Air pollution clouds the mind and makes everyday tasks challenging

Photo Credit: Chris LeBoutillier

People’s ability to interpret emotions or focus on performing a task is reduced by short-term exposure to particulate matter (PM) air pollution, potentially making everyday activities, such as the weekly supermarket shop, more challenging, a new study reveals.

Scientists discovered that even brief exposure to high concentrations of PM may impair a person’s ability to focus on tasks, avoid distractions, and behave in a socially acceptable manner.

Researchers exposed study participants to either high levels of air pollution - using candle smoke - or clean air, testing cognitive abilities before and four hours after exposure. The tests measured working memory, selective attention, emotion recognition, psychomotor speed, and sustained attention.

Publishing their findings in Nature Communications, researchers from the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester reveal that selective attention and emotion recognition were negatively affected by air pollution – regardless of whether subjects breathed normally or only through their mouths.

Air pollution impacts an aging society

Age-related health impacts of PM2.5.
Annual average AVSL (age-adjusted value of statistical life) and variation of premature deaths attributable to PM2.5 among individuals in different age groups from 2001 to 2019 across Japan’s 47 prefectures.
Image Credit: ©2025 Long et al.
(CC-BY-ND)

Air pollution is a growing health issue worldwide, and its impacts are often underestimated in aging societies like Japan. A new study led by researchers from the University of Tokyo highlights how fine particulate pollution, or PM2.5, not only worsens health outcomes, but also creates significant socioeconomic challenges in regions with aging populations and limited medical resources. The researchers hope these findings motivate policymakers to tackle the interrelated issues behind this problem.

PM2.5 refers to microscopic particles of pollution small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, leading to severe respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. PM2.5 are small enough to evade the body’s natural defenses in the nose and throat, making direct prevention difficult. This becomes especially problematic in elderly populations.

“As we age, our immune systems weaken and our bodies are less able to defend against pollutants. Even moderate exposure can exacerbate pre-existing conditions, leading to higher hospitalization rates and premature mortality,” said lead author Associate Professor Yin Long. “Our study provides new insights into impacts of PM2.5 in aging regions, with a particular focus on the mismatch between those impacts and regional medical resource distribution.”

First distributed quantum algorithm brings quantum supercomputers closer

Dougal Main and Beth Nichol working on the distributed quantum computer.
Photo Credit: John Cairns.

In a milestone that brings quantum computing tangibly closer to large-scale practical use, scientists at Oxford University’s Department of Physics have demonstrated the first instance of distributed quantum computing. Using a photonic network interface, they successfully linked two separate quantum processors to form a single, fully connected quantum computer, paving the way to tackling computational challenges previously out of reach. The results have been published in Nature. 

The breakthrough addresses quantum’s ‘scalability problem’: a quantum computer powerful enough to be industry-disrupting would have to be capable of processing millions of qubits. Packing all these processors in a single device, however, would require a machine of an immense size. In this new approach, small quantum devices are linked together, enabling computations to be distributed across the network. In theory, there is no limit to the number of processors that could be in the network.  

Improved Brain Decoder Holds Promise for Communication in People with Aphasia

Brain activity like this, measured in an fMRI machine, can be used to train a brain decoder to decipher what a person is thinking about. In this latest study, UT Austin researchers have developed a method to adapt their brain decoder to new users far faster than the original training, even when the user has difficulty comprehending language.
Image Credit: Jerry Tang/University of Texas at Austin.

People with aphasia — a brain disorder affecting about a million people in the U.S. — struggle to turn their thoughts into words and comprehend spoken language.

A pair of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated an AI-based tool that can translate a person’s thoughts into continuous text, without requiring the person to comprehend spoken words. And the process of training the tool on a person’s own unique patterns of brain activity takes only about an hour. This builds on the team’s earlier work creating a brain decoder that required many hours of training on a person’s brain activity as the person listened to audio stories. This latest advance suggests it may be possible, with further refinement, for brain computer interfaces to improve communication in people with aphasia.

“Being able to access semantic representations using both language and vision opens new doors for neurotechnology, especially for people who struggle to produce and comprehend language,” said Jerry Tang, a postdoctoral researcher at UT in the lab of Alex Huth and first author on a paper describing the work in Current Biology. “It gives us a way to create language-based brain computer interfaces without requiring any amount of language comprehension.”

Genetic diversity is on the decline, but this trend can be slowed

Photo Credit: Tomáš Malík

Genetic diversity is crucial to the ability of animals and plants to adapt to changes in the climate and environment. A major international meta-analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that genetic diversity is declining globally. But there is hope – effective conservation measures can slow this trend.

For a species to adapt to changes in its environment, a high degree of genetic variation between individual entities is crucial. The greater the diversity, the more likely it is that certain genes will make, for example, a plant more resistant to drought or an animal better adapted to higher temperatures. These genes can then be passed on to future generations and contribute to the survival of the species.

An international research team that includes Uppsala University, Stockholm University and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency has analyzed genetic changes in 628 species over a period of more than 30 years. The study is based on data from more than 80,000 scientific papers and shows that genetic diversity is declining globally, especially among birds and mammals. At the same time, there are conservation measures that have proven to be effective.

“Overall, the study shows that there are effective conservation methods and data that allow for strategic targeting of actions. But then the genetic component needs to be considered,” says Sara Kurland, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences and one of the researchers behind the study.

