Fossil fuel CO2 emissions hit record high in 2025

Photo Credit: Chris LeBoutillier

Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels are projected to rise by 1.1% in 2025 – reaching a record high, according to new research by the Global Carbon Project. 

The 2025 Global Carbon Budget projects 38.1 billion tons of fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year. 

Decarbonization of energy systems is progressing in many countries – but this is not enough to offset the growth in global energy demand. 

With projected emissions from land-use change (such as deforestation) down to 4.1 billion tons in 2025, total CO2 emissions are projected to be slightly lower than last year. 

With the end of the 2023-24 El Niño weather pattern – which causes heat and drought in many regions – the land “sink” (absorption of CO2 by natural ecosystems) recovered this year to the pre-El Niño level.

Biomedical: In-Depth Description

Photo Credit: Navy Medicine

Biomedical science is the broad field of applied biology that focuses on understanding health and disease. Its primary goal is to use biological principles and scientific research to develop new therapies, diagnostic tools, and strategies for preventing and treating human illnesses.

Biology: In-Depth Description

Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / stock image

Biology is the natural science dedicated to the study of life and living organisms, encompassing their physical structure, chemical processes, molecular interactions, physiological mechanisms, development, and evolution. The primary goal of biology is to understand the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution of living things.

Scientists move closer to better pancreatic cancer treatments

Tumor and peritoneal metastases are shown in yellow.
Image Credit: UCR/Pellecchia lab

Last year, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, developed a novel “molecular crowbar” strategy to degrade the oncogenic enzyme Pin1, a protein that is overexpressed in many tumors including pancreatic cancer. They designed compounds that bind to Pin1 and destabilize its structure, causing its cellular degradation. 

This approach not only targets cancer cells directly but also addresses tumor-supporting cells like cancer-associated fibroblasts and macrophages where Pin1 is active, potentially overcoming the treatment resistance posed by the fibrous tumor microenvironment in pancreatic cancer.  

The UCR team led by Maurizio Pellecchia, a distinguished professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine, has now collaborated with a team of scientists led by Dr. Mustafa Raoof at City of Hope in Duarte, California, to further test these degraders in pancreatic and gastrointestinal cancers with the goal of developing a new class of therapeutics that can “remove” harmful proteins rather than just block them.

Lesser-known eating disorder just as severe as anorexia and bulimia

Photo Credit: Sehajpal Singh

A diagnosis often viewed as less serious than anorexia and bulimia – and the most common eating disorder worldwide – can cause just as much harm, a new study has found. 

Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder (OSFED) is diagnosed when a person’s symptoms don’t fit neatly into the classical categories but are still clinically significant. 

Researchers from McGill University and Douglas Research Centre compared clinical data from adults with OSFED to those with anorexia and bulimia. Across measures of depression, anxiety, well-being, and concerns about shape, weight and eating, they found people with OSFED were just as ill, and in some cases had more severe symptoms. 

Hawaiian monk seals are far more ‘talkative’ than previously known

Two adult Hawaiian monk seals interacting under water.
Photo Credit: Krista Jaspers

A new study by researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) has revealed that endangered Hawaiian monk seals have a hidden vocal repertoire, using a complex range of sounds to call underwater.

Previously, scientists believed monk seals had a simple repertoire, identifying only six different calls based on seals in human care. In this study, the scientists analyzed thousands of hours of passive acoustic data from the wild, they discovered 25 distinct vocalizations.

How chromosomes separate accurately

Representation how separase recognizes the cohesin subunit SCC1 before chromosome segregation occurs.
Illustration Credit: © Margot Riggi

Cell division is a process of remarkable precision: during each cycle, the genetic material must be evenly distributed between the two daughter cells. To achieve this, duplicated chromosomes, known as sister chromatids, are temporarily linked by cohesin – a ring-shaped protein complex that holds them together until separation. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have uncovered the mechanism by which separase – the molecular ‘‘scissors’’ responsible for this cleavage – recognizes and cuts cohesin. Their findings, published in Science Advances, shed new light on chromosome segregation errors that can lead to certain forms of cancer. 

Variety of animals evolved similar genetics solutions to survive on land, study finds

Transition from water to land 
Image Credit: Dinghua Yang

Animals from completely different branches of the tree of life such as insects, worms and vertebrates independently evolved similar genetic solutions to survive on land, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Bristol and University of Barcelona. 

The research, published in Nature suggests that some adaptations are so essential that environmental challenges make evolution predictable.  

The researchers decoded the genetic basis of one of evolution’s more extraordinary innovations – the transition from water to land. 

New lightweight polymer film can prevent corrosion

MIT researchers tested the gas permeability of their new polymer films by suspending them over microwells to form bubbles. Some bubbles from 2021 experiments are still inflated. This optical micrograph shows how the films form very colorful spots when suspended over microwells.
Image Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

MIT researchers have developed a lightweight polymer film that is nearly impenetrable to gas molecules, raising the possibility that it could be used as a protective coating to prevent solar cells and other infrastructure from corrosion, and to slow the aging of packaged food and medicines.

The polymer, which can be applied as a film mere nanometers thick, completely repels nitrogen and other gases, as far as can be detected by laboratory equipment, the researchers found. That degree of impermeability has never been seen before in any polymer, and rivals the impermeability of molecularly-thin crystalline materials such as graphene.

“Our polymer is quite unusual. It’s obviously produced from a solution-phase polymerization reaction, but the product behaves like graphene, which is gas-impermeable because it’s a perfect crystal. However, when you examine this material, one would never confuse it with a perfect crystal,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Astronomers discover a superheated star factory in the early universe

Glowing deep red from the distant past: galaxy Y1 shines thanks to dust grains heated by newly-formed stars (circled in this image from the James Webb telescope).
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain), J. D’Silva (U. Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), J. Summers & R. Windhorst (ASU), and H. Yan (U. Missouri)

Astronomers have uncovered a previously unknown, extreme kind of star factory by taking the temperature of a distant galaxy using the ALMA telescope. The galaxy is glowing intensely in superheated cosmic dust while forming stars 180 times faster than our own Milky Way. The discovery indicates how galaxies could have grown quickly when the universe was very young, solving a long-standing puzzle for astronomers.  

The first generations of stars formed under conditions very different from anywhere we can see in the nearby universe today. Astronomers are studying these differences using powerful telescopes that can detect galaxies so far away their light has travelled towards us for billions of years.