Researchers at the University of Würzburg have shown that plants communicate root injuries in milliseconds via mechanical signals. A drop in hydraulic pressure serves as a rapid alarm system for neighboring roots.

A new approach that uses specially engineered pulses of light to switch the magnetic states of a material could lead to faster, smaller and more energy-efficient data storage.

Inspired by the ionic signaling of our nervous system, researchers built sensors and therapeutic devices that can communicate and coordinate with each other through tissue.

Twistronics has become a new alchemy of materials. By choosing atomically thin layers, stacking them and changing their relative angle, researchers can create electronic behavior absent from the original ingredients.

Now, in two back-to-back papers publishing in Science on September 24, an international collaboration provides both the building blocks and a guide to that vast search. The first maps the electronic structures and topology of nearly 9,000 two-dimensional entries, whether topological or not. The second identifies more than 1,600 candidates for twisting, with different electronic starting points that could enable entirely new kinds of quantum simulators.

“Every new family of twisted materials gives us a chance to ask a different question about quantum matter. We want to move beyond the few platforms we know and explore the enormous range of physics that other layers and other twists could make possible,” said B. Andrei Bernevig, a Princeton professor of physics and coauthor of both studies.

New analyses of ancient cattle, sheep and goat bones on Madagascar suggest the rapid spread of introduced livestock on the island 1,200 years ago coincided with forest loss and population declines of large native herbivores.

The University of Vermont will coordinate a $19 million, five-year National Science Foundation project to design and test a national observatory for exploring life’s smallest structures in three dimensions. Working with UC San Diego, researchers will combine advanced electron microscopy, artificial intelligence and powerful computing to expand access to imaging capabilities currently concentrated in specialized laboratories. Pilot studies will investigate how learning changes brain wiring, how vision varies across species, how a parasite crosses the blood-brain barrier, and how single-celled organisms are organized. The project will lay the groundwork for a shared national resource serving researchers across biology and medicine.

Alaska's orange, rusted rivers from melting permafrost are even more acidic than water leached from metal mines — an increasingly common mark of climate change, finds a UC Davis study.

The bacteria living on frogs’ skin could serve a vital role in protecting the animal from a deadly fungal disease. A team of researchers led by Penn State scientists found that frogs’ natural skin bacteria can help them fight disease and improve their chances of survival.

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, preceded by decades of breakthroughs in genetics. It eventually gave us a sequence of the human genome. Yet, while the physical rules behind the genome’s organization remain an active area of research, many questions are still largely unanswered. Among these is the impact of an omnipresent force influencing life on Earth: gravity. A new study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, addresses some of these weighty questions by using an innovative technique: creating a zero-gravity, or microgravity, environment in order to reveal gravity’s impact on a human cell.