New technology lights way for accelerating coral reef restoration

Improving coral feeding habits can have a positive domino effect on the marine ecosystem.
Photo Credit: Francesco Ungaro

Scientists have developed a novel tool designed to protect and conserve coral reefs by providing them with an abundance of feeding opportunities. 

The device, dubbed the Underwater Zooplankton Enhancement Light Array (UZELA), is an autonomous, programmable underwater light that works to draw in nearby zooplankton, microscopic organisms that coral feed on. 

After testing the submersible on two species of coral native to Hawaii over six months, researchers found that UZELA could greatly enhance local zooplankton density and increase the feeding rates of both healthy and bleached coral. Importantly, providing coral with greater amounts of food makes them stronger and more likely to be resilient against certain environmental threats, like heat stress or ocean acidification.

This result is impressive, especially at a time when rising ocean temperatures are forcing entire coral reefs to the cusp of collapse, said

Whale poop contains iron that may have helped fertilize past oceans

A blue whale photographed in September 2010.
Photo Credit: NOAA

The blue whale is the largest animal on the planet. It consumes enormous quantities of tiny, shrimp-like animals known as krill to support a body of up to 100 feet (30 meters) long. Blue whales and other baleen whales, which filter seawater through their mouths to feed on small marine life, once teemed in Earth’s oceans. Then over the past century they were hunted almost to extinction for their energy-dense blubber.

As whales were decimated, some thought the krill would proliferate in predator-free waters. But that’s not what happened. Krill populations dropped, too, and neither population has yet recovered.

A recent theory proposes that whales weren’t just predators in the ocean environment. Nutrients that whales excreted may have provided a key fertilizer to these marine ecosystems.

Research led by University of Washington oceanographers supports that theory. It finds that whale excrement contains significant amounts of iron, a vital element that is often scarce in ocean ecosystems, and nontoxic forms of copper, another essential nutrient that in some forms can harm life.

The open-access study, the first to look at the forms of these trace metals in what’s commonly known as whale poop, was published in January in Communications Earth & Environment.

Microplastics discovered in Antarctica

A view over the Ellsworth Mountains, West Antarctica.
Photo Credit: Steve Gibbs, BAS

Scientists have discovered microplastics in the snow near some of Antarctica’s deep field camps, revealing how far-reaching plastic pollution has become. While not new, it’s the first time these tiny pieces of plastic have been found in remote locations.

The study was conducted at field camps, at Union Glacier and Schanz Glacier (near the Ellsworth Mountains), where researchers were carrying out field work, and the South Pole where the US Antarctic Program has a research station. It is the first time a new and advanced technique has been used to detect microplastics as small as 11 micrometers (about the size of a red blood cell) in the snow in Antarctica. The study is published this week (6 February 2025) in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The findings surprised the team as microplastics were found at concentrations ranging from 73 to 3,099 particles per liter of snow. Most of these particles (95%) were smaller than 50 micrometers (0.005 cm, the size of most human cells), suggesting previous studies may have underestimated the extent of microplastic pollution in the region due to less sensitive detection methods.

Previous methods involved hand-picking particles and fibers out of samples for laboratory analyses. However, the newer technique involves melting snow through filter paper and scanning this at a high resolution, using infrared spectroscopy, so any plastics above 11 micrometers can be identified.

Recycling the unrecyclable

Recovered carbon fibers.
This might look like something you’d see on the floor of a barber’s shop, but it’s actually a clump of reclaimed carbon fibers. Photo Credit: ©2025 Jin et al.
(CC-BY-ND)

Epoxy resins are coatings and adhesives used in a broad range of familiar applications, such as construction, engineering and manufacturing. However, they often present a challenge to recycle or dispose of responsibly. For the first time, a team of researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, developed a method to efficiently reclaim materials from a range of epoxy products for reuse by using a novel solid catalyst.

There’s a high chance you are surrounded by epoxy compounds as you read this. They are used in electronic devices due to their insulating properties; clothing such as shoes due to their binding properties and physical robustness; building construction for the same reason; and even in aircraft bodies and wind turbine blades for their ability to contain strong materials such as carbon fibers or glass fibers. It’s hard to overstate the importance of epoxy products in the modern world. But for all their uses, they inevitably have a downside: Epoxy compounds are essentially plastics and prove difficult to deal with after their use or at the end of the life of an epoxy-containing product.

Mutations in two gene pairs point to a promising drug target in 5 percent of adult cancers

Illustration Credit: Natalie Velez, Broad Communications

Scientists from the Cancer Dependency Map (DepMap) at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Columbia University have discovered that about 5 percent of adult cancers rely heavily on a gene called PELO to survive and that disabling the gene kills those cancer cells. These cancers have mutations in one of two genes, FOCAD or TCC37.

The finding, described in Nature, is a new synthetic lethality — a pair of genetic changes that together kill cancer cells. The researchers say that PELO is a promising target, and that genetic testing could identify cancer patients with FOCAD or TCC37 mutations who would benefit from new PELO-targeting drugs.

“These cancers are a huge unmet medical need, because we don’t have effective drugs for them,” said Francisca Vazquez, co-senior author on the study along with postdoctoral researcher Edmond Chan, now an assistant professor at Columbia University. Vazquez is also director of DepMap, which systematically probes cancer cell lines for genetic vulnerabilities. 

“Targeting synthetic lethalities is a good way to expand the repertoire of tumors we’re able to treat,” Vazquez said. “This new synthetic lethality we found shows how powerful the DepMap datasets can be.”

Patricia Borck, a DepMap research scientist in Broad’s Cancer Program, is first author on the study.