MIT engineers hope to cut down on the world’s growing mountain of textile waste with their new recyclable elastic yarn. Made from polyethylene, the yarn has the strength and flexibility of spandex but it can be easily melted and respun many times.

Dartmouth researchers report KinyaProp, the first digital tool for detecting online misinformation and propaganda in Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda—and possibly the first for any Bantu language. Led by Dartmouth senior Fabrice Niyigaba, the study shows that KinyaProp—a digital glossary of examples of propaganda in Kinyarwanda—enables commercial platforms such as Claude and ChatGPT to identify loaded and misleading language with high precision similar to their performance in English. The project could be foundational for developing these tools in Swahili, Zulu, and other languages in the close-knit Bantu family, which, despite being spoken by 350 million Africans, are significantly overlooked in AI research, the team reports.

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a method for systematically developing novel, complex combinations of probiotics and prebiotics to more effectively maintain gut health and treat various gastrointestinal diseases.

To enable next-generation energy devices like fuel cells and water electrolyzers, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) collaborated with scientists at New York University to study the backbone chemistry of different types of ion-exchange membranes to better understand how their chemical make-up governs their structure and ability. They found that the nanostructures within these membranes evolve when water passes through and are affected by the stiffness of the polymer backbone. Different backbone architectures promote distinct ionic nanostructures, which govern how water is distributed within the membrane. Flexible backbones achieve higher ion conductivity with less water uptake, overcoming a trade-off that has long challenged membrane design. The results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. 

A new study reports that omega-3 fatty acids are highest in milk labeled as organic grass-fed and lowest in conventionally-produced milk. Other fatty acids varied by dairy production method and season.