Engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a soft, wearable ultrasound patch that can continuously monitor a fetus for hours at a time while maintaining reliable performance even as the fetus and umbilical cord move throughout pregnancy.

The device could help physicians identify complications earlier in high-risk pregnancies. During clinical testing, the patch detected prolonged abnormal fetal signals in one case, prompting an early Cesarean delivery. Researchers said the intervention may have helped save the baby’s life. The technology could also improve access to prenatal care in low-resource regions where trained ultrasound specialists and continuous monitoring are often unavailable.

“Wearable ultrasound technology has the potential to enable continuous prenatal monitoring and improve pregnancy outcomes in ways that were previously not possible,” said study co-first author Geonho (Tom) Park, a chemical and nanoengineering PhD student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Park co-led the study with fellow UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering co-first authors Yizhou Bian, Hao Huang, and Sai Zhou.

Autonomous Tracking Overcomes Fetal Movement Challenges
Most prenatal ultrasounds provide only a brief look at fetal health and require trained sonographers to operate the equipment. In contrast, the new patch is designed to remain on the body and continuously monitor a baby’s anatomy and blood flow in real time without the need to manually position an ultrasound probe.

“To comprehensively monitor mothers and babies over the amount of time needed to catch complications like preeclampsia, you need a system that can work continuously and largely on its own,” Bian said. “That is why the sensing depth, functional capabilities, and autonomy of this ultrasound technology are critical.”

Global migration has risen sharply from approximately 13 million people per year in 2000 to around 35 million people per year in 2023. This is according to a new dataset on human migration published in Nature by researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), IIASA and the University of Hong Kong.

This rise in migration outpaces global population growth, showing a true per capita increase in human mobility. The trend is contrary to previous research efforts to quantify global migration flows.

Using deep learning, the researchers built the first dataset of migration flows between all countries for the period 1990–2023, offering a far more detailed picture of global movement than traditional data, which is highly fragmented.

Current analysis of migration is heavily reliant on migrant population data published at five-year intervals by the United Nations and at 10-year intervals by the World Bank, providing counts of migrants in each country by country of birth. Thus, they offer only a snapshot at a fixed point in time. As a result, big events—such as wars, recessions, pandemics or climate shocks—have sometimes been missed in the data capture.

More detailed migration data matters because it shows not just how many people move, but when, where and why—helping policymakers respond to crises, plan services and understand global trends.

How the dataset fills gaps
Through the use of advanced machine learning (deep neural networks) to combine official statistics, census data and other sources with geographic and economic factors, the new dataset helps fill in the gaps. It shows migration has become more common overall since 2000, with dips only during the 2008–09 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Globally, the Middle East experienced the highest total inflow of migrants, chiefly from South Asia and the Philippines, with immigration from Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia alone averaging around 300,000 people per year from 2010 onward.

I pulled a jar of pond water and discovered a swarm of microscopic piranhas known as Coleps. Watch what happens when these armored scavengers find their next meal under the microscope!

Meet the Coleps, a barrel-shaped, single-celled ciliate with a reputation as the vulture of the micro-world. In this video, we observe a sample of local pond water under high magnification to see how these microbes hunt and scavenge. Using chemosensation, they can "smell" injured prey like a dead blue water mite or a ruptured Stentor coeruleus.

You'll see them use their reinforced oral baskets (nematodesmata) to drill into tissue, and learn how they fire microscopic harpoons called toxicysts to paralyze struggling prey. Covered in interlocking plates of calcium carbonate, these tiny armored tanks are the ultimate cleanup crew of the microscopic ecosystem.

Timestamps
0:00 - Looking Inside the Pond Water
0:11 - Meet the Coleps (The Micro Vultures)
0:40 - Piranha-like Behavior (swarm)
1:08 - Feeding on a Blue Water Mite
1:33 - The Secret Weapon: Toxicysts & Toxins
2:11 - Calcium Carbonate Armor Plates
2:51 - A Giant Stentor Coeruleus Bursts
3:42 - The Stentor's Secret to Survival

Researchers have long linked perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called “forever chemicals,” to serious birth defects.

However, scientists have struggled to explain exactly how these pollutants affect fetal development. A new study now offers the first detailed molecular explanation, revealing how a PFAS compound known as perfluorodecanoic acid (PFDA) can cause craniofacial abnormalities before birth.

“Most people are exposed to small amounts of PFAS in everyday life, but higher exposure can occur through contaminated water, living near manufacturing sites, or certain jobs like firefighting and ski waxing, which is why it’s so important to understand the chemicals better,” said the paper’s senior author, Jed Lampe, PhD, associate professor at University of Colorado Anschutz Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“We wanted to understand which PFAS compounds are truly harmful during fetal development, especially for people with higher exposure, and how they cause damage.”

