climbs toward 10 billion and climate change strains farmland, scientists are searching for new ways to feed the world. A group of Cornell food science researchers say one answer may lie not in fields of soy or herds of cattle, but in networks of fungi quietly transforming agricultural waste into food.

Powerful, fierce and the king of the Cretaceous world, Tyrannosaurus rex was the ultimate apex predator. But it was also surprisingly dainty on its feet, according to new research. Findings published in the journal Royal Society Open Science show that when these giant beasts walked and ran, they did so on tiptoes.

A new tool enables biomedical researchers from around the world to quickly see the connections between lipids and proteins inside cells, thanks to a new initiative led by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University. The scientists say the new open-access database and dashboard could accelerate new treatments involving an understudied but potent aspect of human health.

Since the UK rejoined Horizon Europe in 2024, cross-border research with UK partners has been delivering safer, smarter, more sustainable technologies for everyday life. On a test track in southern Germany, engineers watch as an automated vehicle drives through simulated heavy rain. As the vehicle pushes through sheets of water and poor visibility, researchers are recreating one of the toughest sensing challenges for automated driving.

A research team affiliated with UNIST has announced the successful development of a novel semiconductor circuit capable of generating high-quality clock signals with significantly reduced noise levels. This innovation combines a compact design with low power consumption, addressing critical challenges in high-speed communication and computing technologies.

A new study co-authored by Virginia Tech and University of Vermont researchers offers one of the first, large-scale empirical looks at how Certified Crop Advisors (CCAs) across North America evaluate the next generation of artificial intelligence–enabled decision support systems (AI‑DSS) for agriculture. Published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, the study identifies the specific design features that most influence whether trusted agricultural advisors will choose AI tools—and what might hold them back.

"That meeting was a total waste of our time! And can you believe what that jerk said about raises?" From whispers in the hallway, to emoji-filled group texts and profanity-laced DMs, gossiping about the boss takes many forms. And while it's generally considered toxic workplace behavior, new research published in this month's edition of the Journal of Business Ethics reveals that it's far more nuanced—and sometimes even beneficial.

There is a tiny cyclops among your oldest ancestors, and humans share these remarkable ancestral roots with all other vertebrates. Researchers from Lund University and University of Sussex have found that all vertebrates evolved from a distant ancestor that had a single eye located at the top of its head. The study, published in Current Biology, also reveals that the remnants of this so-called median eye have today become the pineal gland in our brains.

Since scientists first discovered that human immune cells could be modified to become cancer-fighting agents, they've been trying to engineer a cell that's effective against solid tumors, which account for the vast majority of cancer cases. In a key advance in meeting this "holy grail challenge" in the field of cancer cell therapy, a team of Yale scientists led by geneticist Sidi Chen has revealed how immune cells can be "boosted" to target and eradicate solid tumors.

Crystalline silicon solar cells currently dominate the global photovoltaic industry, with tunnel oxide passivating contact (TOPCon) technology—a type of architecture within this product segment—rapidly gaining market share due to its cost-effectiveness and compatibility with existing manufacturing processes.

Researchers have reported the discovery of a new species of jellyfish, Malagazzia michelin, marking only the second species of its genus ever found in Japanese waters. Led by Takato Izumi of Fukuyama University, the discovery was a collaborative effort between marine biologists and staff from several prominent institutions, including the Tsuruoka City Kamo Aquarium and the Saikai National Park Kuju-kushima Aquarium. The study is published in ZooKeys.

Researchers at Tezpur University in Assam, India, working with scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have identified distinct chemical signatures in blood that could help detect gallbladder cancer earlier. This is important in cancer patients with and without gallstones, two groups that often require different diagnostic approaches.

Enzymatic biofuel cells can act as self-powered wearable biosensors by converting chemicals in body fluids into electricity; however, manufacturing challenges have prevented their widespread adoption. Now, researchers from Japan have developed water-based 'enzyme inks' that enable single-step screen printing of complete biofuel cells onto paper substrates. The printed electrodes demonstrated superior performance and stability compared to those made using conventional methods, paving the way for mass-produced, battery-free wearable health monitors. The findings are published in the journal ACS Applied Engineering Materials.

Pinpointing when early land plants colonized terrestrial environments and began influencing Earth's systems is a core question in the evolution of the Earth system. A research team led by Prof. Zhao Mingyu at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has uncovered evidence indicating that land plants may have started reshaping Earth's surface environments far earlier than previously recognized. Their findings are published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo sapiens who lived in that region.

The indigenous Bugkalot people of Nueva Ecija call it "kelli": a plant with white, starburst-like flowers and oval-shaped leaves that are traditionally mashed and mixed with food to treat ailing dogs. But despite this local familiarity, science has only now been able to identify it as a distinct species and given it a formal scientific name.

