In the United States, ultra-processed foods (UPFs) now account for more than half of the calories people eat each day. These products include fast food and packaged snacks that are typically high in salt, added sugars and unhealthy fats. Previous research has firmly connected heavy consumption of these foods to type 2 diabetes and other chronic illnesses in adults, but their impact on younger people has received far less attention.

To help fill that gap, scientists at the Keck School of Medicine of USC conducted one of the first long-term studies focused on how UPFs affect glucose processing, a key indicator of diabetes risk. By following participants over several years, the researchers were able to observe how changes in diet were linked to changes inside the body.

Four-Year Study Tracks Early Metabolic Changes
The research team followed 85 young adults for a four-year period. Their analysis showed that participants who increased their intake of ultra-processed foods were more likely to develop prediabetes, a condition marked by elevated blood sugar levels that often precedes type 2 diabetes. Higher UPF consumption was also associated with insulin resistance, meaning the body struggled to use insulin effectively to regulate blood sugar.

The study, which received partial funding from the National Institutes of Health, was recently published in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism.

“Our findings show that even modest increases in ultra-processed food intake can disrupt glucose regulation in young adults at risk for obesity. These results point to diet as a modifiable driver of early metabolic disease, and an urgent target for prevention strategies among young people,” said Vaia Lida Chatzi, MD, PhD, a professor of population and public health sciences and pediatrics and director of the Southern California Superfund Research and Training Program for PFAS Assessment, Remediation and Prevention (ShARP) Center at the Keck School of Medicine, who is the study’s senior author.

Researchers at the University of New Mexico have uncovered an unexpected role for OTULIN, an enzyme best known for its involvement in immune system regulation. The team found that OTULIN also plays a key role in the production of tau, a protein linked to many neurodegenerative disorders, along with brain inflammation and the biological processes associated with aging.

The findings were reported in the journal Genomic Psychiatry. In the study, scientists showed that disabling OTULIN stopped tau from being produced and cleared existing tau from neurons. This was achieved in two ways: by using a specially designed small molecule or by removing the gene responsible for producing the enzyme. The experiments were carried out in two types of cells, including cells derived from a person who had died from late-onset sporadic Alzheimer’s disease and human neuroblastoma cells that are commonly used in laboratory research.

A New Target for Neurodegenerative Disease
According to Karthikeyan Tangavelou, PhD, the discovery suggests a new direction for developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related neurological disorders. Tangavelou is a senior scientist in the laboratory of Kiran Bhaskar, PhD, a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology at the UNM School of Medicine.

“Pathological tau is the main player for both brain aging and neurodegenerative disease,” Tangavelou said. “If you stop tau synthesis by targeting OTULIN in neurons, you can restore a heathy brain and prevent brain aging.”

Severe blood loss remains the primary cause of death from combat injuries. To address this challenge, a research team at KAIST that included an active duty Army Major set out to develop a faster and more reliable way to stop bleeding.

Their work led to a next-generation powder-type hemostatic agent that can halt bleeding within one second when sprayed directly onto a wound, offering a potential breakthrough for saving lives on the battlefield.

A spray-on solution in seconds
On December 29th, KAIST announced that a joint team led by Professor Steve Park of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Sangyong Jon of the Department of Biological Sciences had created a powder based hemostatic agent that rapidly forms a strong hydrogel barrier. When applied to an injured area, the material transforms within about one second, sealing the wound almost immediately.

The researchers designed the technology with real combat conditions in mind, and the direct involvement of an Army Major helped ensure its practical readiness. The agent hardens instantly even in harsh environments such as battlefields and disaster zones, and its stability during storage allows it to be deployed quickly for emergency treatment.

How do we know there is water ice on the Moon?

NASA's Clementine in 1994 and Lunar Prospector, which began its mission mapping the Moon this week in 1998, were two of the first missions to find evidence for the existence of water ice on the Moon.

In this visualization of Lunar Prospector's data, high concentrations of hydrogen—a sign of potential ice deposits—are seen around the south pole of the Moon.

