For The Better

The most comprehensive survey conducted of elephant numbers in the Central African nation of Gabon since the late 1980s has found elephants occurring in higher numbers than previously thought.

People with type 2 diabetes who contract COVID-19 are nearly 50 percent more likely to wind up in intensive care if they have poorly managed their blood sugar levels over the long-term than those with better long-term glycemic control, according to a s…

Galápagos giant tortoises can weigh well over 300 pounds and often live over 100 years. So what’s the secret to their evolutionary success? A new study concludes that compared with other turtles, these animals evolved to have extra copies of genes — c…

A ‘macrogrid’ that increases the electricity moving between America’s Eastern and Western interconnections, two of the biggest power grids on the planet, would more than pay for itself, according to new research.

Biologists have struggled to study rare and transient muscle cells involved in the process, but engineers have lifted the curtain on these elusive dynamics with the launch of scMuscle, one of the largest single-cell databases of its kind.

Researchers have conducted an empirical field study and concluded that single urban trees, such as street trees, function differently than trees grown in clusters featuring significantly greater transpiration rates. This result offers a new understandi…

Why do we need sleep? New research takes a step towards solving this mystery by discovering a mechanism of sleep in zebrafish, with some supporting evidence in mice.

Researchers are using generative adversarial networks (GANs) — technology best known for creating deepfake videos and photorealistic human faces — to improve brain-computer interfaces for people with disabilities. The team successfully taught an AI t…

Cells in your body cannot see, but they can feel their surroundings and their own shape. Scientists now showed via both – experiments and theory – how cells can sense the curvature of tissue around them and how this influences their inner workings.

Scientists have used glowing chemicals and other techniques to create a 3D map of the blood vessels and self-renewing ‘stem’ cells that line and penetrate a mouse skull. The map provides precise locations of blood vessels and stem cells that scientists…

Researchers have new evidence that could help rapidly boost efforts to scale-up the adoption of clean cooking with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in sub-Saharan Africa. The new study suggests that supply-side interventions such as shortening the distanc…

Safe, cheap and sustainable technology for energy storage has been developed. It is based on two major breakthroughs: the manufacture of wood-based electrodes in rolled form, and a new type of water-based electrolyte.

Bubbles are common in nature and can form when ocean waves break and when raindrops impact surfaces. When bubbles burst, they send tiny jets of water and other materials into the air. A new study examines how the interplay between bubble surfaces and w…

Immune checkpoint inhibitors strengthen the immune response against cancer cells, but the medications are ineffective against certain tumors. Results from a new clinical trial indicate that adding radiation may overcome this resistance to immune checkp…

An international research team has developed a new imaging technology. In the future this technology could not only improve the resolution of neutron measurements by many times but could also reduce radiation exposure during x-ray imaging.

Researchers conducted a head-to-head test of the second-generation vaccine CV2CoV compared with CVnCoV. The scientists assessed the vaccines’ ability to provoke an immune response as well as their protective efficacy against COVID-19 in non-human prima…

Joining the global effort to curb air pollution, researchers have developed computational tools to accurately assess the footprint of certain organic atmospheric pollutants. Their simulation could help government agencies keep a closer check on human-m…

The heady days of rapidly rising prosperity may be coming to an end, according to an interdisciplinary group of scientists. Developed democracies in particular look to be first in line for a long-run economic slowdown through the 21st century, and that…

Both rare and commonly observed differences in the DNA letters strung along a person’s chromosomes can explain about a third of the risk for being diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), according to a new study.

An active metabolite of vitamin D (not the over-the-counter version) is involved in shutting down inflammation, new research shows.