Researchers with UTHealth Houston School of Public Health awarded $5 million to study cancer risk among firefighters in Texas
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 20-Jun-2025 14:10 ET (20-Jun-2025 18:10 GMT/UTC)
A new study from the University of British Columbia has found that offering people a tiny chance to win a big cash prize can dramatically increase how many bottles they recycle. Instead of giving everyone a guaranteed 10-cent refund per bottle, researchers tested a new idea: What if people had a 0.01 per cent chance to win $1,000 for each bottle they returned? The result? People recycled 47 per cent more bottles.
MIT researchers discovered the underlying cause of position bias, a phenomenon that causes large language models to overemphasize the beginning or end of a document or conversation, while neglecting the middle. They built a theoretical framework that can be used to diagnose and correct position bias in future model designs, leading to more accurate, reliable AI agents.
A low-cost, scalable fabrication technology developed at MIT can integrate fast, efficient gallium nitride transistors onto a standard silicon chip, which could boost the performance of electronic chips used in high-bandwidth applications like video calling and real-time deep learning.
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) was awarded nearly $3.4 million from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), to target hard-to-treat cancers with technologies not currently available in the state and boosting vaccination rates for the human papillomavirus (HPV) that leads to cancer.
Researchers have found a promising new method for gene therapy. They successfully restarted inactive genes by bringing them closer to genetic switches on the DNA called enhancers. The intermediate piece of DNA was cut out using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. This strategy opens up new possibilities for treating genetic diseases. The team specifically shows the technology’s potential for the treatment of sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, two genetic blood diseases. In these conditions, a faulty gene could potentially be compensated by reactivating a helpful but normally inactive one. This ‘delete-to-recruit’ method works by simply changing the spacing—without adding new genes or foreign elements. The discovery, made by researchers from the Hubrecht Institute (De Laat group), Erasmus MC and Sanquin, was published in the journal Blood.
QUT robotics researchers have developed a new robot navigation system that mimics neural processes of the human brain and uses less than 10 per cent of the energy required by traditional systems.