Science & Technology

A new study compares insect herbivore damage of modern-era plants with that of fossilized leaves from as far back as the Late Cretaceous period, nearly 67 million years ago.

A new study describes agricultural intensification strategies to allow Brazil, the world’s largest soybean exporter, to increase its soybean production by 36% in the next 15 years without further encroachment into the Amazonian rainforest. The study dr…

Clinical AI tools hold the promise to transform the practice of medicine, but lack of transparency in some tools is an ongoing challenge. One way to demystify black-box AI reasoning is the use of heat maps that ‘explain’ how an AI tool made a diagnosis…

A new advance overcomes present limitations in spatial transcriptomics with a DNA nanotechnology-driven method called ‘Light-Seq.’ Light-Seq allows researchers to ‘geotag’ the full repertoire of RNA sequences with unique DNA barcodes exclusive to a few…

Gray whales that migrate along the West Coast of North America continued to decline in number over the last 2 years, according to a new assessment. The population is now down 38 percent from its peak in 2015 and 2016, as researchers probe the underlyin…

Chronic, constant stress can increase lifetime risk of heart disease and stroke, but a new survey reveals regular mealtime with others could be a simple solution to help manage stress.

AI-powered recruitment tools that claim to remove discrimination from hiring are a growing market. These AI tools reduce race and gender to trivial data points, and often rely on personality analysis that is ‘automated pseudoscience’, argue researchers…

New research based on data from 18 countries concludes that adults with better mental health are more likely to report having spent time playing in and around coastal and inland waters, such as rivers and lakes (also known collectively as blue spaces) …

The Salton Sea, California’s most polluted inland lake, has lost a third of its water in the last 25 years. New research has determined a decline in Colorado River flow is the reason for that shrinking.

Some smart home technology could help curb opioid overdose. A pilot study showed that a set of noninvasive home sensors could provide accurate information about overnight restlessness and sleep problems for people recovering from opioid use disorder. D…

Researchers have discovered a novel, non-invasive way to measure blood flow to the brains of newborn children at the bedside — a method that has the potential to enhance diagnosis and treatment across medicine, a new study suggests.

A multinational team of researchers in Europe report the discovery of a new antifungal antibiotic named solanimycin. The compound, initially isolated from a pathogenic bacterium that infects potatoes, appears to be produced by a broad spectrum of relat…

A new study provides the best evidence to date that scientists overall are most innovative and creative early in their careers. Findings showed that, on one important measure, the impact of biomedical scientists’ published work drops by between one-hal…

Investigators have examined the microbiome of pancreatic tumors and identified particular microorganisms at single cell resolution that are associated with inflammation and with poor survival. According to the researchers, these microorganisms may be n…

A new study details the genetic diversity of Streptococcus pneumoniae within individual infants, including hidden multidrug-resistant and virulent strains. The findings suggest that the detection of such resistant variants is only possible using a popu…

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is an imposing foe for gene therapy. Formed of cells wedged tightly together, the BBB keeps toxins and pathogens that may be present in the blood from entering brain tissue, but it also keeps out potential treatment for di…

Considering underlying health issues more comprehensively when a patient has a fracture could better identify those at higher risk of poor health outcomes.

Researchers have developed a deep learning algorithm that can teach itself to learn features which can then be used to find similar cases in large pathology image repositories.

Military personnel who were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq may have been exposed to significant amounts of dust and other respiratory hazards, leading to persistent respiratory symptoms and diseases like asthma and bronchiolitis.