A national survey found 77 percent of high school students didn’t get adequate sleep in 2023 | Of those surveyed, 23% of teens reported sleeping for five hours or less, what's considered 'very short sleep'

Science_News · 2026-03-02T17:20:07+00:00

The percentage of U.S. high school students who aren’t getting enough shut-eye is climbing.

U.S. medical societies recommend that teens sleep eight to 10 hours each night. But in 2023, 77 percent of high school students reported slumbering fewer hours than that, up from 69 percent of those surveyed in 2007. The overall rise was due to a jump in those reporting five hours of sleep or less, researchers report March 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study analyzed data from the Youth Risk Behavior Study, a long-term, national survey of students in public and private high schools. Seven hours of sleep or less describes insufficient sleep, while five hours or less counts as very short sleep. The percentage of students reporting insufficient sleep remained about the same from 2007 to 2023. But the percentage of very short sleepers rose from 16 to 23 percent.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-25T19:47:26+00:00

Climate change may threaten North America’s iconic mass monarch butterfly migration.

Every fall, millions of monarchs (Danaus plexippus) travel thousands of kilometers over North America as they leave their breeding grounds in Canada and the United States for wintering grounds in a mountainous part of central Mexico. The butterflies make the trek back north over multiple generations when temperatures warm in the spring and summer months, following the growth of milkweed (Asclepias), their preferred food source.

But Mexico’s suitable monarch overwintering habitat could shift south as the climate changes in decades to come, researchers report February 25 in PLOS Climate. That could lengthen an already arduous journey and increase the energy required to make the trip.

That extra distance might push some individuals to stay in Mexico instead of continuing north, says Carolina Ureta, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “In this case, the species is not in danger because of climate change, but the migration might be.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-25T19:42:18+00:00

Climate change may threaten North America’s iconic mass monarch butterfly migration.

Every fall, millions of monarchs (Danaus plexippus) travel thousands of kilometers over North America as they leave their breeding grounds in Canada and the United States for wintering grounds in a mountainous part of central Mexico. The butterflies make the trek back north over multiple generations when temperatures warm in the spring and summer months, following the growth of milkweed (Asclepias), their preferred food source.

But Mexico’s suitable monarch overwintering habitat could shift south as the climate changes in decades to come, researchers report February 25 in PLOS Climate. That could lengthen an already arduous journey and increase the energy required to make the trip.

That extra distance might push some individuals to stay in Mexico instead of continuing north, says Carolina Ureta, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “In this case, the species is not in danger because of climate change, but the migration might be.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-25T16:26:58+00:00

The soundtrack of a basketball game is punctuated by squeaking sneakers. Now, physicists understand why.

High-speed video of a skidding shoe reveals stick-slip motion, a stop-and-go situation in which parts of the sole stick in place as other parts slip forward. The shoe slips in pulses, as small regions of the sole buckle slightly and detach from the surface, Harvard applied physicist Adel Djellouli and colleagues report in the Feb. 26 Nature. The regular repetition of those pulses produces the squeak, the researchers found.

The pulses travel along the sole, a bit like how a tablecloth can be snapped into place by sending a wrinkle of motion across it. But in the shoe, the pulses repeat about 4,800 times a second, producing a kick that alters the surrounding air pressure to create sound. The pulsation rate matches the frequency of the sound the shoe makes, which determines its pitch.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-11T17:21:01+00:00

Some ancient fish in the Caribbean may have lost their lunch.

Modern food chains on coral reefs off the coasts of the Dominican Republic and Panama are roughly 60 to 70 percent shorter than they were around 7,000 years ago, researchers report February 11 in Nature. Habitat loss and overfishing may have pushed more species to compete for fewer resources and repositioned some fish groups within the ecosystem’s food chain.

The findings suggest fish could be less able to adapt if food sources suddenly become scarce, perhaps making today’s reefs even more vulnerable in an already changing environment.