Grocery retailers may not need new technology—or behavior change from shoppers—to meaningfully reduce food waste. New research in the journal Management Science finds that small operational decisions already under a retailer's control, including how perishable items are displayed and when (and how much) they're discounted, can increase profits while reducing spoilage.

New generations of memristors could reliably store information directly within the molecular structures of graphene-like materials. In a new review published in Nanoenergy Advances, Gennady Panin of the Russian Academy of Sciences shows how these atomically thin materials are ideally suited for electrical circuits that mimic the function of our own brains—and could help address the vast power requirements of emerging AI technologies.

Douglas Grossman, MD, Ph.D., co-leader of the Melanoma Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) and professor of dermatology at the U, has helped develop a noninvasive technology that aims to improve melanoma screening outcomes and reduce unnecessary procedures. Grossman and a team evaluated the accuracy of Skin Fluorescent Imaging (SFI), a system developed by Orlucent, Inc. that reads the molecular makeup of moles and lesions without removing possibly cancerous skin.

Biochemists at Caltech have identified how viruses have converged on a method for killing bacteria. The researchers have homed in on an underexplored small transporter called MurJ that is a vital part of the pathway bacteria use to build their chain-mail-like cell wall. An essential component of the cell wall, called peptidoglycan, provides the strength that allows bacteria to resist pressure. Using advanced tools, the scientists have determined the common mechanism used by three different bacteria-killing viruses to block MurJ from doing its job. The findings reveal a novel target for designing new antibiotics.

What does it take to make AI that can pass as human? Try massive clusters of supercomputers. To build human-like intelligence, computer scientists think big. However, for neuroscientists who want to understand how real brains work, today's AI only goes so far, as it replaces one deeply complicated system (the brain) with another (AI). How, then, do we figure out the inner workings of the biological brain? To answer this question, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Benjamin Cowley is thinking small.

A research group at the University of Lausanne (Unil) has identified a new mechanism that exposes the vulnerability of tumor cells when they are deprived of vitamin B7. The ability of cells to adapt to fluctuations in nutrient availability is essential to life. Yet, some cells become highly dependent on glutamine, an amino acid that plays a central role in cellular metabolism. This nutrient provides the essential building blocks for protein and DNA synthesis, and cells stop proliferating without it. This is the case for cancer cells: "glutamine addiction" is a well-known vulnerability of tumors, but many cancers manage to bypass it.

Scientists have identified how specific genetic changes function in cells to influence disease risk and other human health traits. By probing regions of DNA previously linked to disease, the work has created high-resolution maps of DNA variant activity, helping pinpoint the exact changes that shape blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood sugar, and other complex human traits.

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Weill Cornell Medicine, and other institutions have uncovered a key biological explanation for why eczema so often starts in childhood. The study, in young mice, found that some types of immune cells in early-life skin are more reactive than those in adults, a difference that may help explain why children are more vulnerable to inflammation and allergic skin disease.

Brains of older adults with super-healthy cognition grow more new neurons than those of their peers, according to a study from UIC, Northwestern University and the University of Washington. Researchers found that the brains of superagers—octogenarians with uncommonly nimble minds—were the most neuronally fertile, while those with Alzheimer's disease had negligible new growth.

Unlearning fear responses is a fundamental learning process in the brain. It allows us to flexibly react to formerly threatening situations once the danger is no longer present. This mechanism, known in research as "fear extinction," plays an important role in treating anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorders, among other things.

When researchers studied Norwegians who thought tick bites caused their chronic health problems, they found no objective evidence linking the symptoms to ticks. The same study finds that health problems reported by participants were associated with little physical activity and low labor force participation. The research is published in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases.

The automatic detection of surface-level irregularities—defects or anomalies—in 3D data is of significant interest for various real-world purposes, such as industrial quality inspection, infrastructure monitoring, robotics, and autonomous systems. However, collecting annotated defect examples at a large scale is costly, and existing 3D anomaly detection methods either require templates or heavy memory, multiple inference passes, and brittle heuristic clustering. These shortcomings limit real-life deployment.

ANSTO has made progress on a more cost-effective way to produce the medical radioisotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), with less enrichment of uranium-235 (U-235) and producing less waste. ANSTO supplies the Australian medical community with molybdenum-99, the precursor of technetium 99m, which is one of the most commonly used nuclear diagnostic imaging agents for the diagnosis of cancer, heart disease, organ structure and function, and supports other medical applications.

To be healthy, conventional wisdom tells us to exercise and limit fatty foods. Exercise helps us lose weight and build muscle. It makes our hearts stronger and boosts how we take in and use oxygen for energy—one of the strongest predictors of health and longevity.

