The Biomechanics of a Scream: Why an Angry Yell Can Hurt Your Voice We’ve all been there, haven't we? That day when stress boils over and you need to let out a primal, gut-wrenching scream. It feels great, right? But this cathartic release is fundamentally trying to choke you. New research reveals…

New AI Tool Distinguishes Brain Tumors With High Precision Brain surgery leaves no room for guessing games. When surgeons prepare to operate on the skull base, knowing exactly what they are up against changes everything, from the tools they grab to the path they take through the cranium. Yet, for…

That Tiny Jab Parents Skip: Vitamin K Refusal is Soaring That Tiny Jab Parents Skip: Vitamin K Refusal is Soaring It’s one of the first, simplest medical acts of a newborn’s life: an intramuscular shot of vitamin K. Since the 1960s, this tiny injection has nearly eliminated a lethal condition…

Nicotine Withdrawal Alters Brain, Boosts Postoperative Pain It's standard medical advice: Quit smoking before surgery. Doctors warn us that nicotine raises the risk of serious problems, from nasty wound infections to respiratory failure. But for the millions of patients who manage to stop, they…

How A 4,000-Year-Old Sheep Solved The Bronze Age Plague Mystery We all know the Black Death story. A third of Europe died. Fleas carried the deadly germ, Yersinia pestis, jumping from infected rats right onto people. But 5,000 years ago, a different, older strain of the plague was already…

Health Insurance Costs Crush Worker Paychecks for 25 Years For the 160 million Americans who get health insurance through their jobs, a stark reality has been building for decades. Between 1999 and 2024, family premiums for employer-sponsored coverage climbed 342%. Workers' contributions to those…

An Unruly Cosmic Blast Defies All Models The universe, it seems, still enjoys tearing up the rulebook. Astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have recently helped uncover new clues about the longest-lasting cosmic explosion ever observed, a gamma-ray burst that lasted…

Social Media, Not Screens, Eroding Kids’ Concentration The quiet rise of the screen has coincided with something harder to measure: a slow drain on children's ability to focus. Walk into any middle school and you'll see it. That constant pull toward phones. The glazed look when a lesson stretches…

How Summer Heat May Be Stealing Kids’ ABC’s Picture a sweltering afternoon in a village where the temperature hasn't dropped below 90 degrees in weeks. While adults seek shade and gulp water, something quieter is happening to the children around them. Their brains, still forming the pathways for…

Why Do News Outlets Keep Repeating This Suicide Myth? Every December, the same false story makes the rounds: suicides spike during the holidays. It's wrong. It's been wrong for decades. And yet, journalists keep writing it. The actual data tells a different story. December consistently shows the…

New AI Reads Brainwaves Faster by Mixing Neural Noise Brain-computer interfaces have a frustrating problem. The deep learning models that power them are data gluttons, but getting clean brain recordings is expensive and slow. Every person’s brain is different, which makes training these systems a…

Scientists Beam Information Straight Into Mouse Brains Connecting electronics to living brains sounds like science fiction. But researchers at Northwestern University just made it real. They built a wireless device that sends information directly to the brain using patterns of light. No wires. No…

Want to Move More? Science Says Sleep Matters Most We all know the drill. Get seven to nine hours of sleep. Walk at least 8,000 steps a day. Simple enough, right? Except a massive new study reveals that almost nobody actually does both. And maybe that's because we've been thinking about this…

Gut Bacteria May Hold Key to Taming Diabetes Inflammation For decades, scientists chasing a cure for Type 2 diabetes focused on the obvious targets: diet, exercise, insulin sensitivity. But a surprising answer might be hiding in your gut, produced by the bacteria living there right now. New…

Cancer Treatment Timing: The 3 PM Rule That Could Save Lives Here's something that sounds too simple to be true: giving cancer patients their immunotherapy before 3 PM instead of after might significantly extend their lives. No new drugs, no experimental procedures, just a shift in the appointment…

The Brain’s Reward Chemical Works Night Shifts Dopamine has a well-earned reputation as the brain's get-up-and-go molecule. It's what makes you reach for another cup of coffee, drives you to master a new skill, and gives you that little chemical reward when you finally nail a difficult task. It's…

