The climate crisis seems to be altering gray whales’ access to food, leading them to change their migration paths and forage in San Francisco Bay — a busy shipping area with a narrow bottleneck both whales and boats must cross. Scientists surveying these whales suspect that many don’t survive to leave the bay: of the 114 individuals they identified, only four were seen in more than one year between 2018 and 2025, and 21 were found dead, giving a minimum mortality rate of 18%. Many deaths were caused by vessel strike injuries, while some others are due to starvation. 

An electrochemical sensor developed at Oregon State University holds promise for making food quality testing faster, more accurate, more environmentally friendly and less expensive.

New research from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) reveals that inputs from the dorsal and ventral hippocampus converge on the same neurons in the nucleus accumbens, where they amplify each other. The study shows how the brain integrates spatial and contextual memory with motivation and reward to drive goal-directed decisions. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, it challenges the idea that these pathways operate separately and offers insight into motivation-related disorders such as depression, addiction, and anxiety.

How do nervous systems produce behaviors? A new MIT study provides a detailed mechanistic mapping of exactly what happens in the brains of C. elegans worms when they “follow their nose” to savor attractive odors or avoid unappealing ones.

Deep underground in a Canadian mine, scientists have cooled a massive refrigerator to nearly 1,000 times colder than outer space, a key milestone in the search for dark matter. The achievement enables Texas A&M-designed detectors at the core of the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment at SNOLAB in Ontario to reach the extreme sensitivity needed to spot interactions from elusive “light dark matter."

Engineers at Princeton have designed and built soft-rigid hybrid robots that move and shift without the need for motors or external pneumatic controls. To do this, the team combined a printable polymer, called a liquid crystal elastomer, with flexible electronics and folding techniques based on the art of origami.

A new study revealed that the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO), a large-scale tropical disturbance that travels eastward through the tropics every 30–60 days, significantly influences climate conditions in Hawaiʻi. Their research showed that during active MJO phases, rainfall increases across the islands, especially on windward slopes. In contrast, suppressed MJO phases tend to produce drier conditions.