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With a new method that could be extended to study Earth's core and nuclear fusion, they identify and explain jumps in the electrical conductivity of aluminum under extreme conditions.
Over the course of this year, the dedicated scientists, engineers, technicians and operations staff at Fermilab came together to drive discoveries that shape the future of particle physics, utilize their experience and expertise to drive American innovation and prepare the lab for a bright future.
In a study published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers developed a new approach that can isolate biomarkers released from glioblastoma tumor cells.They showed that their method can be used to determine the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel.
UCLA has been awarded a $7.5 million grant from Aligning Research to Impact Autism to support the Innovative Medicine and Precision Approaches to Clinical Trials Network, which focuses on autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.
Astronomers may have just seen the first ever ‘superkilonova,’ a combination of a supernova and a kilonova. These are two very different kinds of stellar explosions, and if this discovery stands, it could change the way scientists understand stellar birth and death.
Armando Falcon-Brindis has noticed a few newcomers buzzing around University of Idaho’s Parma Research and Extension Center ever since he helped build a garden of flowering plants to accommodate pollinators.
Scientists at University of Idaho’s Parma Research and Extension Center recently showcased their state-of-the-art new laboratory during a unique training that attracted crop pest and disease diagnosticians from throughout the country.
Tired of AI customer service loops? These insider tricks help you escape "frustration AI" and get real human help when you need it most for urgent issues.
From fruit flies that bite to a tiny mouse opossum and a feathered dinosaur preserved with the remains of its last meal, more than 70 new species were described this year by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History.
Engineered dendritic cells with EV‐internalizing and chimeric antigen receptors capture tumor vesicles, activate T cells, and delay melanoma growth in preclinical models, advancing next‐generation cancer immunotherapy strategies.The post Engineered Dendritic Cells Harness Tumor EVs to Boost Cancer Immunotherapy appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital described for the first time a short-lived kinase state that is essential for normal cell migration and T-cell function.
Mountain permafrost is warming and thawing worldwide due to climate change, with ground temperature being a key control of its mechanical stability. Heat conduction is the dominant mode of heat transfer in frozen ground, and thermal diffusivity governs the rate at which temperature changes propagate through the subsurface. Despite its relevance, there are few field-based estimates of thermal diffusivity.
The president said he would prioritize the nation’s push to space for commercial, national security, and exploration purposes.
Shandin Pete, a Salish and Navajo hydrogeologist and science educator, talks about Salish constellations and why Indigenous astronomy is important.
ZHUHAI, China, Dec. 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rezubio, a China-based biotechnology company founded by former Merck scientists, today announced the closing of a $20 million Series A financing. Proceeds will be used to advance the company's lead program into Phase 2 clinical development for obesity and diabetes, as well as other programs in IND-enabling stage and early preclinical stage.The financing was led by Lapam Capital, with participation from Frees Fund and Riverhead Capital."This Series A represents an important inflection point for ...Full story available on Benzinga.com
Science can be as dynamic as the researchers who explore it. The Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers is recognizing three Sandia National Laboratories engineers who pushed beyond the boundaries of linear research to expand their knowledge and impact across multiple fields.
When the world slowed down during the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects extended beyond humans. A recent study found that it reshaped urban ecosystems to such an extent that certain city-dwelling birds even began to develop longer, thinner beaks resembling those of their wild relatives.
Every year since 2010, I’ve posted an article about what trend I expect to dominate the next twelve months. Throughout the 2010s, these forecasts usually focused on emerging technologies or new currents in management thinking. But around 2020, that began to shift. The annual trends increasingly centered on how we cope with change rather than the change itself.Last year my trend was “The Coming Realignment.” History tends to propagate at a certain rhythm and then converge and cascade around certain points. Years like 1776, 1789, 1848, 1920, 1948, 1968, 1989—and, it seems, 2020—mark these inflection points. The years that follow are usually spent absorbing the shock and navigating the consequences. Today, everything is up for question. Will AI boom or bust? Will it take our jobs or bring new prosperity? What kind of economic system will we adopt for the future? We are in the midst of a great realignment. What we know from previous inflections is that what comes after will be profoundly different from before. What we most need to watch is our institutions.AI boom or bust?Today, the AI investment boom is without a doubt the single biggest factor propping up the US economy. Just this year, tech giants are expected to invest roughly $364 billion in the technology. And the spending won’t stop there. McKinsey projects that building AI data centers could add up to $5.2 trillion in investment by 2030.This boom is different from what we’ve seen in the past because the main investors aren’t speculators or startups, but some of the world’s most profitable companies, including Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. Unlike in past cycles, if the industry hits a downturn, there will still be tens of billions of dollars in annual profits to cushion the blow. Still, as investor Paul Kedrosky points out, there are reasons to worry. Investment in data center infrastructure has already surpassed the peak of the dot-com boom and is beginning to approach levels last seen during the railroad frenzy of the 19th century. Also, 60% of the cost of those data centers goes to AI chips, which have a useful life of only about three years.That means this is not a boom that can wait decades to pay off. If today’s investments don’t generate returns in the near future, much of the infrastructure could fully depreciate before delivering meaningful profit. In practical terms, unless tech firms can earn more than $200 billion in profit—on these investments alone, not from their core businesses—they will be underwater. And as investment accelerates, that bar only rises.Kedrosky also notes signs of growing systemic