Read more about the history of evidence for water on the Moon: go.nasa.gov/4jAZea4

Most of what people do each day is guided by habit rather than deliberate decision-making, according to new research from the University of Surrey, the University of South Carolina, and Central Queensland University.

The study, published in Psychology & Health, reports that roughly two-thirds of everyday behaviors begin automatically, driven by habitual responses rather than conscious thought.

Habits form when repeated actions become linked to familiar situations, causing people to respond automatically when they encounter those settings again. Over time, these learned associations prompt behavior with little active awareness.

The researchers also found that 46% of behaviors were both habit-driven and consistent with people’s stated intentions. This suggests that individuals often develop habits that support their goals and are more likely to break routines that interfere with them.

Measuring habits as they happen
Rather than relying on memory or self-reflection alone, the study introduced a real-time approach to observing habits. The international research team tracked 105 participants in the UK and Australia by sending six random prompts to their phones each day for one week, asking what they were doing at that moment and whether the behavior was habitual or intentional.

Using this method, the researchers found that 65% of daily behaviors were initiated through habit, indicating that routine responses play a dominant role in shaping everyday action

Why motivation is not enough
Professor Benjamin Gardner, Professor in Psychology at the University of Surrey and co-author of the study, said:

“Our research shows that while people may consciously want to do something, the actual initiation and performance of that behavior is often done without thinking, driven by non-conscious habits. This suggests that “good” habits may be a powerful way to make our goals a reality.

“For people who want to break their bad habits, simply telling them to “try harder” isn’t enough. To create lasting change, we must incorporate strategies to help people recognize and disrupt their unwanted habits, and ideally form positive new ones in their place.”

This DVD with 616,400 digitized signatures is now part of Saturn.

Starting in November 1995, postcards with signatures from people from 81 nations were received, scanned, stored on a DVD, and attached to the Cassini spacecraft before its 1997 launch. After Cassini completed its groundbreaking mission at Saturn, the spacecraft (including the DVD) was intentionally deorbited into Saturn's atmosphere, and it vaporized to become part of the planet.

Want to make your mark on space history? Time is running out to send your name around the Moon on Artemis II! go.nasa.gov/49vl6z2

Spaceflight doesn't just change your perspective — it shifts the actual position of your brain inside your skull, a new study reports.

Many of us know about the famed "overview effect," which describes how a trip to the final frontier changes how astronauts view the world and their place in it. But the new study focused on the physiological rather than the philosophical.

Rachel Seidler and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took MRI scans of the brains of 26 astronauts and 24 non-astronaut participants to determine what, if any, impacts prolonged spaceflight has on one of our body's most important organs.

Their study, published on Jan. 12, showed a consistent pattern of the brain shifting backward and upward, and rotating upward, after time in microgravity, with some positional changes still detectable months after astronauts return to Earth.

Scientists have long tracked how spaceflight affects the human body, but exactly what microgravity does to the brain's anatomy remains an ongoing question. This study analyzed data from 15 astronauts who provided MRI scans before and after their missions to space, and combined that with MRI data from another 11 astronauts and two dozen participants of a long-duration, head-down tilt bed rest "microgravity analog" experiment.

The first-place-winning video in Nikon’s Small World in Motion Competition 2025 documents the self-pollination of a thymeleaf speedwell flower. Filming at 5X magnification, winner Jay McClellan used a custom-built motion-control system to capture the flower. on.natgeo.com/4jMSUwn

Octopus and cuttlefish are masters of disguise. Many species can quickly shift both the color and surface texture of their skin, and scientists have long tried to reproduce that trick using manmade materials. In a paper published in Nature, Stanford researchers report a major advance: a flexible material that swells into new textures and colors within seconds, forming patterns with details finer than a human hair.

“Textures are crucial to the way we experience objects, both in how they look and how they feel,” said Siddharth Doshi, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at Stanford and first author on the paper. “These animals can physically change their bodies at close to the micron scale, and now we can dynamically control the topography of a material – and the visual properties linked to it – at this same scale.”