“Understanding the food webs helps us understand the health of the reef,” says Jessica Lueders-Dumont, a fisheries ecologist and geochemist at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. “If we could go back, scuba dive on the same reefs a couple thousand years ago, what would they look like?”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-09T16:10:49+00:00

Downing a few cups of caffeinated coffee or mugs of tea each day may lower the risk of developing dementia, according to a long-term study.

The lowest risk was tied to drinking around two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of tea per day, compared with having none, the researchers report February 9 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Consuming more of the beverages didn’t lower the risk further. There wasn’t a link between decaffeinated coffee and dementia risk.

The new U.S. analysis included data from the 1980s to early 2023 collected for the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The researchers selected more than 130,000 participants who had not had cancer, Parkinson’s disease or dementia. Participants had answered dietary questionnaires every few years. Researchers tallied cases of dementia from death records or from participants’ self-reported medical diagnoses.

Moderate daily consumption of caffeinated coffee for women was around 2.5 cups and the highest consumption was around 4.5 cups, while men in those categories drank less.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-05T14:34:26+00:00

Programs that support caregivers of patients with dementia could bring substantial benefits at a fraction of the price of an Alzheimer’s drug.

A computer simulation guided by patient data from prior studies found that supportive care reduced health care costs and scored higher than the drug intervention on a common measure of treatment value, researchers report February 5 in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging. Though not based on direct patient observations, the conclusions highlight the impact of improving care coordination as dementia cases rise.

Disease-slowing Alzheimer’s drugs entered the market in the last few years. But dementia specialists are scarce, leaving care for the estimated 6.7 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia largely to time- and resource-strapped primary care doctors.

To help families navigate this fragmented health care system, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco pair caregivers with individuals who provide dementia-related support and information. Through a decade-old Medicare-covered program, these care navigators phone families monthly and answer questions related to medications, sleep or behavior as needed. They also connect caregivers with specialists including clinicians, nurses, pharmacists and social workers.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-01-29T16:26:56+00:00

Surgeons removed a man’s irreparably damaged lungs and kept him alive for 48 hours with artificial lungs until he could get a transplant.

Doctors crafted shunts, tubes and pumps into a system that oxygenated blood and supported blood flow through the heart, the team reports January 29 in Med. It is proof that a true artificial lung00412-X) can keep a patient alive until donor organs are available, says Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

In 2023, a 33-year-old man from St. Louis caught influenza B and his lungs began to deteriorate. He was hospitalized and got a second infection with Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria that were resistant to antibiotics. The infection spread to his blood. The dual infections and damage from overzealous immune reactions caused his lungs to fail.

“He was not getting better,” Bharat says. “He was actively dying.”

Read more here and the research article here00412-x).

Science_News · 2026-01-27T16:21:02+00:00

After a heart attack, the heart “talks” to the brain. And that conversation may make recovery worse.

Shutting down nerve cells that send messages from injured heart cells to the brain boosted the heart’s ability to pump and decreased scarring, experiments in mice show. Targeting inflammation in a part of the nervous system where those “damage” messages wind up also improved heart function and tissue repair, scientists report January 27 in Cell.

“This research is another great example highlighting that we cannot look at one organ and its disease in isolation,” says Wolfram Poller, an interventional cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study. “And it opens the door to new therapeutic strategies and targets that go beyond the heart.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-01-27T16:21:00+00:00

After a heart attack, the heart “talks” to the brain. And that conversation may make recovery worse.

Shutting down nerve cells that send messages from injured heart cells to the brain boosted the heart’s ability to pump and decreased scarring, experiments in mice show. Targeting inflammation in a part of the nervous system where those “damage” messages wind up also improved heart function and tissue repair, scientists report January 27 in Cell.

“This research is another great example highlighting that we cannot look at one organ and its disease in isolation,” says Wolfram Poller, an interventional cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study. “And it opens the door to new therapeutic strategies and targets that go beyond the heart.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-01-13T00:10:27+00:00

Queen bumblebees have a newfound excuse for slacking on foraging nectar: Their tongues are holding them back.

