ScienceDaily: All - May 01, 2025

Today's top research news

Increasing physical activity in middle age may protect against Alzheimer's disease

An increase in physical activity between the ages of 45 and 65 could help prevent Alzheimer's disease, while inactivity may be detrimental to brain health.

Inside Creative House/Shutterstock.com

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Breast cancer mortality in women ages 20-49 significantly dropped between 2010 and 2020

Breast cancer deaths among women ages 20-49 declined significantly between 2010 and 2020, according to a new study.

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Engineers develop wearable heart attack detection tech

Every second counts when it comes to detecting and treating heart attacks. A new technology may be able to identify heart attacks faster and more accurately than traditional methods.

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Engineers advance toward a fault-tolerant quantum computer

Researchers demonstrated extremely strong nonlinear light-matter coupling in a quantum circuit. Stronger coupling enables faster quantum readout and operations, ultimately improving the accuracy of quantum operations.

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Children's reading and writing develop better when they are trained in handwriting

Researchers explored how manual and keyboard practice influenced children's abilities in their reading and writing learning process. 5-year-olds were taught an artificial alphabet using different techniques, and the conclusion was that children who are trained with pencil and paper assimilate new letters and words better.

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A virtual reality game integrating smell to fight cognitive decline

Aiming to address age-related cognitive decline, a growing global health challenge, a team of researchers has developed a VR-based smell-training system to help combat it. This innovative VR game activates memory pathways by incorporating olfactory stimulation in a virtual environment. This game-based method offers an engaging platform for maintaining cognitive function and reducing the risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia in older adults.

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Landmark experiment sheds new light on the origins of consciousness

An experiment seven years in the making has uncovered new insights into the nature of consciousness and challenges two prominent, competing scientific theories: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT). The findings mark a pivotal moment in the goal to understand the elusive origins consciousness.

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One of Earth's ancient volcanic mysteries solved

A new study traces a 120-million-year-old 'super-eruption' to its source, offering new insights into Earth's complex geological history.

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Restoring oil wells back to nature with moss

In what could represent a milestone in ecological restoration, researchers have implemented a method capable of restoring peatlands at tens of thousands of oil and gas exploration sites in Western Canada. The project involves lowering the surface of these decommissioned sites, known as well pads, and transplanting native moss onto them to effectively recreate peatlands. This is the first time researchers have applied the method to scale on an entire well pad. The study found that the technique results in sufficient water for the growth of peatland moss across large portions of the study site.

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'Scratching' more than the ocean's surface to map global microplastic movement

An international team of scientists has moved beyond just 'scratching the surface,' to understand how microplastics move through and impact the global ocean. For the first time, scientists have mapped microplastic distribution from the surface to the deep sea at a global scale -- revealing not only where plastics accumulate, but how they infiltrate critical ocean systems. Researchers synthesized depth-profile data from 1,885 stations collected between 2014 and 2024 to map microplastic distribution patterns by size and polymer type, while also evaluating potential transport mechanisms.

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When sea stars fall, sea otters rise: Sea otters benefit from prey boom triggered by loss of ochre sea stars

In 2013, a sea star wasting syndrome decimated populations of Pisaster along the west coast of North America and along the Monterey Peninsula in California, where this study was conducted. The orange and purple stars have a hungry appetite for mussels in the rocky intertidal. Without the voracious sea stars lurking around, mussel populations exploded, expanding in cover from around five percent to more than 18 percent within three years. In the wake of the sea star die-off, mussels became a major prey surplus for sea otters, revealing a surprising link between the adjacent rocky intertidal and kelp forest ecosystems. The new research into the phenomenon shows how the loss of a keystone predator (Pisaster) in one ecosystem can impart changes to another (sea otters), linking ecosystems.

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Giant croclike carnivore fossils found in the Caribbean

Imagine a crocodile built like a greyhound -- that's a sebecid. Standing tall, with some species reaching 20 feet in length, they dominated South American landscapes after the extinction of dinosaurs until about 11 million years ago. Or at least, that's what paleontologists thought. A new study shows the Caribbean Islands were a refuge for the last sebecid populations at least 5 million years after they went extinct everywhere else.

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Will the vegetables of the future be fortified using tiny needles?

Researchers have shown they can inexpensively nanomanufacture silk microneedles to precisely fortify crops, monitor plant health, and detect soil toxins.

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Synchrotron in a closet: Bringing powerful 3D X-ray microscopy to smaller labs

For the first time, researchers can study the microstructures inside metals, ceramics and rocks with X-rays in a standard laboratory without needing to travel to a particle accelerator, according to engineers.

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Study suggests dance and lullabies aren't universal human behaviors

Social singing and dance are often assumed to be hard-wired into the human condition; studies have supported the conclusion that these are common across cultures. But new research from an anthropologist challenges the idea that dance and lullabies are universal among humans. The study draws on 43 years of research with an Indigenous population in Paraguay.