Phys.org

Extreme dry mouth, caused by radiation used to treat cancer and by autoimmune diseases such as Sjögren's disease, radically affects quality of life for sufferers. It can hamper speaking, swallowing and eating, and for years has seemed an intractable problem.

Farshid Alambeigi refers to one of his most ambitious research efforts as "the sci-fi project." The idea lives up to the name. He is developing robotic technology that could one day help manufacture living tissue—potentially even functioning organs—for transplantation.

The circadian clock is an internal biological system that regulates sleep-wake cycles, as well as many physiological functions such as body temperature and hormone production. In many animals, this clock relies on a network of neurons that generates rhythms of approximately 24 hours.

Watermarks have long protected everything from bank notes and fine art to digital photographs and software, helping prove authenticity and trace an object's origin. Their main function is to protect copyright and verify authenticity.

New medicines, crop protection products and treatments for fish diseases could have their origins on the seabed. That is where project coordinator Gilles van Wezel and project manager Mariana Avalos Garcia, both biologists in Leiden, together with their colleagues, searched for microorganisms that produce useful compounds. Their search took them to sponges, algae, fish and salt-tolerant plants.

When scientists assess how dangerous a bacterium is, the first question often seems simple: Can it be stopped or killed? In microbiology and antibiotic research, one of the classic readouts has been whether a bacterium can grow in the presence of a given treatment. The bacterium either grows or it does not. The drug either stops it or it does not.

Anak Krakatau, which means Child of Krakatoa, has been active sporadically since it emerged from the sea at the beginning of the last century in the caldera formed after the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa.

Elementary school students who use an AI-supported learning tool learn arithmetic more quickly than children who do not use such a tool. This is the finding of a multiyear study by Radboud University involving nearly 8,000 children. However, the researchers warn that it's no miracle cure, as the teacher's role remains essential even with AI.

New research brings together recent advances in urban hydrology, boundary-layer meteorology, extreme precipitation and flood-risk research and proposes a new framework for understanding how cities and extreme rainfall interact and co-evolve.

The Intracellular Quality Control Project at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science has identified a molecular mechanism that helps initiate the formation of autophagic membranes around damaged mitochondria.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield and University of Cambridge have conducted the most comprehensive study to date on how habitat restoration in sub-Saharan Africa impacts tree loss beyond project boundaries.

Many of the common materials we encounter in our daily lives are crystalline, including ice, salt and sugar. The crystal structures of some solids are formed from molecules arranged in simple geometric patterns, and these patterns can be changed to give the solids special properties required for high-tech applications. However, changing these connections requires extreme measures, such as high heat, leaving researchers with the challenge of finding an easier transformation method.

New research from NTNU's Department of Psychology indicates that elite soccer players experience lower levels of competitive anxiety than amateur players, despite performing under intense scrutiny.

Many systems in nature can settle into several different stable states, with the final state depending on their starting conditions. However, the boundaries separating these states are often far more complicated than they first appear.

Sugars are attractive building blocks for functional materials because of their high water affinity and diverse biological properties. Incorporating sugars into synthetic polymers can therefore provide materials that combine the processability of polymers with characteristics derived from carbohydrates. However, selective chemical modification of sugars is often challenging because they contain multiple hydroxyl groups with similar reactivities, making it difficult to introduce a polymerizable g

When it comes to removing Burmese pythons, one snake does not equal another. A new study by researchers at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) offers agencies a tool to identify pythons with the greatest influence on future population growth and uses machine learning to determine when they are most likely to be detected.

This summer, social media was filled with posts declaring that almost anything was "kinda chic". Repeating outfits was kinda chic. Being overdressed was kinda chic. Doing something unfashionable could, apparently, also be kinda chic.

Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have engineered new optical coatings for LIGO, the global collaboration hunting gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars.

Refugees are more likely than native citizens to begin entrepreneurial ventures in their adopted countries, either by choice or because they have few other options. A new study offers insight into how refugees from common backgrounds end up adopting very different approaches to running their businesses by focusing on refugees who defected from North Korea and started their own ventures in South Korea.

A single-celled green alga from the sand dunes of the Negev Desert has, within just a few years, become a key model organism in modern photosynthesis research. Chlorella ohadii helps researchers better understand plants' adaptability to extreme environmental conditions. These findings could help make crops more resilient to heat, drought, and other consequences of climate change in the future. Haim Treves, a professor of plant metabolism at RPTU, has been studying the desert alga since its disco