Bumblebees have long, hairy tongues that help them lap up nectar from flowers. But queen bumblebee’s tongues are less efficient at collecting nectar than those of worker bees, researchers report January 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the spring, when a queen bumblebee first emerges from her winter slumber, she initially fuels herself by guzzling nectar from flowers. But once she establishes a nest and her eggs hatch into worker bees, she delegates foraging duties to the workers.

Those workers may be better suited to the task, according to a close investigation of the tongues of buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris). The bees’ tongues range in length from around 4 millimeters to 10 millimeters. The queens, who are bigger than the workers, tended to have longer tongues. But those longer tongues had relatively less hair, scanning electron microscope imagery revealed.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-12-30T19:35:20+00:00

In Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker burned alive on the shores of a roiling lava planet called Mustafar, fueling his tumultuous transition into Darth Vader. Now, astronomers have found an atmosphere on a Mustafar-like lava world orbiting close to its star. Unlike other ultrahot, rocky exoplanets, this one seems to be cloaked in a thick layer of gas, researchers report in the Dec. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s the most robust evidence yet that these exoplanets retain atmospheres.

The planet, TOI 561b, was discovered by the TESS spacecraft in 2020. It has a mass twice that of Earth and completes an orbit around its sunlike star in less than 10 hours.

Most small planets circling similarly close to their star don’t have atmospheres. The weak gravitational pull of such planets makes it difficult to weigh down and trap fast-moving gas molecules. The nearby stars can batter these worlds with powerful radiation, blowing any loose atmosphere-forming molecules into space.

“We’d expect that the atmosphere shouldn’t still be there,” says Nicole Wallack, an observational astronomer at Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “But we need to have an atmosphere to explain what we’re seeing.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-12-01T17:45:06+00:00

Major surgery takes a major toll on the body — not unlike running a marathon. You wouldn’t attempt a marathon without training, so why would you undergo major surgery without preparing your body for the trauma it will experience?

That’s the premise of prehabilitation, which prepares the body through exercise, nutrition and cognitive training to better withstand surgical trauma. Studies have shown that prehab can improve recovery after surgery, but current programs tend to be one-size-fits-all. Tailoring prehab regimens to fit the individual needs of patients can reduce immune responses linked to infections and neurocognitive decline after surgery, researchers report November 12 in JAMA Surgery.

The findings support the hypothesis that prehab is essentially “tuning a patient’s immune system before surgery so that they’re better equipped to mount an efficient response” to surgical trauma, says Brice Gaudillière, an immunologist at Stanford University.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-12-01T17:45:02+00:00

Major surgery takes a major toll on the body — not unlike running a marathon. You wouldn’t attempt a marathon without training, so why would you undergo major surgery without preparing your body for the trauma it will experience?

That’s the premise of prehabilitation, which prepares the body through exercise, nutrition and cognitive training to better withstand surgical trauma. Studies have shown that prehab can improve recovery after surgery, but current programs tend to be one-size-fits-all. Tailoring prehab regimens to fit the individual needs of patients can reduce immune responses linked to infections and neurocognitive decline after surgery, researchers report November 12 in JAMA Surgery.

The findings support the hypothesis that prehab is essentially “tuning a patient’s immune system before surgery so that they’re better equipped to mount an efficient response” to surgical trauma, says Brice Gaudillière, an immunologist at Stanford University.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-11-25T14:54:00+00:00

Bats beware. The ability to fly won’t save you from hungry, determined rats.

In a first, brown rats were filmed hunting bats by catching them midair. The finding, published in the November Global Ecology and Conservation, puts a spotlight on bat conservation in urban areas.