risk. Increasingly, tech giants are choosing to finance their infrastructure build-outs with Enron-like special-purpose vehicles. These structures cost more but keep the debt off their balance sheets. That risk, in turn, is increasingly being passed to more traditional investors, including REITs.Will AI displace humans or enhance us? A 2023 report by the World Economic Forum, analyzing 673 million jobs, predicted structural job growth of 69 million jobs and a decline of 83 million, an overall decrease of 14 million jobs. An IMF analysis found that 40% of global employment is exposed. In an interview with Axios, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.Yet more grounded economic analyses suggest a much more modest impact. A study by the St. Louis Fed suggests a 1.1% increase in aggregate worker productivity, with much of that increase concentrated in the tech sector. A paper by Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, which looks at total factor productivity (TFP), a measure which takes use of capital into account, sees a 0.66% increase over 10 years, translating to a 0.064% increase in annual TFP growth.A recent McKinsey report takes an optimistic view. While noting that many routine office and production jobs are likely to disappear, those that leverage technical, social and emotional skills are likely to flourish, just as Autor has predicted. However, there is reason to suspect that optimists may be merely extrapolating from historical trends that may no longer apply.There’s no guarantee that the future will look like the past. An analysis in Harvard Business Review suggested that AI could disrupt the non-routine creative work that, to this point, has been hard to automate. Meanwhile, research in Science has found that, although AI may enhance individual creative work, it diminishes the diversity of novel output, potentially stifling the very innovation it aims to support.What will be the economic system of the future? Before 1789 the world was ruled by the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution, the French Revolution, and the first Industrial Revolution, already underway since the introduction of the steam engine in 1776, together created a fundamental realignment of power.These forces would build and clash for decades until things came to a head in the revolutionary year of 1848. Today, we seem to be in a similarly liminal space, as we decide what kind of future we want to live in. The next century and a half would be dominated by the tensions between socialism and capitalism. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the West was triumphant. Communism was exposed as a corrupt system bereft of any real legitimacy. Yet for anyone paying attention, communism had long been discredited. As far back as the 1930s, Stalin’s disastrous collectivization and industrialization campaigns had led to mass starvation. By the 1970s, Soviet total factor productivity growth had gone negative, meaning more investment actually brought less output. Yet today, it is capitalism that finds itself under siege from all sides. Leftist progressives like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani advocate for reining in the private sector and creating a bigger safety net. The mercantilist American president rails against free trade and nationalizes the means of production. Christian nationalists openly call for theocratic rule.At the same time, a new cadre of theorists has emerged whose ideas don’t fit the traditional right-left paradigm. New Right thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen call for wholesale reordering of society. On the more technocratic side, a new school of thought is emerging that is associated with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance.It’s the institutions, stupidIn Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain why the fate of nations rests less on innate factors such as geography, culture, or climate and more on the quality and types of institutions they build. In particular, they make the distinction between inclusive institutions and extractive institutions. Inclusive institutions protect property rights broadly across society, establish fair competition, and reward innovation. Extractive institutions, on the other hand, concentrate wealth in the hands of a small elite who exploit the broader population. These elite players control resources and use state power to enrich themselves at society’s expense.We are clearly in a liminal period in which we are struggling to adapt to shifts in technology, economics, and identity. Will AI oppress or empower regular people? Will we trade openly or retreat behind national barriers? Will we focus primarily on our local communities or see ourselves as citizens of a larger planet? As ever, there will be no shortage of pundits predicting the paths the future will take. Many of their narratives will be persuasive—but also mutually contradictory. The real tell will be what kinds of institutions we build and which ones we allow to decay or be destroyed outright. Are we creating institutions that strengthen rights and the rule of law, or those that serve the powerful?The outcome is still unclear, but the lines of battle have been drawn. If you want to know what to expect in the near to mid-term, pay less attention to predictions about technology, politics, or ideology and focus instead on institutions. Those are what create the norms and rituals that will shape the behaviors of the future.
The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, has been widely framed as a "climate conflict" and a mass migration and uprising triggered by a severe drought. This very well-known and media-popular narrative is now debunked in a new report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).
One of the researchers said that the findings are especially relevant in high-stakes contexts like eyewitness testimony.
With new technologies comes new discoveries. Or so Spider Man’s Uncle Ben might have said if he was an astronomer. Or a scientist more generally - but in astronomy that saying is more true than many other disciplines, as many discoveries are entirely dependent on the technology - the telescope, imager, or processing algorithm, used to collect data on them. A new piece of technology, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is exciting scientists enough that they are even starting to predict what kind of discoveries it might make. One such type of discovery, described in a pre-print paper on arXiv by Vito Saggese of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and his co-authors on the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team, is the discovery of many more multiplantery exoplanet systems an astronomical phenomena Roman is well placed to detect - microlensing.
Now divided between Romania and Ukraine, the region never fit easily among its neighbors, as regimes including the Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union tried to remake it in their image.
Ocean Optics reports on how spectroscopy revolutionizes research by utilizing light to analyze materials, improving accuracy and efficiency.
