A research team led by Professor Wang Qining from the School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University, has developed the world’s first portable underwater exoskeleton system that assists divers’ knee movement, significantly reducing air consumption and muscle effort during dives.
The findings, published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics on October 14, 2025, open new possibilities for enhancing human performance in underwater environments.
Despite the vast diversity of human languages, specific grammatical patterns appear again and again. A new study reveals that around a third of the long-proposed “linguistic universals”—patterns thought to hold across all languages—are statistically supported when examined with state-of-the-art evolutionary methods.
An international team led by Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) and Russell D. Gray (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) used Grambank, the world’s most comprehensive database of grammatical features, to test 191 proposed universals across more than 1,700 languages. Traditionally, linguists have attempted to circumvent the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages by sampling widely separated languages.
However, sampling can fail to remove all dependencies, reduce statistical power and does not identify historical pathways. The Bayesian spatio-phylogenetic analyses used by the authors accounted for both the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages—a level of statistical rigor rarely achieved in previous work.
A collaboration between SISSA’s Physics and Neuroscience groups has taken a step forward in understanding how memories are stored and retrieved in the brain. The study, recently published in Neuron, shows that distinct perceptual biases—long thought to arise from separate brain systems—can, in fact, be explained by a single, biologically grounded mechanism.
The research, led by professors Sebastian Goldt and Mathew E. Diamond, and first author Francesca Schönsberg (now a junior research chair at the École Normale Supérieure), brings together theoretical physics, computational modeling, and behavioral neuroscience to bridge decades of fragmented research on perceptual memory. Yukti Chopra and Davide Giana carried out laboratory experiments to provide the empirical data that the model was tested against.
An international team led by researchers from the University of Cologne has solved the mystery of an extraordinary phenomenon known as the “Diamond Ring” in the star-forming region Cygnus X, a huge, ring-shaped structure made of gas and dust that resembles a glowing diamond ring. In similar structures, the formations are not flat but spherical in shape. How this special shape came about was previously unknown.
The results have been published under the title “The Diamond Ring in Cygnus X: an advanced stage of an expanding bubble of ionized carbon” in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Ferroelectric materials are used in infrared cameras, medical ultrasounds, computer memory and actuators that turn electric properties into mechanical properties and vice-versa. Most of these essential materials, however, contain lead and can therefore be toxic.
“For the last 10 years, there has been a huge initiative all over the world to find ferroelectric materials that do not contain lead,” said Laurent Bellaiche, Distinguished Professor of physics at the University of Arkansas.
The atoms in a ferroelectric material can have more than one crystalline structure. Where two crystalline structures meet is called a phase boundary, and the properties that make ferroelectric materials useful are strongest at these boundaries.
A broad association of researchers from across Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley have collaborated to perform an unprecedented simulation of a quantum microchip, a key step forward in perfecting the chips required for this next-generation technology. The simulation used more than 7,000 NVIDIA GPUs on the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facility.
Modeling quantum chips allows researchers to understand their function and performance before they’re fabricated, ensuring that they work as intended and spotting any problems that might come up. Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA) researchers Zhi Jackie Yao and Andy Nonaka of the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research (AMCR) Division at Berkeley Lab develop electromagnetic models to simulate these chips, a key step in the process of producing better quantum hardware.
“The computational model predicts how design decisions affect electromagnetic wave propagation in the chip,” said Nonaka, “to make sure proper signal coupling occurs and avoid unwanted crosstalk.”
Lowering arsenic in drinking water can slash mortality by up to 50 percent, even for people exposed for decades.
Decades of meticulous well testing and urine monitoring show that safer wells rapidly translate into declining health risks.
Long-term evidence linking arsenic reduction to lower mortality.
Sea urchins may just look like a ball of spikes waiting to be stepped on at the tide pool, but there’s much more to these barbed beasts than just roe and teeth.
New research reveals sea urchin nervous systems are far more complex than we knew. These creatures, it turns out, possess ‘all-body brains’ and, at least in their genetic layout, they are remarkably similar to our own.
A team of scientists led by developmental biologist Periklis Paganos from Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Italy made the discovery while investigating metamorphosis in purple sea urchins (Paracentrotus lividus), which transform from free-swimming, planktonic larvae to the mature, spine-encrusted form we’re more familiar with.
A hidden physical change in the body may be helping to drive the prolonged malaise some people experience after contracting COVID-19.
Analyzing blood samples from patients with long COVID, a team of medical researchers has identified unusual microscopic structures that may contribute to symptoms such as brain fog and fatigue. If this is the case, it offers a hopeful target for future treatment.
“This study shows a robust association between biomarkers indicative of thromboinflammatory activity and long COVID,” the team writes in a paper led by geneticist Alain Thierry of Montpellier University in France.
Nestled on a hillside in Guangdong Province near Zhaoqing City, the Jinlin crater managed to hide in plain sight until researchers identified it as an impact structure.
Only about 200 confirmed impact craters exist worldwide, making each discovery scientifically valuable.
But this one stands out for its exceptional size and youth.