Adolescent social media restrictions may reduce some harms while shifting others, warn experts

teen online
Credit: Photo By: Kaboompics.com from Pexels

Amrit Kaur Purba and colleagues argue that social media restrictions operate within a wider system of adolescents, families, schools, governments and commercial actors—and therefore should be treated as complex systems interventions rather than isolated behavioral policies.

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Researcher details US biobank's value as global resource in study of roots of disease, health

test tubes
Credit: Tara Winstead from Pexels

Just as this country celebrated its 250th birthday, some geneticists were celebrating America, too. At the end of June, the National Institutes of Health announced its "All of Us" Research Program had become the world's largest database of integrated health and genomic information. The project, launched in 2015 under the Obama administration, aimed to collect comprehensive genetic information and health records from at least a million Americans. Eleven years later, they're approaching that goal, with 747,000 volunteers sharing their whole genomes, lifelong health records or both.

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What does it mean to be 'quantum?' A physicist explains the basics behind Einstein's spooky actions at a distance

quantum
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Imagine shining a flashlight across a dark room. You can predict exactly what the light will do: travel in a straight line from one point to another. That seems obvious because, in the world we see around us, light appears to follow a single, clear path.

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Queen's powerful smell suppresses rivals in naked mole rat colonies | New Scientist

A pregnant naked mole rat queen (left) and worker (right) sniff each other

Felix Petermann, Max Delbrück Center

There’s one scent to rule them all – and we now know what it is. A series of experiments has shown that a single molecule released by the queen of naked mole rat colonies prevents all the other females in a colony from breeding.

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People overestimate legal protections for dogs, study finds

dog on a leash
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Most people in the U.K. don't fully understand dog laws in the country and often believe stronger protections exist than actually exist, according to a new University of Stirling study. The research, led by psychologist Sarah Weir of the University's Faculty of Natural Sciences and involving more than 1,700 people across the U.K., explored how changing attitudes toward dogs are shaping public expectations and knowledge of dog law.

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NASA selects 41 space technologies for future Moon and Mars exploration

NASA has chosen 41 technology proposals from 37 American companies to help develop the capabilities needed for future missions to the Moon and Mars. The selections are part of the agency's 2025 Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity (ACO), which is designed to accelerate innovations in areas such as space transportation, planetary surface operations, and infrastructure for long term exploration on the Moon.

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'Amazing moths': Study pinpoints insect habitat that draws grizzlies to glacier peaks

'Amazing moths': Study pinpoints insect habitat that draws grizzlies to Glacier peaks
The estimated annual range of ACM. In summer, the moths fly to ranges of the Rocky Mountains proximate to the Continental Divide. The known migratory habitat of ACM overlaps occupied grizzly bear range in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems. Credit: Biological Conservation (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2026.111892

When grizzly bears clamber onto the talus slopes high in Glacier National Park, they're searching for an abundant, fatty meal: army cutworm moths. The inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long) moths hatch on the Great Plains and fly en masse to escape the heat in the stony upper reaches of the Rocky Mountains. Grizzlies hoover them up by the thousands—at about a half-calorie each—as they fatten up for winter.

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Composting and water cremation: How the eco credentials of alternatives to burial add up

burial
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

There's growing interest in alternatives to traditional burials and in making the process more environmentally friendly in many countries. For many people, it's about the environmental impact of the funeral industry globally.

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Honey bees' sense of smell changes from larval to adult life stages, study finds

Honey bees' sense of smell changes from larval to adult life stages, study finds
TrackMate-based quantification of HCR RNA-FISH signals for Elav, Ir25a, and Orco in the honey bee larval head. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2615678123

Honey bee larvae lack the sophisticated olfactory capabilities of adult honey bees, a new study finds. Scientists point to this temporary loss of function as a side effect of the nurse bees' heroic level of brood care, calling it a consequence of social evolution. The new findings are detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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'Uncanny valley' effect observed in macaques through 3D animated monkey avatars

Uncanny valley effect observed in macaques through 3D animated monkey avatars
Computer-generated animal avatars must look and move realistically enough to evoke natural social perception. Here, two macaque avatars are shown in an interaction, with one animal displaying dominant behavior and the other submissive behavior. The avatars were generated using the computer graphics pipeline developed and described in our paper, with the pose of the right avatar derived from multi-view markerless tracking of natural macaque behavior using minimal labeling data. By systematically varying avatar realism from uncanny (left) to highly naturalistic appearance (right), we investigated how real macaques perceive virtual monkeys with different levels of realism. Credit: Lucas Martini et al. (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

A new tool that allows researchers to create realistic full-body animations of monkeys has provided the first evidence that nonhuman primates experience the "uncanny valley" phenomenon for body avatars, according to a study by Lucas Maximilian Martini at the University Clinic Tübingen in Germany and colleagues at KU Leuven in Belgium, published in PLOS Biology.

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