With natural disasters striking communities across the U.S. at an accelerating pace, the question of how to build homes that can endure them has never been more critical. New research spanning political science and civil engineering shows that the answer could lie at the intersection of smarter regulatory systems and stronger structures. University of Notre Dame political scientist Susan Ostermann and her team have identified the building code features that have the biggest impact on hazard resilience and translated those features into tangible, practical building solutions.

University of Utah research engineers finetune robotic prosthetic hand to improve its manual dexterity through an artificial intelligence-powered neural interface.

In a survey of faculty, staff and students at an undisclosed museum, 93% of the 44 people who participated said that giving people a look at what goes on behind the scenes is a crucial part of their job.

"We undertook this difficult study to understand fatigue," said senior author Daniel Forger, a University of Michigan professor of mathematics. "We're seeing profound changes in the brain over the course of the day as we stay awake and they seem to be corrected as we go to sleep."

CSHL postdoc Iacopo Gentile has devised a new system for identifying redundant genes and predicting how certain genetic mutations may affect plant traits. The model provides plant breeders with a potential roadmap for future crop improvements.

Interactions among viruses can help them succeed inside their hosts or impart vulnerabilities that make them easier to treat. Scientists are learning the ways viruses mingle inside the cells they infect, as well as the consequences of their socializing. Although it is debatable whether viruses are living things, they do compete, cooperate and share genome materials that can sometimes alter their responses to antiviral drugs, result in new variants or play a role in virus evolution. A paper today in Nature Ecology & Evolution by UW Medicine scientists looks at the evolution of poliovirus resistance to a promising experimental antiviral drug, pocapavir. While it seemed counterintuitive, the researchers demonstrated that lowering the potency of pocapavir could improve the situation by enhancing the survival of enough susceptible viruses to continue sensitizing the resistant ones.

Goldenberries taste like a cross between pineapple and mango, pack the nutritional punch of a superfood, and are increasingly popular in U.S. grocery stores. But the plants that produce these bright yellow-orange fruits grow wild and unruly—reaching heights that make large-scale farming impractical. Researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) helped solve that problem.