This Brain Chip Breaks Physics’ Speed Limit on AI There's a cruel irony at the heart of neuromorphic computing. Engineers build chips that mimic the brain's architecture, billions of artificial neurons firing in efficient bursts, only to discover that the larger the system grows, the slower it…

Real-Time Images Of Exploding Stars Defy Simple Theories For decades, astronomers thought they had novae figured out. The story went like this: a white dwarf star siphons hydrogen from a companion until the pressure triggers a thermonuclear blast, shooting material outward in a neat, expanding…

Rabies Virus Reveals How Psilocybin Breaks Depression Loops Scientists just hijacked one of nature's deadliest pathogens to watch magic mushrooms rewire the brain. They stripped a rabies virus of its ability to kill, then used it as a microscopic tracer to map exactly how psilocybin rebuilds…

Physics Just Got Flatter: 2D Weyl Semimetals and Fermi Strings Back in 1929, a mathematician named Hermann Weyl dreamed up a weird particle. It would have no mass but could still carry an electric charge. For decades, physicists wondered if such a thing could actually exist outside the equations.…

When a Korean Parent Dies, Who Pays the Bills, and Who Cares? The death of a spouse is one of life's most disruptive events, leaving the surviving parent in a state of emotional and financial vulnerability. In South Korea, where traditional filial piety is still profoundly felt, the expectation…

Teenage T. Rex Theory Collapses Under Microscope The throat bone did not lie. After decades of paleontologists insisting that Nanotyrannus was just a scrawny adolescent Tyrannosaurus rex, a microscopic examination of a single hyoid bone has proven them wrong. The 18-foot predator was fully grown…

Space Junk Economics: Why No One Wants to Clean Up Orbit Picture a collision at 15,000 miles per hour between a dead Soviet satellite and a discarded rocket stage. The impact doesn't make a sound in the vacuum, but it creates thousands of new projectiles, each one capable of punching through…

Climate Change Could Cost You 24 Hours of Sleep a Year By the end of this century, Americans could lose up to an entire day of sleep annually as rising temperatures turn summer nights into restless struggles with sheets and pillows, according to new research tracking 12 million nights of sleep…

62,000 Penguins Starved While We Counted Sardines Picture a penguin standing on Robben Island in 2004, sleek and fat, ready to breed. Now imagine that same bird eight years later. Except you can't, because there's a 95% chance it's dead. That's not a thought experiment. It's what happened to…

Plastic in the Brain: The Dinner Plate Problem When researchers cracked open donated human skulls to examine brain tissue, they found something that didn't belong there. Tiny fragments of plastic, the same materials in your water bottle and takeout container, had worked their way past the body's…

Astronomers Clock Universe’s Expansion Using Cosmic Lenses Eight distant quasars, their light bent and delayed by massive galaxies in the foreground, have given astronomers a new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding. The number: 74.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec, give or take…

Protein Orchestrates Muscle Repair as Bodies Age Getting out of bed shouldn't feel like a high-stakes gamble. But for millions of older adults battling sarcopenia, that's exactly what it becomes. The progressive loss of muscle mass doesn't just make daily tasks harder. It sets off a cascade:…

Latchkey Dinosaurs May Have Created Richer Ecosystems Picture a baby Brachiosaurus the size of a golden retriever, hunting for food with its siblings while dodging predators. Meanwhile, its parents, towering over 40 feet tall, are dozens of miles away, completely unbothered by their offspring's…

Volcanoes May Have Triggered the Black Death’s Arrival A volcanic eruption somewhere in the tropics around 1345 might have set off the chain of events that brought the Black Death to Europe. At least, that's what tree rings and medieval documents are now suggesting. The plague killed tens of…

Trust in Cancer Scientists Splits Along Political Lines A new survey of more than 6,000 American adults reveals a striking pattern: while most people trust scientists for cancer information, political ideology creates a clear divide in how much. The findings show trust levels dropping from 94%…

Satellite Swarms Plague Space Telescopes The shining promise of space-based astronomy faces a threat: tens of thousands of commercial satellites launched not for science, but for internet connectivity. A comprehensive new forecast reveals that even telescopes orbiting hundreds of kilometers above…

Scientists Turn Fiber Optic Cable Into Working Brain Imagine if the cables carrying your internet traffic could think while they transmit. A research team from NTT Inc., Kyushu University, and the University of Tokyo has done that, building a working neural network that performs computations as…

