Xuanhong Cheng, a professor of bioengineering and materials science and engineering at Lehigh University, and her team are collaborating with materials science company Dow Inc. to study how microbes—microscopic organisms that digest sewage—interact with and potentially biodegrade viscosifiers, polymers used in consumer products like shampoos, detergents, and cosmetics to keep ingredients suspended and stable in solution. Their proposal recently received a three-year GOALI award from the National Science Foundation. The program funds projects that support university-industry collaborations.

Computer programming powers modern society and enabled the AI revolution but little is known about how our brains learn this essential skill. To help answer that question, Johns Hopkins University researchers studied the brain activity of university students before and after they learned how to code.

A new dataset of pre- and post-hurricane first-floor elevation for homes and buildings in a Southwest Florida city was awarded a 2025 DesignSafe Dataset Award, which recognized the dataset's diverse contributions to natural hazards research.

Study challenges long-held assumptions, finding late-surviving dinosaurs lived in vibrant, regionally distinct communities

The discovery of a possible “super-Earth” less than 20 light-years from our own planet is offering scientists new hope in the hunt for other worlds that could harbor life, according to an international team including researchers from Penn State. They dubbed the exoplanet, named GJ 251 c, a “super-Earth” as data suggest it is almost four times as massive as the Earth, and likely to be rocky planet.

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the streams are telling us a story about forest recovery following acid rain and logging. According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, long-term watershed chemistry reveals that recovering forests are mining rocks for nutrients. While this leads to improved pH in nearby streams, it further depletes soils, leaving forests less resilient to future pollution.  The study team analyzed more than 60 years of data from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, established by the US Forest Service in the 1950s for ecological and hydrologic research.