Payal Dhar (she/they)

A sugar present on virus envelopes might become the target of new antiviral treatments for a range of viruses, researchers report August 27 in Science Advances. This treatment, shown to shut down infections of Ebola, Nipah, SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in mice, could potentially be the first line of defense against future pandemics, the scientists say.

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people visit India’s temples, mosques, and gurdwaras. Their offerings of flowers become floral waste, with most going to landfills and over 8 million metric tons dumped into bodies of water each year. But some of those flowers find their way to Neetu Jha’s laboratory at the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai (ICT), where they are converted into high-performance green energy solutions.

With no fuel or engines, tiny explorers will surf sun-warmed air alone to explore high in the skies of Earth and Mars. The new centimeter-wide disks are made from two thin perforated membranes of ceramic alumina connected by tiny vertical supports. They are kept aloft by a force called photophoresis: the light-induced movement of small particles at very low atmospheric pressures.

Researchers in Australia have come up with a way to make hydrogen efficiently by harnessing the contaminants in wastewater.

A patch containing tens of millions of nanoneedles can read what’s happening in our cells on the fly, potentially eliminating the need for time-consuming biopsies. The patch might also facilitate disease diagnosis and monitoring.

Lightweight yet strong and resistant to corrosion and weathering, carbon fiber–reinforced polymers (CFRPs) are used in aircraft, shipping containers, natural gas storage tanks, wind turbine blades, high-end sporting goods, and other applications. Their manufacture, though, is expensive and emission heavy, which means that efficient recycling strategies are important.

Imagination relies on an ability to differentiate between what's real and what's not — and now, scientists have uncovered potential brain mechanisms that make this distinction possible. A paper published June 5 in the journal Neuron explored these mechanisms.

Scientists have observed that ammonia in penguin guano is directly related to cloud formation in Antarctica. Gaseous ammonia reacts with gaseous sulfur compounds in the Antarctic atmosphere to form aerosols, providing a surface for water vapor to condense on, thus forming clouds. This process, they hypothesize, could be playing a role in climate change in the region.

An interview with chemical oceanographer Sambuddha Misra about changes in water chemistry and lead concentration in ocean water, and how these changes affect people and the environment.

On May 4, 2025, Oscar Larrainzar, 41, became the first human to successfully receive a bladder transplant. The surgery was part of a clinical trial developed to demonstrate the feasibility of bladder transplants in patients with terminal bladder diseases.

There are 600 species of venomous snakes across the world, and their bites account for over 130,000 deaths annually and three times that number of permanent disabilities, mostly in Asia and Africa. Because of the diversity of toxins, most antivenoms work against the venom of only a single species in a specific region, and possibly closely related species. Scientists have been working for decades to produce a broad-spectrum antivenom that would work across different types of toxins, , but this approach has proven difficult.

Screens are steadily taking over more and more of our life, leading some researchers to worry about the effect of long-term use on older adults’ brain. It has been suggested that this might lead to so-called digital dementia—that depending on digital technology throughout our life might detract from cognitive functioning in our later years. But new research indicates this hypothesis doesn’t appear to be true, at least for the generation of adults who first routinely used smartphones, computers and the Internet—and who are now reaching the age when cognitive impairment often starts to appear.

A new study shows that if rain-like droplets fall naturally through a narrow tube in a discontinuous flow—gaps of air between each drop, also known as plug flow—the amount of electricity generated increases by five orders of magnitude compared with an uninterrupted flow.

Temporary pacemakers can be used as a stopgap measure to regulate the heartbeat after surgery and in emergency situations. But the fact that they need to be surgically installed and removed also brings risk. Now researchers have developed a tiny temporary pacemaker that could eliminate some of that risk. Their device, just a few millimeters long, has no wires and needs minimally invasive placement. It can be injected into the body with a needle. And when its work is done, it simply dissolves.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, tools are great for handling boring tasks. Like going through thousands of job applications and pulling out the most promising ones. So companies often use AI apps to shortlist job applications. But these tools tend to show bias in which applicants they rank as the best fit for a job, a new study finds.