The team says the approach could improve dynamic camouflage for people and robots, and it may enable flexible, color-changing displays for wearable technologies. The findings also broaden the possibilities in nanophotonics, a field that precisely shapes how light behaves to support advances in electronics, encryption, biology, and more.

“There’s just no other system that can be this soft and swellable, and that you can pattern at the nanoscale,” said Nicholas Melosh, a professor of materials science and engineering and a senior author on the paper. “You can imagine all kinds of different applications.”

A team of New York University scientists has created a gear mechanism that relies on fluids to generate rotation. The invention holds potential for a new generation of mechanical devices that offer greater flexibility and durability than do existing gears—whose origins date back to ancient China.

"We invented new types of gears that engage by spinning up fluid rather than interlocking teeth—and we discovered new capabilities for controlling the rotation speed and even direction," says Jun Zhang, a professor of mathematics and physics at NYU and NYU Shanghai and the senior author of the paper.

Gears are among the oldest machine parts, dating back to 3,000 BCE in China, where they were used in two-wheeled chariots to cross the Gobi Desert. Over time, they've been deployed in the famous Antikythera mechanism, which predicted astronomical positions in ancient Greece, as well as in windmills, clocks, and, now, robotics.

However, gears' teeth, whether wood, metal, or plastic, are inflexible, so they are vulnerable to breaking—and they must interlock perfectly to work.

Some fish can walk - and choose to! 🦵🏽

Find out how they do this, why, and see it in action in this week’s Surprising Science! 🐟

Made it.

At 6:42pm ET on Jan. 17, the stacked Artemis II rocket and spacecraft reached Launch Pad 39B after a nearly 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASAKennedy in Florida.

A quantum state of matter has appeared in a material where physicists thought it would be impossible, forcing a rethink on the conditions that govern the behaviors of electrons in certain materials.

The discovery, made by an international team of researchers, could inform advances in quantum computing, improve electronic efficiencies, and enhanced sensing and imaging.

The state, described as a topological semimetal phase, was theoretically predicted to appear at low temperatures in a material composed of cerium, ruthenium, and tin (CeRu4Sn6), before experiments verified its existence.

At extremely low temperatures, CeRu4Sn6 reaches quantum criticality, a point where a material teeters between changes in its phase, where conditions are so cold that quantum fluctuations dominate, effectively turning the material into a puddle of waves rather than a fog of particles.

The plot twist in this study is that quantum criticality can give rise to states thought to be defined by interactions between particles, such as the behavior of electrons as discrete charge carriers.

"This is a fundamental step forward," says physicist Qimiao Si, from Rice University in the US.

"Our work shows that powerful quantum effects can combine to create something entirely new, which may help shape the future of quantum science."

In physics, topology refers to the geometry of material structures. Particular topological states can protect properties of particles, unlike the way neighboring particles might jostle and disrupt each other's behavior.

It’s true that there are a lot of different theoretical proposals that serve as alternatives or extensions to mainstream physics: string theory, supersymmetry, Gauss-Bonnet gravity, GUTs, and much more. 

Many point to the success of our standard picture of reality, based on Einstein’s general relativity and the quantum field theory of the Standard Model, and (prematurely) dismiss all such alternative explorations. 

However, a tremendous amount of progress has been made simply by constraining and ruling out many such alternatives and extensions through data-driven experiments and observations. That progress is underappreciated, representing a huge achievement whenever it occurs.

Ever since their discovery more than 165 years ago, massive fossilized structures left by an organism known as Prototaxites have proven impossible to categorize.

Researchers in the UK have suggested in a recently published study that there's a very good reason these oddities don't fit neatly on the tree of life – they belong to a branch all of their own, with no modern equivalent.

Some 400 million years ago, the swamps of the late Silurian period would have sprouted a mix of horsetails, ferns, and other prototype plants that look positively alien today.

Among them stretched 8-meter (26-foot) tall towers that defy easy identification. Wide and branchless, these organisms may have been a form of algae or ancient conifer, researchers suspect, based on what little evidence remains.