PFDA Identified as the Most Toxic PFAS
Around 15,000 PFAS compounds are used in consumer and industrial products, but growing evidence suggests only a portion of them present major health concerns. To identify the most harmful compounds, Lampe and colleagues Michaela Hvizdak and Sylvie Kandel examined 13 commonly detected PFAS. Their results showed that PFDA was the most toxic to craniofacial development in a fetus.

The researchers found evidence linking PFDA to significant facial abnormalities seen in both people and laboratory animals. Some estimates suggest the compound may increase the risk of these defects by about 10%, even at very low exposure levels.

“This finding moves us beyond association by providing a clear explanation for how PFDA can interfere with fetal development. It’s a critical step toward understanding a vast and complex class of environmental chemicals,” said Lampe.

The Very Large Array, the iconic field of radio antennas featured in the film "Contact" (inspired by Carl Sagan's novel), has a long and distinguished history of service. But after more than 45 years of studying the radio sky and probing the mysteries of the universe, the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which operates the VLA, is looking to create a new generation of telescopes that will pick up where the VLA leaves off.

The first step in the process was the creation of the next-generation Very Large Array, or ngVLA, prototype, a single radio antenna located on the NSF VLA grounds in the deserts of New Mexico. This prototype recently achieved a major milestone by gathering its "first light," making independent observations and working in collaboration with the NSF VLA.

This achievement marks the transition from the construction phase to astronomical testing and will serve as the blueprint for the proposed 244-antenna array.

Tony Beasley, director of NSF NRAO and AUI vice president for radio astronomy operations, explained the significance of this event in an NSF NRAO press release:

"First light from the ngVLA prototype antenna is a real-world demonstration of the engineering progress required to build America's—and the world's—next great radio astronomy facility. This milestone reflects the leadership and expertise we've tapped into among NRAO staff, our contractors, and the U.S. and international scientific community."

Scientists at the SETI Institute recently searched for technological signals from 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object observed in our solar system. Using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, the team scanned a wide range of radio frequencies for signs of extraterrestrial technology and found none, as expected based on other astronomical observations showing that the object exhibits natural comet-like composition and behavior. The paper is published in The Astronomical Journal.

Discovered in July 2025, 3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed object from another star system to enter our solar system, after 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. Its interstellar origin makes 3I/ATLAS a rare opportunity to study material from another stellar system and better understand how planetary systems form and evolve.

While observations strongly indicate that 3I/ATLAS is a natural object, interstellar visitors are also compelling technosignature targets because an artificial object—however unlikely—could represent detectable extraterrestrial technology and potentially provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

"Eventually, our own Voyager spacecraft will be extraterrestrial artifacts in other stellar systems," said Dr. Sofia Sheikh, lead author on the paper. "Given that, it is important that we understand the natural distribution of interstellar objects so that we will be able to identify any anomalies that could one day be signs of an artificial interstellar object."

The Spirit rover (Mars Exploration Rover A) left our planet to begin the journey to its new home OTD in 2003. This view captured 20 years ago at the beginning of 2006 shows rippled sand deposits of the "El Dorado" ripple field in Gusev Crater on Mars.

Designed for a 90-day mission, Spirit operated for more than 6 years on Mars. It's twin, Opportunity, operated for almost 15 years.

Ten days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.

At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.

A new study finds that plants respond to injury by actively redirecting sugars to damaged tissues, helping fuel the regeneration process. Using a fluorescent sensor to track sugar movement in living plants, researchers have discovered that wounds trigger a localized shift in energy transport, concentrating glucose around the injury site. The findings published in PNAS offer new insight into how plants coordinate repair and recovery and could help scientists better understand the mechanisms that support resilience in crops facing physical damage or environmental stress.

When a plant is damaged, whether by a storm, an animal, or a gardener's pruning shears, it faces an immediate challenge: how to deliver enough energy to the wounded area to rebuild lost tissue. The study reveals how plants solve that problem. The team discovered that injuries trigger a rapid rerouting of sugars, directing energy toward damaged tissues where repair and regeneration are underway.

Using a fluorescent sensor that allowed them to watch sugar movement inside living plants, the researchers found that glucose accumulates around wounds as regeneration progresses. They also identified several genes that help drive this process, providing new insight into how plants recover from injury.

Viruses are highly effective at infecting human cells, largely because of specialized proteins that cover their outer surfaces. These proteins are also a key focus for vaccine design. To study them, scientists often create lab-made versions to see how the immune system might respond. However, these simplified versions usually omit important sections embedded in the virus’ membrane. Without those pieces, the proteins do not fully behave the way they do in real viruses, making it harder to understand how antibodies recognize and disable them.