An international research expedition involving Cornell has uncovered new details as to why a 2011 earthquake northeast of Japan behaved so unusually as it lifted the seafloor and produced a tsunami that devastated coastal communities.
New research shows the Chesapeake Bay’s top invader is hard to control.
Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., the company behind Truth Social, is getting into nuclear fusion.
Jane Dever, director of Clemson University’s Pee Dee Research and Education Center (REC) near Florence, South Carolina, has...The post Dever inducted into Cotton Research and Promotion Hall of Fame appeared first on Clemson News.
A recent NBER study, "Technology and the Innovation Shock," reveals that technological breakthroughs like AI boost GDP by 2-3% short-term and enhance productivity, but they widen income inequality by favoring capital owners and high-skilled workers while displacing routine jobs. Policymakers must implement retraining and progressive measures to ensure equitable benefits.
Gazing Into the Mind’s Eye With Mice – How Neuroscientists Are Seeing Human Vision More ClearlySuperadminThu, 12/18/2025 - 09:08 Despite the nursery rhyme about three blind mice, mouse eyesight is surprisingly sensitive. Studying how mice see has helped researchers discover unprecedented details about how individual brain cells communicate and work together to create a mental picture of the visual world.I am a neuroscientist who studies how brain cells drive visual perception and how these processes can fail in conditions such as autism. My lab “listens” to the electrical activity of neurons in the outermost part of the brain called the cerebral cortex, a large portion of which processes visual information. Injuries to the visual cortex can lead to blindness and other visual deficits, even when the eyes themselves are unhurt.Understanding the activity of individual neurons – and how they work together while the brain is actively using and processing information – is a long-standing goal of neuroscience. Researchers have moved much closer to achieving this goal thanks to new technologies aimed at the mouse visual system. And these findings will help scientists better see how the visual systems of people work.The Mind in the Blink of an EyeResearchers long thought that vision in mice appeared sluggish with low clarity. But it turns out visual cortex neurons in mice – just like those in humans, monkeys, cats and ferrets – require specific visual features to trigger activity and are particularly selective in alert and awake conditions.My colleagues and I and others have found that mice are especially sensitive to visual stimuli directly in front of them. This is surprising, because mouse eyes face outward rather than forward. Forward-facing eyes, like those of cats and primates, naturally have a larger area of focus straight ahead compared to outward-facing eyes.This image shows neurons in the mouse retina: cone photoreceptors (red), bipolar neurons (magenta), and a subtype of bipolar neuron (green). Brian Liu and Melanie Samuel/Baylor College of Medicine/NIH via FlickrThis finding suggests that the specialization of the visual system to highlight the frontal visual field appears to be shared between mice and humans. For mice, a visual focus on what’s straight ahead may help them be more responsive to shadows or edges in front of them, helping them avoid looming predators or better hunt and capture insects for food.Importantly, the center of view is most affected in aging and many visual diseases in people. Since mice also rely heavily on this part of the visual field, they may be particularly useful models to study and treat visual impairment.A Thousand Voices Drive Complicated ChoicesAdvances in technology have greatly accelerated scientific understanding of vision and the brain. Researchers can now routinely record the activity of thousands of neurons at the same time and pair this data with real-time video of a mouse’s face, pupil and body movements. This method can show how behavior interacts with brain activity.It’s like spending years listening to a grainy recording of a symphony with one featured soloist, but now you have a pristine recording where you can hear every single musician with a note-by-note readout of every single finger movement.Using these improved methods, researchers like me are studying how specific types of neurons work together during complex visual behaviors. This involves analyzing how factors such as movement, alertness and the environment influence visual activity in the brain.For example, my lab and I found that the speed of visual signaling is highly sensitive to what actions are possible in the physical environment. If a mouse rests on a disc that permits running, visual signals travel to the cortex faster than if the mouse views the same images while resting in a stationary tube – even when the mouse is totally still in both conditions.In order to connect electrical activity to visual perception, researchers also have to ask a mouse what it thinks it sees. How have we done this?The last decade has seen researchers debunking long-standing myths about mouse learning and behavior. Like other rodents, mice are also surprisingly clever and can learn how to “tell” researchers about the visual events they perceive through their behavior.For example, mice can learn to release a lever to indicate they have detected that a pattern has brightened or tilted. They can rotate a Lego wheel left or right to move a visual stimulus to the center of a screen like a video game, and they can stop running on a wheel and lick a water spout when they detect the visual scene has suddenly changed.Mice can be trained to drink water as a way to ‘tell’ researchers they see something. felixmizioznikov/iStock via Getty Images PlusMice can also use visual cues to focus their visual processing to specific parts of the visual field. As a result, they can more quickly and accurately respond to visual stimuli that appear in those regions. For example, my team and I found that a faint visual image in the peripheral visual field is difficult for mice to detect. But once they do notice it – and tell us by licking a water spout – their subsequent responses are faster and more accurate.These improvements come at a cost: If the image unexpectedly appears in a different location, the mice are slower and less likely to respond to it. These findings resemble those found in studies on spatial attention in people.My lab has also found that particular types of inhibitory neurons – brain cells that prevent activity from