For The Better

A team of researchers has discovered two new and unusual species of diatoms in the waters off Hawai’i. The organisms were also found to fix nitrogen, a critical process that supports productivity in the nutrient-poor open ocean they inhabit.

For a long time, anthropologists believed that a written language was a hallmark of a society being complex or ‘advanced.’ A new study on precolonial Mesoamerican societies shows that you can have a society with a big population and a complex governmen…

How are the different shapes of our organs and tissues generated? To answer this question, a team forced muscle cells to spontaneously reproduce simple shapes in vitro. By confining them on adhesion discs, the biochemists and physicists observed that t…

How can we reduce the carbon footprint of electricity consumption in Switzerland? The country relies on electricity imports from fossil fuel power plants, which are major emitters of greenhouse gases.

Seven to nine percent of all vascular plant species occurring in Europe are globally threatened, according to a new study. Researchers combined Red Lists of endangered plant species in Europe with data on their global distribution.

Toward a new kind of superconductivity: In the past four years scientists have discovered metals whose crystal structure mimics that of a traditional Japanese woven bamboo pattern: kagome metals. The international research activity in this new directio…

A new machine learning process designed to identify and classify hip fractures has been shown to outperform human clinicians. Two convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were able to identify and classify hip fractures from X-rays with a 19% greater degre…

Using a technique called spatial transcriptomics, researchers have analyzed the gene expression in the mouse colon and created a map showing where in the tissue individual genes are expressed. When they superimposed previously known human transcription…

Researchers discovered how ovarian cancer hides from the body’s immune system. The findings will help develop novel precision therapies for ovarian cancer, a common and aggressive cancer type.

In conflict with the current prevailing theory used to describe the universe, a new study suggests the existence of a direct interaction between the elementary particles that make up the dark matter halo and those that make up ordinary matter.

Following surgery, patients with breast cancer are faced with the question of whether additional chemotherapy is necessary and really effective. It is important that these women do not receive too much treatment — but not too little treatment either. …

Researchers may have cleared a significant hurdle on the path to quantum computing, demonstrating step-change improvements in the spin transport characteristics of nanoscale graphene-based electronic devices.

Researchers have found several hundred different chemical substances in tap water stored in reusable plastic bottles. Several of these substances are potentially harmful to human health. There is a need for better regulation and manufacturing standards…

Cerebral venous thrombosis is a rare, often severe disease that has been brought to public attention by the COVID-19 pandemic. A research group has now succeeded for the first time in deciphering a molecular cause of this disease. This opens the way to…

Researchers have developed a method that could be used to diagnose atherosclerosis. Using self-learning software, they were able to identify vascular changes in patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD), often at an early stage. Although these ea…

Researchers have developed a system based on computer vision techniques that allows automatic analysis of biomedical videos captured by microscopy in order to characterize and describe the behavior of the cells that appear in the images.

The oceanic phenomenon El Niño significantly affected the number of enslaved Africans transported from West Africa to the Americas between the mid-1600s and mid-1800s, according to a new study. The study bridges atmospheric science with African history…

More than eight million tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year — a serious danger for the environment and health. Biodegradable bioplastics could provide an alternative. A research team has now introduced a new method for the production of pr…