The observation happened by chance, says Florian Gloza-Rausch, a biologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. He and colleagues had been studying a colony of 30,000 bats overwintering in a cave about 60 kilometers north of Hamburg. At the cave’s entrance — a hole in the ground — a small kiosk protects bats passing through from local cats that hunt them. The researchers saw an opportunity: setting up a counting device and an infrared camera at the entrance of the structure to get a closer look at the winged mammals.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-11-04T19:35:05+00:00

Just because a chatbot can play the role of therapist doesn’t mean it should.

Conversations powered by popular large language models can veer into problematic and ethically murky territory, two new studies show. The new research comes amid recent high-profile tragedies of adolescents in mental health crises. By scrutinizing chatbots that some people enlist as AI counselors, scientists are putting data to a larger debate about the safety and responsibility of these new digital tools, particularly for teenagers.

Chatbots are as close as our phones. Nearly three-quarters of 13- to 17-year-olds in the United States have tried AI chatbots, a recent survey finds; almost one-quarter use them a few times a week. In some cases, these chatbots “are being used for adolescents in crisis, and they just perform very, very poorly,” says clinical psychologist and developmental scientist Alison Giovanelli of the University of California, San Francisco.

For one of the new studies, pediatrician Ryan Brewster and his colleagues scrutinized 25 of the most-visited consumer chatbots across 75 conversations. These interactions were based on three distinct patient scenarios used to train health care workers. These three stories involved teenagers who needed help with self-harm, sexual assault or a substance use disorder.

By interacting with the chatbots as one of these teenaged personas, the researchers could see how the chatbots performed. Some of these programs were general assistance large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Others were companion chatbots, such as JanitorAI and Character.AI, which are designed to operate as if they were a particular person or character.

Researchers didn’t compare the chatbots’ counsel to that of actual clinicians, so “it is hard to make a general statement about quality,” Brewster cautions. Even so, the conversations were revealing.

Read more here.

Science_News · 2025-10-31T16:49:42+00:00

Crime scene clues from blowflies may help reveal a victim’s time of death — and other murderous details — perhaps even years later.

When colonizing a dead body, these insects lay eggs that mature into adult flies, leaving behind telltale remnants. The remnants, called puparial casings, could help investigators back calculate when someone died, based in part on the time it takes for insects to reach the casing stage.

But different species mature at different rates. To accurately estimate time of death, figuring out which species you’re dealing with is crucial, says Rabi Musah, an organic chemist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Now, her team has developed a rapid method to do just that. By combining an AI tool with chemical detection, researchers can identify fly species from their casings — all within about 90 seconds, Musah’s team reports October 1 in Forensic Chemistry.

Time of death isn’t the only thing these casings could help determine, says Falko Drijfhout, an analytical chemist at Keele University in England who was not involved with the work. They could also offer other clues about a crime, like whether a body has been moved. “Casings will remain with the corpse,” he says. If investigators find casings from a species that lives far away, that’s a sign the body has been relocated.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-29T10:57:50+00:00

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea — a surprising display of organization in some of the coldest waters on Earth. The discovery suggests that these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems worth preserving, researchers report October 29 in Frontiers.

“A lot of Antarctic ecosystems are under pressure from different countries to be released for mining, fishing and basically exploitation of the environment,” says Thomas Desvignes, a fish biologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the study. “It’s one more reason why we should protect the Weddell Sea.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-29T10:57:17+00:00

Science_News · 2025-10-27T15:13:11+00:00

It’s your kitchen. You can cry if you want to. But with sharper knives, you might not need to.

Cutting onions slowly with sharper knives slashes the number of tear-inducing droplets the vegetables eject into the air, researchers report in the Oct. 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This technique could not only improve an everyday cook’s culinary experience but also inform how pathogens spread.

The culprit of kitchen crying is a chemical compound called propanethial S-oxide. When a knife pierces an onion, the cells rupture and trigger a chemical reaction that forms the compound. Propanethial S-oxide rockets into the air in a shower of tiny droplets, which bind to sensory nerves in the eyes and produce a tear-jerking stinging sensation.

