On NFL draft day, every team has the chance to win—or lose—big. With millions of dollars on the line and just minutes to make a final decision on each pick, a single choice can shape a franchise for years. Carnegie Mellon University experts said those intense moments offer a window into how people make decisions when the stakes are highest. [...]
Taylor Little became so badly addicted to her smartphone that she felt she had lost many of her teenage years. "I was literally trapped by addiction at age 12 and lost my teenage years because of it," she said. Her addiction was to social media, which led to suicide attempts and prolonged depression. [...]
An article published in CABI Agriculture and Bioscience calls for a diverse, participatory approach that combines indigenous, local knowledge systems with modern technologies to tackle plant diseases and strengthen food security in Africa. This comprehensive review proposes a strategy for "One Plant Health" management across the continent and aims to address challenges such as climate change and emerging plant viruses. [...]
Eight CubeSats and one payload supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) have reached orbit, where they will demonstrate various applications aimed at improving how data is sent around and processed. Thanks to these demonstrations, practical and—sometimes—even life-saving data enabled from space will move more efficiently and reach the right actors on time in the future. [...]
The ice giant Uranus is one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system, with its sideways rotation, intricate ring system, and unique family of moons. However, it is also one of the least explored objects in the solar system, owing to its extreme distance from the sun. With NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft remaining as the only spacecraft to visit Uranus, scientists continue to design and envision mission concepts for returning to explore Uranus and its icy secrets. [...]
Most predators slow down when ocean temperatures shift. Great hammerhead sharks don't—not significantly anyway. These ocean predators are masters of the "thermal hustle," maintaining peak hunting performance across a surprisingly wide range of ocean temperatures between winter and summer months, according to new research published this week in Journal of Experimental Biology. [...]
In the medieval European imagination, racial difference was often highly polarized. Black people were perceived either as exotic status symbols—including saints and wealthy rulers such as the Queen of Sheba—or as subjugated figures, considered inferior to white Christians. [...]
A Université de Montréal study has found a previously unknown mechanism in bacterial reproduction that could be attacked by future antibiotics. Bacteria reproduce by dividing into two: they form a wall, or septum, between the two future cells while remodeling the old cell walls so the so-called "daughter" cells can separate without bursting. Until now, scientists had believed that once the dividing wall was built, bacteria gradually break down the links between its two sides to allow the cells to separate in a process called cleavage. [...]
A new, miniature laser source developed by applied physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien) could soon pack the power of a laboratory-based spectrometer—an important workhorse tool for precision environmental gas analysis—onto a single microchip. [...]
Identifying weeds, checking out the pollen map, or discovering new plant life-forms are among the promising wealth of data available to users of PlantNet—a "Shazam!" for plants. Pierre Bonnet and computer scientist Alexis Joly introduced us to the digitally enhanced plant recognition application they developed. [...]
A Southwest Research Institute-led study found that protons and heavy ions react differently to solar magnetic reconnection events, revealing a more complex magnetic engine powering the solar wind. Magnetic reconnection converts magnetic energy into explosive kinetic energy, powering solar events and causing space weather that impacts Earth. Magnetic reconnection energizes protons and heavy ions, sending them shooting out from the sun at high speeds. [...]
In a first for the field, materials scientists from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have interfaced two materials to artificially generate a highly conductive ferroelectric charged domain wall. Led by associate professor of materials science and engineering Arend van der Zande and graduate student Shahriar Muhammad Nahid (now a postdoc at Stanford) and published in Advanced Materials, their approach highlights the versatility of charged domain walls in 2D materials and may be used in the future development of neuromorphic devices and reconfigurable electronics. [...]
Anna spends most of her workday typing on her laptop. After a few hours, she starts rubbing her wrists as her pain sets in. A glance at her desk reveals the painkillers that she uses to ease her discomfort. And for John, his neck pain sets in every time he listens to the news about a potential economic crisis and his stress levels start to rise. [...]
Light can carry angular momentum in two distinct ways. One comes from polarization, which describes how the electric field rotates. The other comes from the shape of the wavefront itself, which can twist like a corkscrew as it travels. This second form, known as orbital angular momentum, has attracted wide interest because it allows light to encode information, interact with matter in new ways, and probe physical and biological systems. Despite this promise, producing well-defined twisted light in free space remains technically challenging, especially when the light originates from small or localized sources. [...]