Silver Filaments Wire Individual Molecules Into Circuits Forget silicon chips. Japanese researchers just figured out how to wire up electronic circuits using individual molecules, held in place by bridges made from silver atoms. The trick involves what they call an atomic switch, though it's more…

Modified Buckyballs Could Make MRI Scans Far More Precise MRI machines have spent four decades peering inside the human body, but they still miss plenty. The fundamental problem is simple: these medical workhorses can only detect tissues rich in water molecules. Everything else remains essentially…

Robot Grippers Made From Langoustine Leftovers The langoustine tails that typically end up in restaurant compost bins have found an unlikely second career. Engineers at Switzerland's EPFL are building functional robots from discarded crustacean exoskeletons. The grippers can hoist 500-gram…

Study Shows Pleasant Words Stick Better Here's a curious fact: the way a word sounds might determine whether you remember it. Not its meaning, not how useful it is, but simply how pleasant it sounds rolling off your tongue. Theresa Matzinger, a linguist at the University of Vienna, stumbled onto…

Mental Health Struggles Strongly Linked To Dark Web Use An unsettling pattern emerges when you look closely at how people move through hidden online spaces. In a new study from Florida Atlantic University, researchers used national survey data to uncover stark mental health differences between…

Energy-Efficient Process Delivers Rare Earth Magnets Researchers have developed a new method for producing neodymium metal that could dramatically reduce costs while addressing critical supply chain vulnerabilities in the United States. The so-called chloride molten salt electrolysis process skips…

Bennu’s Frozen Heart Reveals Life’s Earliest Chemical Sparks Material collected from asteroid Bennu shows that the molecular building blocks potentially necessary for life began forming in the deep freeze of our infant solar system, long before water existed in liquid form. The finding suggests…

Dry January Delivers Real Health Gains, New Review Finds For those eyeing the calendar and contemplating a January without alcohol, science has some encouraging news: even one month off the bottle appears to deliver measurable improvements in sleep quality, mood, liver function and blood pressure,…

Sugar Substitute Sorbitol May Fuel Liver Disease That "sugar-free" gum or low-calorie candy in your desk drawer might not be the harmless treat you thought. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered that sorbitol, a common sugar alcohol found in diet foods and naturally…

Weight-Loss Drug Tames Blood Sugar in Schizophrenia Patients Here's something you don't see often in psychiatry research: a treatment that actually works before the damage is done. Danish researchers gave semaglutide to 36 people with schizophrenia who were gaining weight and showing early blood…

How Black Hole Disks Blaze With Light Astrophysicists have created the most detailed simulations ever made of how black holes produce some of the universe's brightest light shows, using calculations that track every photon's journey through the twisted fabric of space-time. The findings could…

New Design Tool Makes Sculpted Glass Roofs Practical A new computer method from the University of Tokyo and U.S. engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti lets architects design large, curving glass-and-steel roofs in about 90 minutes on a normal computer instead of roughly 90 hours on a specialist…

Hidden Cell Layers Rewire Memory Map Researchers at the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have found a new pattern in one of the brain’s key memory hubs. In mice, they discovered that the CA1 region of the hippocampus is built from…

Stanford Engineers Build Quantum Device That Works at Room Temperature Stanford researchers have built a nanoscale optical device that entangles photons and electrons at room temperature, something quantum engineers have been trying to crack for years. The chip, described in Nature Communications,…

Supplement Mix Reverses Autism-Linked Behaviors in Mice A carefully balanced mix of zinc, serine, and branched-chain amino acids reversed social deficits in three different mouse models of autism, a new study from Academia Sinica in Taiwan reports. After just seven days of dietary supplementation,…

Big Mouth Crickets Grind Microplastics Smaller Tropical house crickets raised in Ottawa, Canada, happily gobbled polyethylene microplastics mixed into their feed, treating them much like normal food. The work appears in Environmental Science & Technology and followed the insects for seven weeks as…

Sick Ants Flash a Chemical Alarm, Then Workers Finish the Job Most of us would probably try to downplay an illness, but for ant pupae, the best way to protect family is to scent their own death. Researchers at IST Austria have found that when young ants catch a truly deadly infection, they sound…