spreading – strongly control the strength of visual signals. When we activated certain inhibitory neurons in the visual cortex of mice, we could effectively “erase” their perception of an image.These kinds of experiments are also revealing that the boundaries between perception and action in the brain are much less separate than once thought. This means that visual neurons will respond differently to the same image in ways that depend on behavioral circumstances – for example, visual responses differ if the image will be successfully detected, if it appears while the mouse is moving, or if it appears when the mouse is thirsty or hydrated.Understanding how different factors shape how cortical neurons rapidly respond to visual images will require advances in computational tools that can separate the contribution of these behavioral signals from the visual ones. Researchers also need technologies that can isolate how specific types of brain cells carry and communicate these signals.Data Clouds Encircling the GlobeThis surge of research on the mouse visual system has led to a significant increase in the amount of data that scientists can not only gather in a single experiment but also publicly share among each other.Major national and international research centers focused on unraveling the circuitry of the mouse visual system have been leading the charge in ushering in new optical, electrical and biological tools to measure large numbers of visual neurons in action. Moreover, they make all the data publicly available, inspiring similar efforts around the globe. This collaboration accelerates the ability of researchers to analyze data, replicate findings and make new discoveries.Technological advances in data collection and sharing can make the culture of scientific discovery more efficient and transparent – a major data informatics goal of neuroscience in the years ahead.If the past 10 years are anything to go by, I believe such discoveries are just the tip of the iceberg, and the mighty and not-so-blind mouse will play a leading role in the continuing quest to understand the mysteries of the human brain. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Subtitle Summary sentence Studying how mice see has helped researchers discover unprecedented details about how individual brain cells communicate and work together to create a mental picture of the visual world. Summary Studying how mice see has helped researchers discover unprecedented details about how individual brain cells communicate and work together to create a mental picture of the visual world. Dateline Tue, 12/16/2025 - 12:00 Contact Author:Bilal Haider, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of TechnologyMedia Contact:Shelley [email protected] Related links Read This Article on The Conversation Associated importer 1 Keywords go-resarchnews News room topics Science and Technology Mercury ID 686983 Source updated Thu, 12/18/2025 - 08:57
British policymakers planning for climate change now have detailed worst-case scenarios at their disposal, filling a gap that left the UK unprepared for extreme outcomes.
Real skeptics study the evidence and ask questions, rather than taking political dogma on faith. Experiencing disasters can open more eyes to the risks.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)
Water is a vital resource. Life on Earth, as we know it, is impossible without access to safe drinking water. Concerns over declining quality and consistency of municipal drinking water supplied to consumers have been increasing over a long time.
Effective communication lies at the heart of human connection. It helps us collaborate with each other, solve problems and build relationships. And communicating clearly is a major consideration for most of us in most aspects of life.
(MENAFN - GlobeNewsWire - Nasdaq) The Cloud ERP Market is expanding rapidly as organizations replace legacy ERP systems with scalable cloud platforms, with the U.S. market set to grow from USD 18.25 ...
For Olutoyin Green, two study abroad experiences launched a multi-semester research endeavor bridging social movements across time and space.The post Leaders From South Africa Inspire New Generation of Social Changemakers appeared first on Syracuse University Today.
On the shelf in a European supermarket, two packs of pasta sit side by side. Both claim to be "climate friendly." One carries a bright green "A" in a traffic-light scheme. The other shows a neat carbon footprint value: 1.8 kg CO2 per kg. Which one is better? Which one should you choose?
(MENAFN - PR Newswire) New data analysis clarifies misleading benchmarks released by a competitor; separate SkylineDx analysis demonstrates Merlin CP-GEP Test provides stronger metastatic-risk ...
Imagine a grain field in Western Jutland, winter wheat standing tall and golden. Now picture it being plowed up and replaced with clover grass: one of the crops intended to drive the green transition in Danish agriculture.
University of Michigan Health has launched a brain-computer interface clinic for patients with motor and speech disabilities. The health system is among the first in the nation to establish a clinic dedicated to brain-computer interfaces, which have potential to recover functionality loss that occurs due to injury or disease.
Researchers at Empa have succeeded in making aluminum-coated polymer film material even more resistant by implementing an ultra-thin intermediate layer.
ClinTrial Research (CTR) announced today that it has closed a growth equity round led by Tarsadia Investments, a multi-billion-dollar firm that makes high-conviction investments in category-defining companies globally. The investment reflects Tarsadia's conviction that CTR is positioned to become the leader in the clinical site network sector.
Windows on the Universe Center for Astronomy Outreach is a new science education and astronomy outreach center that has just opened at U.S. National Science Foundation Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.
University of Michigan researchers found a new protein target and developed a drug to treat non-small cell lung cancers that have KRAS mutations.
(MENAFN - EIN Presswire) EINPresswire/ -- The Space Situational Awareness (SSA) market is dominated by a mix of global aerospace and defense giants, specialized space technology firms, and emerging ...
CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reports on Coinbase making its biggest push yet to become a one-stop financial platform, rolling out new features that expand the app into stocks, more advanced trading and prediction markets.