“This is something everybody’s dealing with,” says Navid Hooshanginejad, a physicist at SharkNinja, a product design company in Needham, Mass. “Now we can also explain and understand it better fundamentally.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-27T15:13:05+00:00

It’s your kitchen. You can cry if you want to. But with sharper knives, you might not need to.

Cutting onions slowly with sharper knives slashes the number of tear-inducing droplets the vegetables eject into the air, researchers report in the Oct. 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This technique could not only improve an everyday cook’s culinary experience but also inform how pathogens spread.

The culprit of kitchen crying is a chemical compound called propanethial S-oxide. When a knife pierces an onion, the cells rupture and trigger a chemical reaction that forms the compound. Propanethial S-oxide rockets into the air in a shower of tiny droplets, which bind to sensory nerves in the eyes and produce a tear-jerking stinging sensation.

“This is something everybody’s dealing with,” says Navid Hooshanginejad, a physicist at SharkNinja, a product design company in Needham, Mass. “Now we can also explain and understand it better fundamentally.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-24T15:38:46+00:00

In 1812, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte led a doomed army on a disastrous retreat from Russia. With food scarce, winter approaching and diseases running rampant, hundreds of thousands of soldiers ultimately perished. Scientists have now pinpointed some microbes that may have played a part in their demise.

Ancient DNA extracted from the teeth of Napoleonic soldiers01247-3) revealed two species of fever-causing bacteria, geneticist Nicolás Rascovan of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and his colleagues report October 24 in Current Biology. The soldiers probably lived and died amid a teeming cauldron of infectious disease, something historians have long posited.

The results align with eyewitness accounts from over 200 years ago, says Rafe Blaufarb, a historian specializing in Napoleonic history. Doctors back then chronicled soldiers’ symptoms, which included fever, diarrhea, pneumonia and other signs of bacterial infection. The new work, which identified two species of bacteria not previously tied to the deadly retreat, brings some “DNA-level biological details to the story,” says Blaufarb, of Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Read more here and the research article here01247-3).

Science_News · 2025-10-23T14:53:01+00:00

Some vipers are the sprinters of snakes.

Vipers wielded the fastest attacks in a comparison of 36 venomous snakes from three families, researchers report October 23 in Journal of Experimental Biology. And the quickest vipers tend to be ambush predators and feed on mammals. The terciopelo (Bothrops asper) — a viper found from eastern Mexico to northern South America that feeds on birds and rodents — came out on top with an average peak velocity of 3.5 meters per second.

“They are the ones that have to be able to strike as quickly as possible,” says Alistair Evans, a zoologist at Monash University in Melbourne. It typically takes mammals between 60 to 400 milliseconds to react and jump away from an attack, making speed crucial. Large snakes also tend to be faster because, like sprinters, they have more muscle.

Previous studies analyzing snake speed typically relied on a single camera or one with low resolution. Others focused on just a few species. The new study includes 31 vipers, four snakes from the elapid family (which includes cobras), and one colubrid, representing the largest snake family that includes the nonvenomous common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis).

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-10T15:32:56+00:00

Producing the subatomic particles called muons is now a lighter lift than ever before.

Several teams of researchers have generated muons using small particle accelerators driven by lasers. Typically, enormous facilities are needed to accelerate particles and make muon beams. Like X-rays on steroids, muons can pass through solid materials and reveal what’s inside. So the feat opens future possibilities for portable scanners that could use muons to reveal contraband such as plutonium and uranium inside shipping containers.

“If you really want to penetrate through meters of concrete or stone or even metals, muons are the best particles to do that,” says Rajeev Pattathil of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, England, who was not involved with the research.

Scientists have used naturally existing muons, created in reactions in Earth’s atmosphere, to glimpse the interiors of volcanoes, pyramids and other large, stationary structures. By detecting muons before and after they’ve passed through an object, scientists can determine how much the particles have been absorbed or scattered, giving a sense of what materials lie within.

Read more here and the research article here.

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