Latest News Releases 2 April

From seat cushions to mattresses to insulation, foam is everywhere — even if we don’t always see it. Now, researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have fused chemistry with technology to create a 3D-printed foam that is more durable and more recyclable than the polymer foam found in many everyday products.

Groundbreaking research by physicists at The City College of New York is being credited for a novel discovery regarding the interaction of electronic excitations via spin waves. The finding by the Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics (LaNMP) team headed by physicist Vinod Menon could open the door to future technologies and advanced applications such as optical modulators, all-optical logic gates, and quantum transducers. The work is reported in the journal Nature Materials.

The American Society for Nutrition, or ASN, and the ASN Foundation announced the distinguished recipients of the 2025 National Scientific Achievement Awards today. Recognizing outstanding contributions and pioneering advancements in the field of nutrition, these awards serve as a testament to excellence and innovation.

Among the honorees is Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Dr. Leanne Redman, who received the E. V. McCollum Award – given to a clinical investigator who is perceived as a major creative force, actively generating new concepts in nutrition and personally seeing to the execution of studies testing the validity of these concepts.

 The Ecological Society of America (ESA) presents a roundup of six research articles recently published across its esteemed journals.

A Wayne State University professor has been selected as an Early Career Policy Ambassador (ECPA) by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). Those chosen will engage in various advocacy initiatives in partnership with SfN.

Fish farmers across the Great Lakes states can face a confusing web of permits, policies and regulations that can hinder the growth of their operations. A new Sea Grant publication, Aquaculture Regulation in the Great Lakes, offers much-needed clarity. 

Drug-carrying DNA aptamers can deliver a one-two punch to leukemia by precisely targeting the elusive cancer stem cells that seed cancer relapses, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign report. The aptamers — short single-strand snippets of DNA that can target molecules like larger antibodies do — not only deliver cancer-fighting drugs, but also are themselves toxic to the cancer stem cells, the researchers said.

A powerful new software platform called the Playbook Workflow Builder is set to transform biomedical research by allowing scientists to conduct complex and customized data analyses without advanced programming skills. An article that describes the new platform was published in the April 3 online issue of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Developed by a multi-institutional team that was led by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai investigators as part of the National Institutes of Health Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) program, researchers from across the United States developed the web-based platform that enables scientists to analyze and visualize their own data independently through an intuitive, interactive interface.