Researchers at Scripps Research, working with IAVI and other collaborators, have now developed a new platform that allows these viral proteins to be studied in a form that closely resembles their natural state. The method uses nanodisc technology, where the proteins are placed into tiny particles made of lipids. This creates a membrane-like environment that better preserves their structure and function. As a result, scientists can gain clearer insights into how viral proteins and antibodies interact.

Nanodisc Technology Improves Vaccine Research
The new platform, described in Nature Communications, was tested using proteins from HIV and Ebola. These viruses have been particularly difficult targets for vaccines because their surface proteins are not easily recognized by the immune system. The researchers say the same approach could also be used to study other viruses with similar membrane-bound proteins, including influenza and SARS-CoV-2.

“For many years, we’ve had to rely on versions of viral proteins that are missing important pieces,” says co-senior author William Schief, a professor at Scripps Research and executive director of vaccine design at IAVI’s Neutralizing Antibody Center. “Our platform lets us study these proteins in a setting that better reflects their natural environment, which is critical if we want to understand how protective antibodies recognize a virus.”

Researchers at MIT are testing a new propulsion technology that could give small satellites a major boost in capability. The system combines two very different forms of spacecraft propulsion in a single package, allowing satellites to perform both rapid maneuvers and highly efficient long-distance travel.

At the heart of the design is a single propellant that can power both chemical and electric thrusters. Traditionally, these systems require separate fuel sources, adding complexity and taking up valuable space on a spacecraft.

“If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Amelia Bruno, a former postdoctoral researcher in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform.”

Bruno is the lead author of a study published in the Journal of Propulsion and Power. The research demonstrates that a type of environmentally friendlier monopropellant originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for chemical propulsion can also be used to operate miniature electric thrusters known as electrospray thrusters.

Day 121, orbit 1873 — Sunday morning science with Sophie, episode 9: Hunting for sounds, part 2.

Before anyone from the NASA engineering teams starts wondering why the TOCA is clicking while it’s switched off… I obviously could not turn it on just for the purpose of this video, so I recorded the sound later on during actual operations. It’s my absolute favourite sound onboard the Station! The sound consists of the checkout of several valves, which are used by this Total Organic Carbon Analyzer. This beautiful piece of engineering is used to test the quality of the Station's drinking water. 98% of the water onboard is recycled, isn’t it amazing?

At age 19, John McFall thought he might never walk again after his right leg was amputated above the knee following a motorcycle accident. Fast-forward more than two decades, and he is now on the verge of becoming the first physically disabled person in space.

McFall, 45, is a British surgeon and former Paralympic athlete who won multiple medals as a T42-class sprinter. In 2022, he joined the European Space Agency's (ESA) Fly! program, which aimed to see if a person with a physical disability could live and work in low Earth orbit. And in February 2025, he became the first member of the program to be cleared for a potential future mission to space.

More recently, on June 2, the U.K. government announced that McFall had been selected as a prospective member of the first crew to live on Haven-1, an upcoming commercial space station from U.S. company Vast that is scheduled to be the first of its kind in low Earth orbit, if it launches on time early next year.

A warming climate has been helping drive a global rise in sea levels. A new analysis now finds that hundreds of major studies missed just how much sea levels have risen. Past estimates were too low, the new study shows. On average, true sea levels are 20 to 30 centimeters (8 to 12 inches) higher than what past studies reported.

This means that the toll of future sea level rise is even greater than expected.

Katharina Seeger and Philip Minderhoud did the research. They work at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. These physical geographers evaluated data from 385 global and regional studies. All had been published between 2009 and 2025.

Some 99 percent of the studies had incorrectly estimated ocean height, they found. And 45 of the studies were used a few years ago in a major report. It was issued by a global panel of climate experts convened by the United Nations.

Knowing the rate of ocean rise is crucial for coastal planners around the world. It helps them predict when sea water will start to flood — and permanently cover — large swaths of land. The errors in past studies, the researchers say, mean that coastal land may disappear faster than expected. In some places, it could vanish as much as a century sooner than thought.

In a first, a large, international team led by multiple labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has published a complete wiring diagram of all the connections between neurons in the central nervous system of an adult fruit fly.

The work allows researchers to begin to study how the brain and body interact to carry out complex behaviors such as walking and flying. It also empowers deeper investigations into the basic principles of how nervous systems work.

"We can see all of the neurons and their connections as a complete unit for the first time and ask, "What do we learn from that?'" said study co-senior author Rachel Wilson, the Joseph B. Martin Professor of Basic Research in the Field of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

The highly detailed diagram of neural connections—known as a connectome—adds a map of the fruit fly's spinal cord equivalent, called a nerve cord, to a previously published connectome of the fly brain.

