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A research team has developed a highly efficient wearable energy harvester that can power electronic devices using only body movements.

This bioengineering breakthrough has found a way to make neurons grown in a dish react just like the real thing.

Scientists develop a high-performance photoacoustic endoscopy featuring a transparent ultrasound transducer.

Sustainable, renewable and good for the climate: Wood is the material of the future. But how much of it do we actually have and how do we make best use of it? Researchers have now analyzed the material flows of wood in Switzerland in detail -- and discovered untapped opportunities.

When analyzing artworks, understanding the visual clarity of compositions is crucial. Inspired by digital artists, researchers have created a metric to quantify clarity in digital images. As a result, scientists can accurately capture changes in structure during artistic processes and physical transformations. This new metric can improve analysis and decision-making across the scientific and creative domains, potentially transforming how we understand and evaluate the structure of images. It has been tested on digital artworks and physical systems.

When analyzing artworks, understanding the visual clarity of compositions is crucial. Inspired by digital artists, researchers have created a metric to quantify clarity in digital images. As a result, scientists can accurately capture changes in structure during artistic processes and physical transformations. This new metric can improve analysis and decision-making across the scientific and creative domains, potentially transforming how we understand and evaluate the structure of images. It has been tested on digital artworks and physical systems.

People who started playing video games at an early school age developed problematic gaming more quickly compared to those who started playing a few years later.

Recent measurements with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cast doubt on the current understanding of the exoplanet Trappist-1 b's nature. Until now, it was assumed to be a dark rocky planet without an atmosphere, shaped by a billion-year-long cosmic impact of radiation and meteorites. The opposite appears to be true. The surface shows no signs of weathering, which could indicate geological activity such as volcanism and plate tectonics. Alternatively, a planet with a hazy atmosphere composed of carbon dioxide is also viable. The results demonstrate the challenges of determining the properties of exoplanets with thin atmospheres.

When one tectonic plate sinks beneath another, it generates magmas rich in volatiles such as water, sulphur and chlorine. As these magmas ascend, they release magmatic fluids, in which sulphur and chlorine bind to metals such as gold and copper, and transport these metals towards the surface of the Earth. As the extreme conditions relevant to natural magmas are very difficult to reproduce in the laboratory, the precise role of the different forms of sulphur in metal transport remains highly debated. However, an innovative approach has demonstrated that sulphur, in its bisulphide (HS-) form, is crucial for the transport of gold in magmatic fluids.

Scientists have developed a 3D concrete printing method that captures carbon, demonstrating a new pathway to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry.

How does the Earth generate its magnetic field? While the basic mechanisms seem to be understood, many details remain unresolved. A team of researchers has introduced a simulation method that promises new insights into the Earth's core. The method simulates not only the behavior of atoms, but also the magnetic properties of materials. The approach is significant for geophysics, but could also support the development of future technologies such as neuromorphic computing -- an innovative approach to more efficient AI systems.

How can we ensure that as many households as possible adopt not only solar panels, but also their own battery to store solar energy, a heat pump, and an electric car? Researchers have looked into just this question.

Scientists have developed a new blood test that could screen cancer patients to help make their treatment safer and more effective.

A study is the first-of-its-kind to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet gestures using computer vision. Researchers developed a custom dataset of 29,820 static images of ASL hand gestures. Each image was annotated with 21 key landmarks on the hand, providing detailed spatial information about its structure and position. Combining MediaPipe and YOLOv8, a deep learning method they trained, with fine-tuning hyperparameters for the best accuracy, represents a groundbreaking and innovative approach that hasn't been explored in previous research.

Anthropologists argue physical artifacts of human exploration on Mars deserve cataloging, preservation and care in order to chronicle humanity's first attempts at interplanetary exploration.

This WaPo article below (click headline to read, or find the piece archived here), discusses the new case about gender transitioning being adjudicated by the Supreme Court. It’s judging the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that, according to the paper, “bans the use of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-transition treatments in minors on the grounds that it unlawfully discriminates based on sex.” (23 other states have similar laws). I’m not sure how a ban on blockers can discriminate on the basis of sex if the hormones are banned in both males and females, but I’ll leave that up to the lawyers.

What’s important here is that the dispute about the blockers is now being discussed openly, in an Editorial Board op-ed in the Washington Post, while previously such discussion was taboo. Even questioning the use of such “affirmative treatments” was seen as “transphobic,” though there wasn’t good clinical evidence that they had good outcomes. They could even have been harmful, and in light of a lack of efficacy, they’re now banned in the UK and regarded as experimental treatments in much of Europe.

What we need, as the paper says, are “gold standard” studies: large controlled studies (double blind ones would be impractical given that the drugs have easily discernible effects) over a fairly long period of time.

Read below, and I’ll give some quotes (indented):

This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions — and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality. The issue is subject to legal dispute in part because the medical questions have not been properly resolved.

Multiple European health authorities have reviewed the available evidence and concluded that it was “very low certainty,” “lacking” and “limited by methodological weaknesses.” Last week, Britain banned the use of puberty blockers indefinitely due to safety concerns.

“Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led,” British Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said in a press release. “The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.”

An early Dutch study of blockers showed “promising results”, but the sample was too small to give definitive results, and wasn’t replicable:

Yet as other doctors began copying the Dutch, clinical practice outraced the research, especially as treatment protocols rapidly evolved. A British study attempting to replicate the Dutch researchers’ success with puberty blockers “identified no changes in psychological function” among those treated.

Some clinicians appear reluctant to publish findings that don’t show strong benefits. The British lackluster results were published nine years after the study began, after Britain’s High Court ruled that children younger than 16 were unlikely to be able to form informed consent to such treatments.

And here is the unconscionable censorship on the part of both the American government and the WPATH organization that I haven’t yet written about:

Internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health [WPATH] suggest that the group tried to interfere with a review commissioned from a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University

Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, told the New York Times that a government-funded study of puberty blockers she helped conduct, which started in 2015, had not found mental health improvements, and those results hadn’t been published because more time was needed to ensure the research wouldn’t be “weaponized.” Medical progress is impossible unless null or negative results are published as promptly as positive ones.

Weaponized?  WEAPONIZED? The study is done, but the results aren’t ideologically pleasing to gender activists, and so the study languishes, unpublished. That is unethical, for whether or not one uses blockers can have permanent effects on the well being and future fertility of adolescents.

And so we have one more example of science being suppressed because it didn’t give the results activists wanted. But this story isn’t over. As the Post recommends, Congress should fund larger and wlll-conducted trials of blockers with followups on adults who have gone on to estrogen or testosterone therapy. Given the increasing number of people who want to transition, such studies are imperative. But now we lack evidence, and without that the use of blockers should, I think, be stopped. Anecdotal evidence is not enough.

A cheap method for forming the tiny components of chips, such as transistors and diodes, harnesses simple fluid physics to make the electronics self-assembling

The age of the rings that encircle Saturn is under dispute thanks to calculations that show they could have been formed billions – rather than millions – of years ago

The past 12 months have been packed for the world’s wealthiest person as he has juggled Tesla, X, Neuralink, SpaceX and relations with Donald Trump – has it been a success?

Researchers have discovered proteins with emulsifying action that can be readily released from yeast cell walls. One of them exhibited emulsifying activity comparable to that of casein, a milk-derived emulsifier.