News Articles

In all racket sports, a well-executed serve can establish a real advantage. Badminton is played by around 220 million people across the globe and a“spin serve” took badminton by storm when a Danish player at the Polish Open 2023 badminton tournament used it to dominant effect. Like in table tennis, a spin-serve in badminton adds pre-spin before the racket touches the shuttlecock and the natural spin determined by its feathers’ inclination angles plus the pre-spin makes the flight trajectory even more unpredictable.Naturally, instead of expecting players to adjust and improve, the community demanded the Badminton World Federation ban it. Coaches and players said extended rallies were more exciting for fans than good serves.

The most common cancer-causing strain of human papillomavirus, HPV16, can reprogram immune cells surrounding the tumor to help cancer grow, and new work in mice blocking this process helped treatments prevent the spread of cancer.HPV is common in humans and in most cases clears naturally but HPV16 is linked to over half of cervical cancer cases and roughly 90% of HPV throat cancers. The HPV vaccine can prevent those cancers if vaccination occurs prior to HPV exposure but young people are the first generation to have the vaccine readily available.

The El Niño climate phenomenon is consistently inconsistent, which plays havoc with computer models hoping to anticipate the effects of increased emissions from large polluting countries like China.It may even be causing periodic booms and busts in spiders and overall insects.

Over 1 million years ago, early hominims made a treacherous deep sea crossing to reach the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and in a modern corn field local people discovered what looked like stone tools in the sedimentary layers and called in archaeologists.What they found in the Early Pleistocene site of Calio reset the date for colonization of the island; seven stone artifacts. Because this was near a river channel, the researchers believe this would have been the hub for hominin tool-making and other activities such as hunting.

Methanetetrol, the only alcohol which has four hydroxyl groups (OH) at a single carbon atom, is out of this world.Scientists meant that literally, it had been only theorized because it cannot occur naturally in Earth's everyday conditions but in extreme conditions of space it was assumed to exist. Now after a century of hypothetical existence, ultra-cold temperatures, near-perfect vacuum and high-energy radiation to simulate the environment inside interstellar clouds have combined to make it real.The scientists from institutions in Russia, communist China, Hawaii, and Mississippi, believe their work could reshape our understanding of chemistry in the universe and shed light on the complex reactions happening in deep space.

Yellowstone was the first national park designated in the United States and is a popular tourist destination, but there is a lot going on underneath that people never feel.A new analysis of 15 years of historical earthquake data from the Yellowstone caldera used machine learning and found an order of magnitude more seismic events than previously acknowledged. 

In early 2025, the Trump administration began to place tariffs on countries that already had them on the U.S., like China, Brazil, and many in Europe. China has already begun to experience deflation but a new book reveals that the business sector likely to be impacted most is the $500,000,000,000 counterfeiting business there.

Real world data show that the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine rolled out for pregnant women in the UK last year has already resulted in a 72 percent drop in babies being admitted to the hospital among women who took it. Experts predict that as more women take it, England is the home of both the modern anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements so change takes time, it will further reduce the number of needlessly sick babies each year and therefore the burden on the overtaxed National Health Service system.

Scholars have developed a method to encode binary and Morse code messages in ice. A 'message in a bubble' has limited practical utility, information storage in Antarctica and the Arctic is expensive but less challenging than storing message in ice, but they are more covert than paper documents and can easily be carried.

The discovery of the Denisovans 15 years ago set off a chain of evolutionary research into how they contributed to modern East Asians and Oceanians. A new study adds evidence. Researchers have confirmed that a nearly complete hominin skull from 146,000 years ago that was discovered near Harbin belongs to the Denisovan lineage even as it is a new species, Homo longi.  

In the Cradles of Civilization, there are entire cities covered in sand that were once thriving places. The climate shifted and humans did with it. One of our greatest cultural achievements has been our ability to adapt to a natural world that is out to destroy and rebuild everything, including us.A new study shows we were adapting to diverse areas and environmental changes long before the creation of agriculture and resulting civilizations. Even before worldwide migration, we were bending African forests and deserts. Failing to do so was why the probably earliest migration efforts seemed to have disappeared with barely a trace. 

Screen time is a concern for parents and mental health advocates but looking at screen time may be treating the symptom rather than the disease. What is a true harbinger for risk of mental health problems is addictive behavior in young people.National surveys have documented rising screen use but a new paper mapped longitudinal trajectories of addictive use specifically, rather generic limits on screen time.The data were social media use of nearly 4,300 children enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, starting at age 8, and how use changed over the next four years.