MBARI is pleased to announce Antje Boetius as the institute’s president and CEO. A world-renowned polar and deep-sea researcher, Boetius will lead MBARI into an exciting new chapter in its work to develop and deploy innovative technology to understand our changing ocean.

Between 12 and 20% of women with a history of pregnancy or testing for pregnancy visited crisis pregnancy centers across four U.S. states, according to a new study by Maria Gallo and colleagues from The Ohio State University, U.S., published June 4, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Six decades of data on North Atlantic phytoplankton reveal that their biomass has decreased up to 2% annually across most of the Atlantic Ocean, with potentially widespread implications for the wider food web under climate change

Researchers at Colorado State University have developed a tool that can be used to switch a plant’s key genetic traits on or off at will. The breakthrough was recently published in ACS Synthetic Biology and represents the first time that a synthetic genetic “toggle switch” has been used in a full-grown plant. 

A new study highlights a surprising lens for tracking pollution trends over centuries: preserved plants and animals housed at natural history museums around the world. According to Shane DuBay, a researcher at The University of Texas at Arlington, these specimens contain valuable environmental data that can help scientists reconstruct pollution trends spanning more than 200 years.

Scientists at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) have uncovered a non-invasive method to boost the brain’s natural waste drainage system—a discovery that could open new avenues for tackling age-related neurological disorders.

In a study published in Nature, researchers from the IBS Center for Vascular Research, led by Director KOH Gou Young, along with senior researchers JIN Hokyung, YOON Jin-Hui, and principal researcher HONG Seon Pyo, demonstrated that precisely stimulating the lymphatics under skin on the neck and face can significantly enhance the flow of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)—the liquid that cushions the brain and helps remove toxic waste—through lymphatic vessels. This offers a new approach to clearing brain waste using safe, non-invasive mechanical stimulation, rather than relying on drugs or surgical interventions.

What if your brain had a built-in map – not of places, but of possible futures? Researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) blend neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) to reveal that populations of dopamine neurons in the brain don’t just track whether rewards are coming – they encode maps of when those rewards might arrive and how big they might be.

These maps adapt to context and may help explain how we weigh risks, and why some of us act on impulse while others hold back. Strikingly, this biological mechanism mirrors recent advances in AI, and could inspire new ways for machines to predict, evaluate and adapt to uncertain environments more like we do.