Researchers found a way to temporarily program cells in the liver and bolster T cell function in aging mice by compensating for the age-related decline of the thymus, where T cell maturation normally occurs. The post T Cell Populations in Aged Mice Rejuvenated By mRNA Delivery to Liver appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
(MENAFN - EIN Presswire) EINPresswire/ -- The Clinical Decision Support Systems market is dominated by a mix of global healthcare technology leaders and specialized digital health innovators. ...
An RPI team has been awarded a $3.3 million grant from the Gates Foundation to develop breakthrough purification technologies that could dramatically reduce the cost of producing mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics.
NCAR's Mesa Laboratory is seen as a global leader in scientific research, is an economic driver and, along with other federal labs, a cultural and educational pillar in Boulder.
Lawmakers and researchers sound the alarm on the academic loophole that enables the sharing of sensitive research with China.
Scientists search for "decaying" dark matter (DDM) because it offers unique signatures like specific X-ray or gamma-ray lines or neutrino signals not seen in normal matter, potentially revealing dark matter's particle nature, mass and interactions, information that could illuminate the universe's structure. DDM is a theoretical model where dark matter particles aren't perfectly stable, but slowly decay over vast cosmic timescales into lighter dark matter particles and/or massless particles, leaving behind gravitational or electromagnetic signals.
The United States aims to embark on its most active new nuclear construction program since the 1970s. In its most high-dollar nuclear deal yet, the Trump administration in October launched a partnership to build at least $80 billion worth of new, large-scale nuclear reactors, and chose Westinghouse Electric Company and its co-owners, Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco, for the job.The money will support the construction of AP1000s, a type of pressurized water reactor developed by Westinghouse that can generate about 1,110 megawatts of electric power. These are the same reactors as units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia, which wrapped up seven years behind schedule in 2023 and 2024 and cost more than twice as much as expected—about $35 billion for the pair. Along the way, Westinghouse, based in Cranberry Township, Penn., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.Chief executives of investor-owned utilities know that if they were to propose committing to similar projects on the same commercial terms, they’d be sacked on the spot. As a result, the private sector in the United States has been unwilling to take on the financial risk inherent in building new reactors.The $80 billion deal with the federal government represents the U.S. nuclear industry’s best opportunity in a generation for a large-scale construction program. But ambition doesn’t guarantee successful execution. The delays and cost overruns that dogged the Vogtle project present real threats for the next wave of reactors.Streamlining AP1000 Reactor ConstructionWhat might be different about the next set of AP1000s? On the positive side, delivering multiple copies of the same reactor ought to create the conditions for a steady decline in costs. Vogtle Unit 3 was the first AP1000 to be built in the United States, and the lessons learned from it resulted in Vogtle Unit 4 costing 30 percent less than Unit 3. (Six AP1000s are currently operating outside the United States, and 14 more are under construction, according to Westinghouse.)There’s been a bipartisan effort in the United States to streamline regulatory procedures to ensure that future projects won’t be delayed by the same issues that hampered Vogtle. The Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act that was signed into law by former U.S. President Joe Biden in 2024, includes several measures intended to improve processes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The last nuclear reactors to be built in the United States—Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Waynesboro, Georgia—were completed seven years behind schedule and cost more than twice as much as expected.Georgia Power Co. That included a mandated change in the NRC’s mission statement, setting a goal of “enabling the safe and secure use and deployment of civilian nuclear energy technologies”. It was a symbol of Congress’s intent to encourage the commission to support nuclear development.In May President Trump built on that legislation with four executive orders intended to speed up reactor licensing and accelerate nuclear development—a framework that has yet to be tested in practice. In November the NRC published regulations setting out how it planned to implement the president’s orders. The changes are focused on removing redundant and duplicative rules.One of President Trump’s orders included a series of provisions intended to help build the U.S. nuclear workforce, but it’s clear that that will be a challenge. The momentum gained in training skilled workers during the construction at Vogtle is already dissipating. Without other active new reactor projects to move on to immediately in the United States, many of the people who worked there have likely gone into other sectors, such as liquified natural gas (LNG) plants.Around the time that construction was wrapping up at Vogtle, many employers in the industry were already reporting difficulties in finding the staff they need, according to the Department of Energy’s 2025 United States Energy and Employment Report. Surveyed in 2024, 22 percent of employers in nuclear construction said it was “very difficult” to hire the workers they needed, and 63 percent said it was “somewhat difficult”. In nuclear manufacturing, 63 percent of employers said hiring was “very difficult”.If reactor construction really begins to pick up, there is clearly a danger that those numbers will rise. U.S. Nuclear Power Expansion PlansSo just how many reactors will $80 billion buy? Assuming an average of $16 billion per AP1000—slightly less than for Vogtle, and allowing for cost reductions from economies of scale and learning-by-doing—the plan would mean five new reactors. That would represent an increase of about 5.7 percent in total U.S. nuclear energy generation capacity, if all the reactors currently in service remain online.The full details of the $80 billion deal, including the precise allocation of financing and risk-sharing, have not been specified. But Westinghouse’s co-owner, Brookfield, did disclose that the partnership includes profit-sharing mechanisms that will give the U.S. government some of the upside if the initiative succeeds.The Washington Post reported that after the U.S. signs the final contracts for $80 billion worth of new reactors, it will be entitled to 20 percent of all Westinghouse’s returns over $17.5 billion. And if Westinghouse’s valuation surpasses $30 billion, the administration can require it to be floated on the stock market. If that happens, the government will get a 20 percent stake. Enriched uranium is loaded at Vogtle Unit 4.Georgia Power Co. Japan’s government is also playing a key role. As part of a $550 billion U.S.-Japan trade deal struck in July, the Japanese government pledged large-scale investment in U.S. energy, including nuclear. Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toshiba Group, and IHI Corp., are interested in investing up to $100 billion in the United States to support the construction of new AP1000s and small modular reactors (SMRs), the two governments said.The Westinghouse deal supports a range of the administration’s objectives, including power for AI and investment and job creation in the American industrial sector. The focus on AP1000s also makes it possible to rely on U.S.-produced fuel, strengthening energy security. (Many of the designs for SMRs, which have garnered a considerable amount of excitement globally, use high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, which is not currently produced on a large scale in the United States).U.S. Nuclear Energy InvestmentThere have been other recent moves to add additional nuclear capacity in the United States. Santee Cooper, a South Carolina utility, announced plans for completing the construction of two AP1000 reactors that had been abandoned in 2017 at the V.C. Summer site in Jenkinsville, S.C.Separately, Google announced in October a deal with NextEra Energy to reopen a 615-MW nuclear plant in Iowa. The Duane Arnold Energy Center was shut down in 2020, and the aim is to have it operational again by the first quarter of 2029. Google has agreed to buy a share of the plant’s output for 25 years. Construction of two AP1000 reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear site in Jenkinsville, S.C. were abandoned in 2017 after delays and cost overruns. Executives leading the projects were charged with fraud. Chuck Burton/AP But the plans that have been announced so far pale in comparison to the Trump administration’s nuclear ambitions. Earlier this year, President Trump set a goal of adding a whopping 300 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050, up from a little under 100 GW today. That would mean much stronger growth than is currently projected in Wood Mackenzie’s forecasts, which show a near-doubling of U.S. nuclear generation capacity to about 190 GW in 2050.The main driver behind the Trump administration’s interest in nuclear is its ambitions for artificial intelligence. Chris Wright, the U.S. energy secretary, has described the race to develop advanced AI as the Manhattan Project of our times, critical to national security, and dependent upon a steep increase in electricity generation. Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in September, Wright promised: “We’re doing everything we can to make it easy to build power generation and data centers in our country.” One of the hallmarks of the Trump administration has been its readiness to intervene in markets to pursue its policy goals. Its nuclear strategy exemplifies that approach. In many ways, the Trump administration is acting like an energy company: using its financial strength and its convening power to put together a deal that covers the entire nuclear value chain. Throughout the history of nuclear power, the industry has worked closely with governments. But the federal government effectively taking a commercial position in the development of new reactors would be a first for the United States. In the first wave of U.S. reactor construction in the 1970s, federal government support was limited to R&D, uranium mining and enrichment, and indemnifying operators against the risk of nuclear accidents.Before the partial deregulation of U.S. electricity markets that began in the 1990s, utilities could develop nuclear plants with the assurance that the costs could be recovered from customers, even if they went far over budget. With many key markets now at least partially deregulated, nuclear project developers will need other types of guarantees to secure financing and move forward.The first new plants that result from the $80 billion deal will come online years after President Trump has left office. But they could play an important role in boosting U.S. electricity supply and developing advanced AI for decades.
New research has found that Fiddler crabs are playing an unheralded role when it comes to hoovering up microplastics found in the world's mangrove forests and salt marshes.
As researchers are racing to find greener ways to power AI, a new study explores a promising solution: analog in-memory computing, utilizing analog chips.
Vivek Ramswamy used to be a darling of the far right. A biotech entrepreneur from Cincinnati, he went from his own presidential candidacy in 2024, to Donald Trump surrogate, to co-heading Trump's Department of Government Efficiency task force, and now he's running for governor of Ohio on a MAGA platform.But his Indian-American heritage has become a huge target for attack in right-wing circles — and on Wednesday, he released a New York Times op-ed warning that this rising racism is on the brink of tearing the conservative movement apart."Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation," wrote Ramaswamy. "As Ronald Reagan quipped, you can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman; but anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in the United States and become an American ... This is what makes American exceptionalism possible."The problem, he warned, is that a growing contingent of right-wing activists and strategists no longer believe this, and instead subscribe to an "identitarian" vision of America based on ancestry and ethnicity, where outsiders don't belong."The divide between these two views is more foundational than policy divides between Republicans and Democrats," wrote Ramaswamy. "Older Republicans who may doubt the rising prevalence of the blood-and-soil view should think again. My social media feeds are littered with hundreds of slurs, most from accounts that I don’t recognize, about 'pajeets' and 'street s------s' and calls to deport me 'back to India' (I was born and raised in Cincinnati and have never resided outside the U.S.)."Indeed, he warned, the "online right" class spreading this hate and taking over thought in GOP policy circles reminds him of exactly what he hates in the left."As one of the most vocal opponents of left-wing identity politics, I now see real reluctance from my former anti-woke peers to criticize the new identity politics on the right," wrote Ramaswamy. "This pattern eerily mirrors the hesitance of prominent Democrats to criticize woke excess in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, even though most Democratic voters clearly never believed that math is racist, or that hard work and the written tradition are hallmarks of whiteness. That’s a big part of why Kamala Harris lost in such spectacular fashion. If the post-Trump G.O.P. makes the same mistake with our own identitarian fringe, we will meet a similar fate."Republicans need to forcibly condemn white supremacists like "Groyper" founder Nick Fuentes, Ramaswamy concluded, and focus on policies to lift everyone up like affordability reforms, so young conservatives won't get radicalized."The uplifting truth is that the solution to identity politics needn’t be one camp defeating the other, but instead achieving together a national escape velocity to more promising terrain," he wrote.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 17, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Photonic Inc., a global leader in distributed quantum computing, today announced that its Founder and Chief Quantum Officer, Dr. Stephanie Simmons, has been included in the Quantum 100, a major global initiative as part of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ 2025). The Quantum 100 celebrates the people advancing [...]
