Every time natural gas ignites on a kitchen hob or powers an industrial furnace, a complex chain of chemical reactions unfolds in fractions of a second. Now, Dr Solly Lebelo and Dr Tranos Zuva, both b...

The Catholic Church is bigger than ever – but is it led well enough for the world it now serves? That’s the question at the heart of a paper by theologian Jean Olivier Nke Ongono, who argues that after a century of dramatic change, the Church needs a genuinely global rethink of how it’s governed without attempting to dilute the truths of faith or its identity.

Keeping seismic monitoring stations in top condition is essential for studying Earth’s interior, and for detecting earthquakes, military explosions, ocean storms and even meteorites entering the atmosphere. But with many stations operating in remote locations, spotting the first signs of equipment problems can be surprisingly difficult. In a new study, Arthur Cuvier, Éric Beucler, Mickaël Bonnin and Raphaël Garcia in France have developed a clever statistical technique that could help scientists identify failing instruments long before serious damage occurs.

It started, as good science often does, with someone noticing something weird. A decade before ‘cockroach milk’ made headlines, a researcher spotted odd, shiny crystals in the gut of a baby cockroach and assumed they were waste – crystals in guts usually are. He was wrong; they turned out to be… protein!

Deep inside a developing bird’s body, an unassuming organ is hard at work building a sophisticated immune system. Known as the bursa of Fabricius, it is where B cells – the immune cells responsible for producing antibodies – are born and trained. While scientists have long understood its importance, new research is revealing just how finely tuned and dynamic this environment really is. Recent work led by Ádám Soós and Emőke Szőcs at Semmelweis University offers a closer look at how B cells navigate this tiny but complex structure.

When anthropologist Camilo Sanz’s father was diagnosed with incurable Multiple Myeloma at 79, a form of blood cancer, his doctors offered a stark choice: continue aggressive chemotherapy or face the p...

Graduate school is notoriously gruelling. The pressure to publish, the long hours, the financial strain, and the creeping isolation of dissertation life take a real toll. These pressures are not accid...

What happens when someone bridges two worlds – moving between university lecture halls and research forums on one side, and hands-on consulting and development project evaluation on the other? Berthol...

Families raising children with prenatal alcohol exposure are incredibly diverse. A child might live with a birth parent, a foster parent, an adoptive family, aunties or uncles, or a grandparent. Yet a landmark new study suggests that the research meant to support these families has been telling only part of the story. Led by Samantha Rennie and Kristene Cheung at the University of Manitoba, the study set out to map exactly who is – and who isn’t – represented in the scientific literature on caregivers of children with prenatal alcohol exposure.

What happens when a language teacher educator stops grading her students’ reflective essays and starts writing back to them instead? For Laura Park, who educates student English teachers at Ewha Womans University in South Korea, that simple shift sparked an entire research methodology. More importantly, it offered a way for teacher educators to better understand their students’ experiences and assumptions, helping them become more reflective, empathetic teachers.

In Kawakami Mieko’s novel Breasts and Eggs, a woman decides to have a child alone, and must choose who the father will be. It looks like a simple decision. But researcher Jingyi Wan of the University of Amsterdam argues that Natsuko’s choice exposes a trap: modern societies offer women only two scripts for freedom, and neither actually delivers it.

Sign languages are rich, complex languages used by deaf communities all over the world. Yet despite decades of research showing this clearly, many people still hold on to outdated misunderstandings ab...

Aging well isn’t just about the body; it’s about the brain, too. A major new review led by Professor Helen Lavretsky of UCLA argues that ‘brain health’ deserves the same attention we give heart health...

Seventy years after their discovery, neutrinos remain one of the most mysterious particles in the universe. These ghostly entities barely interact with anything at all, making them extraordinarily dif...

If you're using a probiotic in your animal feed program and it only contains one specie of Bacillus, you may be leaving a lot of performance on the table. Bacillus is a genus of spore-forming bacteria that has proven to be a cornerstone of animal nutrition for decades, and for good reason. The spores are tough enough to survive the heat and pressure of feed pelleting, resist digestive acid, and arrive alive and active in the intestinal tract where the real work happens. Most other probiotic organisms simply can't make that journey intact.

If you're using a probiotic in your animal feed program and it only contains one specie of Bacillus, you may be leaving a lot of performance on the table. Bacillus is a genus of spore-forming bacteria that has proven to be a cornerstone of animal nutrition for decades, and for good reason. The spores are tough enough to survive the heat and pressure of feed pelleting, resist digestive acid, and arrive alive and active in the intestinal tract where the real work happens. Most other probiotic organisms simply can't make that journey intact.

