Companies that express remorse in the wake of a product failure are more likely to encourage customers to repurchase from them, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York. The study, which examines how emotional reactions affect how consumers interact with a company, also found that remorseful statements can help stave […]

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed COVID-19 vaccine candidates that can take the heat. Their key ingredients? Viruses from plants or bacteria. The new fridge-free COVID-19 vaccines are still in the early stage of development. In mice, the vaccine candidates triggered high production of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that […]

When looking back at the fads of past decades, like 1980’s spandex clothing and the 1990’s boy band craze, later generations often wonder, “How was that ever popular?” Researchers who study cultural evolution and transmission have long tried to answer these sorts of questions, seeking to get a handle on why trends, behaviors and ideas emerge and […]

Technology is such a ubiquitous part of modern life that it can often feel like a force of nature, a powerful tidal wave that users and consumers can ride but have little power to guide its direction. It doesn’t have to be that way. Stanford scholars say that technological innovation is not an inevitable force […]

Fact-checking works to reduce false beliefs across the globe, according to a new study conducted in four countries. Researchers found that fact-checking worked with little variation in Argentina, Nigeria, South Africa and the U.K., and the positive effects were still detectable two weeks later. Even more encouraging, there was no evidence of a “backfire” effect […]

Latinos in non-union jobs were seven times more likely than Latinos in labor unions to fall into unemployment during three key months early in the pandemic, according to a new report by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative. The report also found that Black and Latino union workers had higher wages than their counterparts in non-union jobs […]

A genomic analysis of lung cancer in people with no history of smoking has found that a majority of these tumors arise from the accumulation of mutations caused by natural processes in the body. This study was conducted by an international team led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National […]

The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, which has become the dominant variant in countries including India and the UK, has most likely spread through its ability to evade neutralising antibodies and its increased infectivity, say an international team of researchers. The findings are reported today in Nature. As SARS-CoV-2 replicates, errors in its genetic makeup cause it to mutate. […]

Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking scientific productivity while isolated from the spread of bubonic plague is legendary. University of California San Diego physicists can now claim a stake in the annals of pandemic-driven science. A team of UC San Diego researchers and colleagues at Purdue University have now simulated the foundation of new types of artificial intelligence […]

A team of biochemists and computer scientists has developed a new way to accurately predict the three-dimensional structures of RNA molecules, using an artificial intelligence system trained with a small number of known RNA shapes. Experts have hailed the development as a significant improvement in the challenge of computationally predicting RNA structures, and say it […]