Protein diffusion, critical for cellular metabolism, occurs in the highly crowded cytoplasm. Understanding how this dynamics changes when organisms are adapted to different thermal niches is a fundamental challenge in microbiology and biophysics. In Escherichia coli, protein diffusion undergoes a pronounced slowdown at temperatures near cellular death, coinciding with the early stages of unfolding. To [...]The post Cytoplasmic Fluidity And The Cold Life: Proteome Stability Is Decoupled From Viability In Psychrophiles appeared first on Astrobiology.
Planetary impact events have profoundly influenced the origin of life and the habitability of Earth in both constructive and destructive ways. The constructive effects of impacts include building Earth into a habitable world and providing the key ingredients for life, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and energy. The destructive effects of impacts include a [...]The post Planetary Impacts: Friend Or Foe? appeared first on Astrobiology.
Astronomers using W. M. Keck Observatory and the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island have discovered a massive planet and a brown dwarf orbiting distant stars—two rare companions that deepen our understanding of how giant planets and substellar objects form and evolve. These discoveries are the first results from the OASIS program (Observing Accelerators with [...]The post Discoveries From Maunakea Reveal Hidden Worlds Around Accelerating Stars appeared first on Astrobiology.
At TU Wien, researchers are developing three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques that can be used to create living biological tissue—for example, to study skin diseases.
Who really makes Tekton tools? We dug into their manufacturing origins and found a surprising mix of US and global production that sets them apart.
And they absolutely swear by it.The post People Are Injecting Themselves With an Experimental New Weight Loss Drug appeared first on Futurism.
EL SEGUNDO, CALIFORNIA / ACCESS Newswire / December 17, 2025 / Radiant, a pioneer in portable, mass-produced nuclear microreactors, today announced that it has raised more than $300 million in a new round of funding.
Researchers at Leipzig University's Carl Ludwig Institute for Physiology, working in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, have achieved an important breakthrough in brain research. The so-called zap-and-freeze technique, which allows processes of signal transmission between nerve cells to be visualized within milliseconds, has now been successfully applied for the first time to acute brain slices from both mice and humans.
Oracle's latest mega–data center project is moving ahead in Michigan—but without its usual financial backer. The Financial Times , citing people familiar with the talks, reports that private capital firm Blue Owl Capital, Oracle's biggest partner on US data center builds, has walked away from a planned financing package of...
(MedPage Today) -- Note that some links may require registration or subscription.Harvey Risch, MD, PhD, a Yale emeritus professor who was appointed chairman of the President's Cancer Panel, has speculated about links between turbo cancers and...
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The new design could be adapted to assist the elderly, sort warehouse products, or unload heavy cargo. In the horticultural world, some vines are especially grabby. As they grow, the woody tendrils can wrap around obstacles with enough force to pull down entire fences and trees. Inspired by vines’ twisty tenacity, engineers at MIT and [...]
A UK research team has developed a pioneering blood test that could change the way lung cancer is detected and monitored.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Waskyra (etuvetidigene autotemcel) as the first cell-based gene therapy for the treatment of Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (WAS).
A team of researchers led by Karina Xavier has uncovered a promising new live biotherapeutic agent that may redefine how the medical field approaches microbiota-based therapies.
Tesla just got a three-month countdown clock from California regulators over how it sells the idea of "self-driving" cars, the Wall Street Journal reports. An administrative law judge found the company misled buyers by suggesting its vehicles could operate autonomously, prompting the state's Department of Motor Vehicles to move toward...
For us linguists, the flurry of "word of the year" announcements from dictionaries and publishers is a holiday tradition as anticipated as mince pies. The words of the year aren't just a fun peek into new slang and language changes, they also tell us quite a bit about the worries, trends and obsessions of the English-speaking world.
Want to start 2026 strong? Binghamton University, State University of New York research suggests focusing on time, not money, helps motivation last.
The Arctic landscape is changing at an unprecedented rate. In addition to rising temperatures, climate change is causing episodes of extreme melting, which occurs when ice losses that previously took weeks or months occur over just a few days.
(MENAFN - EIN Presswire) EINPresswire/ -- Coherent Market Insights has added a new research study on the Global "Metadata Management Tools Market " 2025 by Size, Growth, Trends, and Dynamics, ...