Many people have likely found themselves watching oddly satisfying videos of random objects being squashed by a powerful hydraulic press, but rarely do people consider why things squash the way they do. One object that caught the eye of researchers at The University of Manchester was a simple drink can. When crushed while filled with liquid, it behaves completely differently from an empty one. Instead of collapsing suddenly, it produces an ordered sequence of circular rings that appear one by one. [...]
An individual's position in the income hierarchy is a stronger predictor of well-being than either how much they earn or how large the income gap is between them and others, finds new research from the University of Leeds, the University of Oxford and the University of Warwick. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that the strength of the relationship between income rank and well-being varies significantly depending on the social and cultural context in which people live—and that strong civic and community life can substantially reduce it. [...]
While I was leading a tour of the National Air and Space Museum in January 2026, a visitor posed this insightful question: "Why has it taken so long to return to the moon?" [...]
Communities worldwide rely on reservoirs for drinking water, hydroelectric power, irrigation, and more. These critical freshwater resources are affected by seasonal and long-term changes; water levels in reservoirs can dip during hot summer months or due to prolonged drought, or can flood after a particularly strong storm. Despite their importance, there are key gaps in our knowledge of reservoir structure and dynamics. Two recent papers published in Scientific Data use Landsat data to help fill in those gaps. [...]
Often diagnosed when surgery is no longer an option, pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to treat and has one of the lowest rates of survival among major malignancies. Like many solid tumors, the most common type of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), is shielded by the desmoplastic matrix—a dense barrier of connective tissue, structural proteins, and specialized cells called cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs)—that also suppresses the immune response. [...]
Many emerging medical technologies rely on seamless integration between biological systems and electronics. This requires materials that are soft, electrically conductive, and biologically active—properties that have been difficult to combine in a single system. Research teams led by Prof. Dr. Ivan Minev (TUD Dresden University of Technology, Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden) and by Dr. Christoph Tondera (Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden and Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden at TUD) have now developed such a material. [...]
A Mississippi State physicist has produced a direct laboratory measurement of a key nuclear reaction believed to occur during explosive bursts on neutron stars. These bursts forge heavier elements—the building blocks of planets and life on Earth. The findings appear in The Astrophysical Journal. [...]
Recent advancements in nanophotonics are moving beyond isotropic noble metals to achieve dynamic and directional control over plasmons. Conventional localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPR) are limited by their isotropic permittivity and geometry-dependent resonance tuning. Introducing strong material anisotropy offers an effective alternative strategy, providing an additional degree of freedom for controlling plasmon propagation and confinement. [...]
Introducing forest soil on an entryway doormat shifted the indoor microbiome of Finnish homes closer to bacterial profiles found outdoors, with less contribution from human-associated bacteria, a new study shows. In the future, such interventions rebalancing the home microbiome could be used for health promotion, especially in urban settings. The study was led by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and the University of Eastern Finland and is published in the journal Microbiome. [...]
Cars on the road today are 99% cleaner than they were in 1970. Air quality in the United States is much, much better as a result. In Los Angeles, where I live, lead levels in the air were 50 times higher in the 1970s than today, and the amount of lead in kids' blood has plummeted. [...]
The stockpile of German ammunition left in Norway in 1945 could have been cleared and dismantled by the Germans. Norway declined the offer and began dumping it in Lake Mjøsa and other lakes instead. [...]
New Minnesota Carlson research debunks the idea that introverts are better listeners than extroverts. In fact, extroverts may have a slight perceived advantage as listeners. The study authors suggest moving past personality-based assumptions to develop listening as a skill. [...]
There is a closing 20-year window in which decisions on climate and land use will determine the fate of dozens of native birds, butterflies and plants across Great Britain, which is already one of the most nature-depleted countries globally. That is the warning in a new study led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), which, for the first time, predicts how different combined environmental changes would affect the survival of species within 1km square areas across the country. [...]
Climate change is a threat to countries' macroeconomic and fiscal stability. Extreme weather events exacerbated by global warming alone are costing the world $143 billion every year. However, measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change can also pose a risk to fiscal stability, especially for emerging and low-income developing countries, whose limited public spending capacity also makes them more vulnerable to extreme events. But how are climate and fiscal risks related, and above all, how can they be mitigated? [...]
We are what we eat. And in the ocean, most life-forms source their food from phytoplankton. These microscopic, plant-like algae are the primary food source for krill, sea snails, some small fish, and jellyfish, which in turn feed larger marine animals that are prey for the ocean's top predators, including humans. [...]
Politics are rife with emotions. But new research from the University of Georgia suggests emotions alone may not determine whether people are satisfied with democracy. [...]