Phys.org

Busoga, in eastern Uganda, is a low, fertile plateau surrounded on three sides by Lake Victoria, the Nile River and Lake Kyoga. Most of its 4.3 million people farm small, rain-fed plots. Yet hunger is common: in the 2024 census, about a third of Busoga households reported going whole days without food.

Fine particulate matter consists of tiny particles with diameters in the nanometer range. They are produced, for example, by fuel combustion, remain suspended in the air and can penetrate deep into the respiratory tract. There, they can trigger oxidative stress, a process that promotes inflammation and, over the long term, can lead to serious health problems such as respiratory or cardiovascular diseases. Scientists call this harmful property the particles' oxidative potential.

Researchers have developed a chip-scale optical ring-laser gyroscope that can measure rotation as slow as 37 degrees per hour. This record sensitivity, approaching Earth's rotation rate of 15 degrees per hour, could eventually be useful for precision navigation and orientation systems, particularly where GPS is unavailable.

When astronauts first travel to Mars or anywhere else in deep space, they will have to contend with two problems that our planet protects us from on its surface—radiation and weightlessness. Scientists already know both can have a profound impact on the human body, but the extent of that impact and how long it can last remain a mystery.

Researchers at McGill University have found that urbanization is weakening one of Earth's most enduring ecological patterns: the tendency for biodiversity to increase toward the tropics, a pattern known as the latitudinal diversity gradient.

Sometimes it can be hard for parents to agree on how to raise children. One parent might insist their child's homework has to be finished before they're allowed to use devices. The other may think a bit of screen time before studying is perfectly reasonable. Rules and consequences might be the preferred strategy of one parent, while the other favors a more flexible approach.

Discarded plastic packaging materials, old CDs and even LEGO bricks can be transformed into materials that capture significant amounts of moisture from the air. Materials chemists Anastasiia Naryshkina, Paul Schweng and Robert Woodward at the University of Vienna have converted several types of plastic waste into water-attracting polymer networks that take up water even in dry climates and release it again under moderate heating, for example, using sunlight. The study, published in Chem Circularity, offers a route to give plastic waste a second life as an adsorbent for atmospheric water harvesting.

Most kinds of coral spawn once a year. In an enormous multiday event synchronized to specific phases of the moon, they release vast slicks of eggs and sperm into the ocean to be mixed together by the drifting currents.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute's Tree of Life program plans to accelerate publication of genome notes from approximately 30 per month to 200, expanding access to research that is supporting advances in agriculture, conservation and medicine. This increase will be facilitated by a new specialized workflow developed by F1000 and the Wellcome Sanger Institute for Wellcome Open Research.

Flat is fine for a sheet of paper, but many of the most useful molecules need depth. Now, researchers from Japan have found a way to give them that depth using nothing more than a single carbon atom.

The gut microbiome is teeming with hundreds of bacterial species and trillions of bacteria. These microorganisms influence many aspects of health, including digestion, and assist with numerous functions in the body. Gut bacteria compete for the limited nutrients available in their environment, while also interacting with each other in ways that can influence the stability of the microbial community.

American audiences will be able to watch an English-dubbed version of "Ramayana," a Hindi film based on a South Asian epic tradition, in theaters in November 2026.

A new study examining how tropical cyclone activity near Hawai'i could change in a warmer future finds a shift toward stronger storms, even though substantial uncertainty remains about whether the total number of storms near the islands will increase.

Many of the Australian animals most at risk of extinction are extremely tough to track down. That's because they live in small pockets of disappearing nature, such as rare grasslands or ancient forests, in worryingly low numbers.

Thousands of Adélie penguins found dead in Antarctica in 2024 were primarily victims of avian cholera, not high pathogenicity avian influenza (H5N1) as researchers initially suspected, according to a study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The findings highlight an underrecognized threat to Antarctic wildlife and the importance of comprehensive disease investigations, particularly as H5N1 continues to raise concerns for seabird and marine mammal populations.

Scientists have long used a powerful gene-editing tool called CRISPR to make precise changes to DNA. But a different version of the technology, known as Cas13a, targets RNA, the genetic material found in viruses such as HIV. Now, researchers at Rice University have developed an improved version of Cas13a that could make it easier to detect HIV and other RNA viruses in blood and environmental samples. The study was published in Cell Chemical Biology.