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have developed a new, easy-to-use blood test score that can help identify when fatty liver disease is being driven by excessive alcohol use, an important distinction that often goes unrecognized in routine care. The study results, published in Gastroenterology, found that a new blood test score could help clinicians determine when liver injury is likely driven by alcohol rather than metabolic factors, providing clearer guidance on when additional alcohol testing may be needed.

Waymo will begin dispatching its robotaxis in four more cities in Texas and Florida, expanding the territory covered by its fleet of self-driving cars to 10 major U.S. metropolitan markets.

Inside America's junk drawers sits an untapped fortune, and a national and economic security solution. As the global race for critical minerals intensifies, University of Houston researchers have unveiled a breakthrough supply chain model designed to transform e-waste from a mounting environmental hazard into a stable, domestic engine for the U.S. economy.

Rice becomes weaker when compressed quickly, while staying stronger under slow pressure—a discovery enabling scientists to design a new material that could be used to build "soft" robots that change stiffness automatically and protective gear that adapts to impact speed. Researchers harnessed this effect to design a new "metamaterial"—an artificially engineered composite structure designed to behave in ways impossible for natural materials.

Researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have developed a multi-source co-evaporation recipe that markedly enhances the crystal quality of vacuum-deposited perovskite films. This advance brings all vacuum-deposited single-junction perovskite cells as well as perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells closer to scalable production. The research has been reported in Nature Materials, in a paper titled "Crystal-facet-directed all-vacuum-deposited perovskite solar cells."

A team from the Institute of Materials Science of Seville (ICMS), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Seville (US), has developed a new hybrid device that allows energy to be captured from both the sun and rain simultaneously. A thin film created and patented by the research team not only protects and improves the durability of perovskite solar cells, even in adverse weather conditions, but also allows nanogenerators to produce more than 100 volts from the impact of a single drop of water, enough to power small portable devices.

DNA, the genetic blueprints in every living organism, is nature's most efficient storage mechanism, capable of storing about 215 million gigabytes of data per gram. That storage capacity, if applied to electronics, could enable significantly more efficient data centers, speedier data processing and the ability to process far more complicated data. The trick to making this technological leap is getting DNA, a biological material, to work with electronics. A team led by Penn State researchers has figured out how to bridge the wide compatibility gap.

The problem with many types of modern batteries is that they rely on harsh chemicals to work. Not only can these corrosive liquids damage internal parts over time, but they can also leach into soil and water when disposed of, contaminating it. But researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Southern University of Science and Technology have developed an alternative, a new kind of eco-friendly battery that runs on a solution similar to the minerals used in tofu brine.

Researchers from the University of Münster, ETH Zurich, Stanford University, and the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Battery Cell Production (FFB) used AI-supported patent analysis to show how strongly battery technologies build upon one another. The findings suggest that industrial and innovation strategies must account for these technological dependencies far more rigorously.

Large language models (LLMs), artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can process human language and generate texts in response to specific user queries, are now used daily by a growing number of people worldwide. While initially these models were primarily used to quickly source information or produce texts for specific uses, some people have now also started approaching the models with personal issues or concerns.

A leading cause of disability in the United States is hemiparesis, a condition where impaired motor control, muscle weakness, and spasticity affect one side of the body. Occurring in 80% of stroke survivors, reduced mobility and decreased quality of life are challenges that impact millions of individuals.

Industrial quality inspection plays a critical role in manufacturing, from ensuring the reliability of electronics and vehicles to preventing costly failures in aerospace and energy systems. Traditional vision-based inspection systems typically rely on Red, Green, Blue (RGB) cameras, which are fast and inexpensive but often miss defects related to geometry (scratches or dents), material structure, or heat dissipation.

It is not easy to bring new technologies from the laboratory to market. Researchers and companies face very different demands for new developments and do not always find common ground. Scientists at Empa and other institutions have analyzed two emerging solar cell technologies to identify the greatest risks. Their conclusion: Research and industry must start collaborating much earlier.

A landmark social media addiction trial resumed Monday with a YouTube executive insisting that the Google-owned company's aim was to give people value, not hook them on harmful binge-viewing.

Researchers at the University of Oulu, Finland, have developed new high-performance bio-based resins that can replace conventional oil-based materials in composite products—without compromising strength, cost, or industrial scalability. As composite materials continue to play a critical role in renewable energy, transportation, marine industries and construction, biobased resins may become a driver of sustainable industrial production.

A research team led by Professor Taesung Kim from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University has developed a technology that precisely controls the internal structure of semiconductors using heat, much like stamping out "bungeoppang" (fish-shaped pastry) in a mold. The team report that this approach improves the performance of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) hardware. With this technology, complex AI computations can be processed more quickly using significantly less electricity than before. The findings are published in the journal ACS Nano.