just now   (55+ words) Hyperspectral imaging has long promised a kind of digital omniscience: sensors that capture hundreds of narrow spectral bands, revealing the chemical fingerprints of crops, wetlands, minerals, and city streets in a single sweep. Yet the technology has always carried an…...

4+ min ago   (659+ words) On the reefs surrounding Sepanggar Island, off the coast of Sabah in Malaysian North Borneo, a bushy soft coral sways in the current, its eight-tentacled polyps filtering plankton from the water. To divers, the organism known as Litophyton is an…...

10+ min ago   (618+ words) Every day, computational biologists release new methods for analyzing genomes, single cells, microbiomes and molecular signatures, and every day researchers struggle with the same question: which method actually works best for their data? The answer usually depends on benchmarks—structured…...

13+ min ago   (55+ words) In the world of traditional Chinese medicine, few raw materials are as quietly ubiquitous as Cicadae Periostracum, the papery slough that cicadas abandon when they molt from nymph to adult. For centuries, this discarded exoskeleton has been prescribed for sore…...

25+ min ago   (96+ words) Rice paddies are among the most productive agricultural ecosystems on Earth, feeding billions of people across Asia and beyond. Yet beneath the flooded fields lies a complex microbial world whose balance determines whether the soil stays fertile or degrades over…...

25+ min ago   (75+ words) A transporter sitting in the walls of the brain’s blood vessels has turned out to be one of the most important gatekeepers of brain chemistry during development, according to a new study published in iScience. The protein, known as SLC38A2, shuttles…...

25+ min ago   (53+ words) Triple-negative breast cancer is the form of the disease that clinicians fear most. Lacking the three molecular targets — the estrogen receptor, the progesterone receptor and the HER2 protein — that anchor modern targeted therapies, it leaves patients with fewer options and a…...

36+ min ago   (489+ words) Tin halide perovskites have long been the tantalizing alternative to lead-based perovskites in next-generation solar cells. They offer a narrower bandgap that is ideal for harvesting more of the solar spectrum, and they replace toxic lead with an environmentally friendlier…...

36+ min ago   (668+ words) A detailed immunological portrait of one of the world’s most underappreciated parasitic diseases has emerged from southwestern Iran, where researchers have mapped, with unusual precision, how the human immune system responds to infection with the intestinal worm Strongyloides stercoralis....

41+ min ago   (674+ words) Beneath every harvest in the United States lies an intricate microscopic economy, one that most consumers never see but every farmer depends upon. Andi Jilling, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School…...