"It is really important to have a central nervous system connectome that is as complete as possible so we can link up the brain and body and start thinking about behavior holistically," said study co-senior author Wei-Chung Allen Lee, associate professor of neurobiology at HMS and HMS professor of neurology at Boston Children's Hospital.

In analyzing the connectome, the team found that many fruit fly behaviors are controlled by local neural circuits in the body parts that are involved, rather than by a central hub in the brain.

The entire connectome is now freely available online so that other scientists can use it to propel neuroscience research.

Rarely seen by humans, a humpback whale birth is a truly special moment. Now that it has entered the world, this humpback calf will spend the next 10 years of its life growing to its full adult size.

Biomedical engineers at Brown University have created a wound dressing that releases antibiotics only when harmful bacteria are detected. In a new study, the team found that the material may quickly eliminate wound infections and speed healing while cutting back on unnecessary antibiotic use. Overuse of antibiotics is a key factor behind antibiotic resistance and difficult-to-treat “superbug” infections, which kill tens of thousands of people worldwide each year.

The material is a smart hydrogel packed with antibiotics and designed to be applied directly to a wound beneath a bandage. It responds to an enzyme made by many harmful bacteria. When that enzyme is present, the hydrogel begins to break down and releases the antibiotics stored inside. If harmful bacteria are absent, the hydrogel remains intact and keeps the medication sealed away.

“Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem worldwide, so we need better approaches for how we use antibiotics,” said Anita Shukla, a professor in Brown’s School of Engineering who led the development of the smart hydrogel. “We’ve developed a material that releases antibiotics only when harmful bacteria are present, so it limits exposure to antibiotics when they’re not needed but still provides these important medications when they are needed.”

In the study, published in Science Advances, the researchers tested the hydrogel and found that it was highly selective for enzymes produced by common bacteria that cause wound infections. The findings also suggest that the material may clear infections and support wound healing more effectively than a hydrogel dressing currently used in clinical care.

For decades, the semiconductor industry has boosted computing power by making transistors smaller and fitting more of them onto a single chip. That strategy has fueled remarkable advances in electronics, but it is now approaching fundamental physical limits. As devices shrink toward atomic scales, engineers must contend with the constraints of material properties and the effects of quantum mechanics.

Researchers believe the next major advance may come not from making chips smaller, but from building them upward.

A team at the University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering has demonstrated a new way to stack layers of silicon circuits directly on top of one another, creating compact three-dimensional chips that could deliver greater computing power while using less energy. Their work, published in Nature, overcomes a major obstacle that has long prevented widespread adoption of this approach.

“Take something as simple as static random-access memory, which is universal in CPUs and GPUs. Today it takes six microelectronic devices called transistors on a single plane to store one bit of information. With vertical integration, you can distribute them across multiple layers. It’s like replacing a sprawling suburb with high-rises: you get the same functionality, but the spatial footprint is reduced while making communication between layers faster and more efficient,” said Qing Cao, a professor of materials science and engineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering.

Researchers at the University of Houston's College of Pharmacy have discovered an unexpectedly simple strategy to improve the performance of mRNA vaccines and gene therapeutics: adding salt. The findings, published in Small, address one of the biggest challenges facing modern gene medicine—getting fragile therapeutic material to the right place inside cells.

"We are introducing salt-loaded lipid nanoparticles as a novel and broadly applicable design principle for gene delivery," said Fanfei Meng, assistant professor and Presidential Frontier Faculty member in the Department of Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences. "What makes this exciting is that we can significantly improve delivery efficiency without needing to invent entirely new materials."

Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, are tiny fat-based delivery vehicles widely used to transport fragile genetic material into cells. They became widely recognized during the COVID-19 pandemic through mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer. Today, scientists are also using LNPs to develop new treatments for cancer, rare diseases and genetic disorders.

Despite their success, a major obstacle has remained. After entering cells, much of the therapeutic cargo becomes trapped inside endosomes—membrane-bound compartments that prevent the genetic material from reaching the interior of the cell, where it must go to function properly.

Researchers have long considered this "endosomal escape" problem one of the major bottlenecks limiting the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines and other gene-based medicines.

"Many gene therapies fail because of this," said Meng. "We found a surprisingly simple way to help more of that cargo escape."

The escape plan
Meng and his research team discovered that loading salt into lipid nanoparticles creates pressure inside the endosomes, helping release the therapeutic material into the cell, where it can become active. The team believes the strategy could eventually help improve a wide range of treatments, including mRNA vaccines, gene-editing technologies and other nucleic acid-based therapeutics.

The approach relies on basic physical principles rather than complex chemical redesigns, making it easier to adapt for future therapies and large-scale manufacturing.