Earlier this summer, Stanford economist Neale Mahoney sounded an alarm with a study he coauthored: Americans have at least $140 billion in unpaid health care bills sitting in collection agencies – making the country’s medical debt crisis far bigger than anyone had realized. Now, in plumbing the repercussions, his latest research finds evidence suggesting that people saddled with unpaid […]

It sounds like a scene from a spy thriller. An attacker gets through the IT defenses of a nuclear power plant and feeds it fake, realistic data, tricking its computer systems and personnel into thinking operations are normal. The attacker then disrupts the function of key plant machinery, causing it to misperform or break down. […]

One U.S. child loses a parent or caregiver for every four COVID-19 deaths, a new modeling study published today in Pediatrics reveals.  The findings illustrate orphanhood as a hidden and ongoing secondary tragedy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and emphasizes that identifying and caring for these children throughout their development is a necessary and urgent part of […]

A new process for electrochemically removing carbon from steel during recycling to create ultra-pure low carbon steel has been developed in Canada. The researchers believe that the technology required could potentially be integrated into secondary steel mills, allowing the recycling of high-carbon steel into purer, higher-grade metal more in demand for hi-tech industries. With climate […]

A paper published today in the journal Nature Energy identifies five ways that people of high socioeconomic status have a disproportionate impact on global greenhouse gas emissions – and therefore an outsized responsibility to facilitate progress in climate change mitigation. By saying it’s only the super-rich that need to change their behaviour, we ignore the power that others have […]

Human activity and climate change are causing invasive non-native species to spread rapidly across the globe. Researchers have found that certain invasive species can push lake ecosystems beyond a critical ‘tipping point’, causing a sudden shift from healthy to degraded conditions that is difficult to reverse. Invasive fish such as Asian silver carp Hypophthalmichthys molitrix, and […]

The fight against one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases — malaria — may soon have two new weapons. The World Health Organization this week endorsed a vaccine, Mosquirix, made by British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, that prevents malaria and, according to The New York Times, “could save the lives of tens of thousands of children in Africa […]

New funding from the National Science Foundation’s Build and Broaden Program will enable a team of researchers from Penn State and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) to explore how speech recognition works while training a new generation of speech scientists at America’s largest historically Black university. Research has shown that speech-recognition […]

At the end of the 1970s, infanticide became a flashpoint in animal behavioral science. Sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy, then a Harvard Ph.D. student, shared her observation in her published thesis that whenever a new langur male entered an established colony, infants would either begin to disappear or show evidence of wounds. Hrdy concluded this was done […]

Massages feel good, but do they actually speed muscle recovery? Turns out, they do. Scientists at the Wyss Institute and Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences applied precise, repeated forces to injured mouse leg muscles and found that they recovered stronger and faster than untreated muscles, likely because the compression squeezed […]