Few economists have had as much influence on modern business as Michael Jensen. His ideas transformed corporate governance, executive pay, and the way companies are judged by investors. Some hailed hi...

What does it actually take to build a living wall that survives one of South Africa’s driest, most climatically varied cities, and what would it cost? Those were the questions Rolien Terblanche and co...

As climate change accelerates and energy demand continues to rise, countries are racing to replace fossil fuels with cleaner sources of power, such as off-shore wind. In regions such as the North Sea,...

Menopause can bring a range of symptoms, including vaginal pain, decreased sexual arousal and recurrent vaginal and urinary tract infections. While estrogen therapies can be very effective at relievin...

Air pollution is often thought of as an outdoor problem, but the air inside buildings can be just as complex – and sometimes more polluted. Dr Dimitrios Kotzias, former official at the European Commis...

Porous media are all around us! From natural materials like soil, sand and rocks, to everyday products like sponges, filters, diapers, and concrete, these materials contain tiny spaces – or pores – th...

Climate change is changing our oceans in ways that we are still working to understand. The sea absorbs vast amounts of heat and carbon, and even more so as the global temperature rises. But predicting...

In Australia, asbestos remains a hidden danger in countless buildings, despite being banned more than two decades ago. Roughly one in three homes still contains asbestos, and when materials degrade or...

Motor neurone disease (MND), also known as ALS, causes progressive muscle weakness that eventually affects breathing. When wanting help to support their breathing the majority of people with MND in th...

For many decades, historians have argued over whether Nicolaus Copernicus – the astronomer who first proposed that Earth orbits the Sun rather than the other way around – also cast horoscopes and used...

The pancreas is best known for producing insulin, the hormone that keeps blood sugar in check. But a growing body of research suggests this organ has been hiding a secret – one that could reshape how ...

In many institutions, the rules that matter most are never officially stated. Nobody tells a male primary school teacher to think twice before physically comforting an upset child. Nobody writes into ...

Imagine a cancer so rare that most doctors will never see a single case in their entire career. Now imagine being the parent of a child diagnosed with it. This is the reality of choroid plexus carcino...

Statistics is everywhere. From clinical trials to particle physics, from economic policy to public health, researchers rely on statistical analyses to determine what the data are telling them. Despite...

Most of us use digital technology every day – for work, shopping, socialising, and keeping up with the news. But how many of us really stop to think about what we’re doing online, why we’re doing it, ...

For decades, fat tissue was treated as little more than the body’s storage cupboard – a place where excess calories were tucked away for later use. But research from Dr. Jamie Rausch, Assistant Profes...

When antiviral drugs are widely used, resistance usually follows. Viruses mutate, treatments lose strength, and scientists scramble to adapt. That pattern has been seen with influenza, HIV, and many o...

The idea that children learn best when they feel secure may seem obvious, but new research from the University of Wisconsin–Madison shows just how deeply a child’s trust in their parents shapes their ...

What comes to mind when you think of informal settlements, or so-called ‘slums’? Portrayed negatively in public discourse, governments demolish them to make way for formal housing projects. However, r...

Human emotions are universal. But how freely people express them – and to whom – is shaped by culture, history, and lived experience. For African Americans, that shaping has a particular weight: centu...

A simple, inexpensive blood test taken at the moment of diagnosis could help predict how long a patient with blood cancer will survive – and potentially open the door to treatments that improve their ...

What if love is not merely an emotion, but the very fabric of existence itself? That is the arresting question at the heart of a new paper by Robert Slesinski, a researcher working in the tradition of...

Data are a key driver in the modern era. Combining data from different domains brings new insights and adds further dimensions to scientific research, but data on their own rarely explain themselves. ...

Pulmonary fibrosis is a devastating disease in which lung tissue becomes scarred and stiff, making it harder to breathe. The outlook for patients remains poor, with many surviving only a few years aft...

Since its beginnings in 1963 as the International Association for Plant Tissue Culture, the International Association for Plant Biotechnology (IAPB) has helped shape the field of modern plant science....

For centuries, we’ve been told a story about ourselves: that reason is noble and emotion is messy; that to think clearly, you need to keep your feelings firmly under control. It’s a story that has sha...

Electronic cigarettes have been marketed as a safer alternative to traditional tobacco, but a growing body of research is painting a more troubling picture. Two studies from North Carolina Central Uni...