Instead of searching for a single molecule or structure that proves the presence of biology, researchers attempted to classify how likely mixtures of compounds preserved in rocks and meteorites were to contain traces of life by examining the full chemical
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The abstract in PubMed or at the publisher’s site is linked when available and will open in a new window. Papers deriving from NASA support: Other papers of interest: Astrobiology, space biology, space life science, microgravity, ISS,The post NASA Spaceline Current Awareness List #1,178 12 December 2025 (Space Life Science Research Results) appeared first on Astrobiology.
Interactive computing students are developing new data tools to reduce bird/building strikes in Atlanta, which is among the country's deadliest cities for migratory birds.
Right now, many of us have a bit of moss sitting in our Christmas decorations at home. Some of us picked it ourselves in the forest, others bought it in a shop. But few have probably thought about the fact that moss can be full of small remains from foxes, hares, badgers or other animals that live in the area where the moss grew.
Record-Breaking Cosmic Burst Caused by Stellar-Mass Black Hole Shredding Its Companion Sci.NewsView Full Coverage on Google News
Automakers Hyundai and Kia must offer free repairs to millions of models under a settlement announced Tuesday by Minnesota's attorney general, who led an effort by dozens of states that argued the vehicles weren't equipped with proper anti-theft technology, leaving them vulnerable to thefts, the AP reports. Under the nationwide...
learn more Top 5 R&D Audit Issue Categories – The Federal Audit Clearinghouse Data Roseann Luongo Huron Consulting Watch Now ***Click Here to See More NCURA Videos*** The ...
What is the structure of the quark-gluon plasma that existed at the beginning of the universe? Is the dark energy that is causing the universe to expand ever faster changing over time? While these questions address vastly different areas in high-energy and nuclear physics, the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science is supporting scientists using artificial intelligence (AI) to help answer them.
In 2024, astronomers discovered the brightest Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT) ever observed. LFBOTs are extremely bright flashes of blue light that shine for brief periods before fading away. New analysis of this record-breaking burst, which includes observations from the International Gemini Observatory, funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, challenges all prior understanding of these rare explosive events.
Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and elsewhere report the discovery of a new brown dwarf about 60 times more massive than Jupiter. The newfound substellar object, designated TOI-7019 b, is a brown dwarf known to orbit a star that is part of the Milky Way's ancient thick disk. The finding is detailed in a paper published December 5 on the arXiv preprint server.
Researchers have developed a new method for human identification, which could be a powerful new tool for forensic investigations. Edith Cowan University (ECU) Ph.D. students Rebecca Tidy and Romy Keane, who are also chemists at Western Australia's premier chemical science facility ChemCentre, are lead authors of the article "Proteomic genotyping for individual human identification: Inferring SNPs in the absence of DNA evidence" published in Forensic Science International.
In U.S. states with anti-union labor environments, workers are up to 53% more likely to start their own businesses—and blue-collar workers are more likely to do it out of necessity.
WARSAW, Poland, Dec. 16, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The TOP200 NAWA programme is a new initiative aimed at supporting transnational science cooperation and fostering excellent research in Poland. Programme objective The TOP200 NAWA programme aims to attract to Poland outstanding research talents from universities ranked 1 to 200 in global rankings (Shanghai Ranking, QS, THE), [...]
WARSAW, Poland, Dec. 16, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The TOP200 NAWA programme is a new initiative aimed at supporting transnational science cooperation and fostering excellent research in Poland.
AI-Identified Memorabilia Acquired This Weekend Expected to Support Long-Term Funding for Technology Development
The mystifying 3I/ATLAS interstellar comet is blazing toward Earth and will in a matter of days come as close to our planet as it ever will.
WARSAW, Poland, Dec. 16, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The TOP200 NAWA programme is a new initiative aimed at supporting transnational science cooperation and fostering excellent research in Poland.Programme objectiveThe TOP200 NAWA programme aims to attract to Poland outstanding research talents from universities ranked 1 to 200 in global rankings (Shanghai Ranking, QS, THE), thereby strengthening research capacity of Polish innovation ecosystem and highlighting Poland as a destination for researchers.Main objectives- to provide stable employment to foreign researchers (2–4 years at Polish universities or research institutes);- to establish predictable conditions for conducting research;- to create possibility to set up own research teams;- to accelerate the development of the Polish research ecosystem with viable links between science and business.Two ...Full story available on Benzinga.com
In a new book, Donald Campbell, Ph.D. ’71, professor emeritus of astronomy, recounts the history of Arecibo from construction to its last days under Cornell’s management in 2011.
In new research that puts the latest models to test in a 3D environment, Cornell scholars found that AI fares well with untangling basic knots but can’t quite tie knots from simple loops nor convert one knot to another.
The new book from anthropology professor Andrew Willford shows how patterns of psycho-social stress combined with modernity’s pressures can influence psychiatric practice.
Led by the University of Georgia's Scott Carver, a new study published in the Journal of Zoology considers whether wombats are communicating through the unusual scat that they deposit in common latrines across southeastern Australia.
Scientists in China have developed an ultra-high-temperature heat pump that could transform steel, cement and chemical production.