Julia Rock-Torcivia

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new method to upcycle cathodes from used lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries into lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP), a material that stores more energy and could offer a more valuable second life for batteries used in electric vehicles and grid storage. The findings were published in Joule.  …

Establishing causal relationships in plant-microbe studies can be exceptionally difficult, as it requires juggling sterility, standardization and manual labor. A single contaminant or inconsistent measurement can render weeks of work unusable. For example, one study on the effects of plant genotype and soil microbiome on growth in Lotus japonicus found that 15% of variability in shoot length was due to variability in the…

Disturbances on Earth, from thunderstorms to earthquakes, send ripples into the upper atmosphere, disturbing the region that low-Earth-orbit satellites fly through and that GPS and communications signals must cross.  “Think of waves as throwing a pebble into a body of water, and you see those waves propagate out in a circle. That’s what happens in…

At least 11 states have enacted bans on expanded polystyrene (EPS), which is commonly used in packing peanuts and food packaging, due to environmental harm. The food packaging industry is now looking for compliant alternatives. However, these tend to be more expensive than conventional polystyrene.   Researchers have created a sustainable alternative to polystyrene using sawdust…

When researchers Marc Hillmyer and Christopher Ellison created their compostable plastic, they focused on accelerating PLA’s degradation without sacrificing other properties such as strength and shelf life.  In a paper published in ACS Central Science, the researchers describe polylactide (PLA) blends that reach 90% biodegradation in 11 days under composting conditions and hold up on…

One year after nearly 500 National Institutes of Health (NIH) employees signed a letter warning that political interference was threatening the agency’s mission, the authors of a new report say the situation has only gotten worse.  “The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026,” the Bethesda Declaration: One Year…

A new study published in Nature found that Antarctic ice loss is remarkably predictable for the next few decades, but varies by glacier. Near-term Antarctic ice loss is linearly predictable through the mid-21st century, but this predictability isn’t a single number. Instead, it’s governed by a physical property called “reservoir timescale” which swings from roughly…

When researchers tuned in to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) public webinars on its new $1.5 billion X-Labs initiative, including one held on June 30, they got a consistent answer to nearly every question about eligibility, IP ownership, milestone design and selection criteria: it depends, and we’ll work it out with you. The NSF X-Labs…

A comprehensive analysis of the expected shelf-lives of the entire 2023 ISS formulary found that 54 of 91 medications have a terrestrial shelf-life of 36 months or less, which could be accelerated by space radiation. As NASA aims for Mars missions, which take about 200 days, resupply becomes unrealistic. Now, researchers at the University of…

The NSF’s new draft policy simultaneously requires researchers to publish open access immediately and proposes to eliminate the grant funding that pays for it at many journals, but fails to define exactly which publication costs are allowed.  The NSF is renewing and revising its financial assistance policies and procedures document, renaming the longstanding Proposal and…

For years, international climate targets have been calculated using the assumption that the world’s northern permafrost would act as a carbon sink through the end of the century. Now, a paper published in Science Advances finds that the northern land carbon sink will become a carbon source in the 2050s.  The northern permafrost region, which…

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a formal Request for Information (RFI) regarding a proposal to limit the number of Research Project Grants (RPGs) an individual investigator can hold simultaneously. The agency is considering caps ranging from two to four grants per Principal Investigator (PI) or Multi-Principal Investigator (MPI).  A cap of four…

The Trump administration has reclassified approximately 8,000 senior-level career officials across 54 agencies to Schedule Policy/Career, formerly Schedule F, status. The move strips the employees of standard civil service job protections, making it easier to remove them from their positions. Approximately 97% of those reclassified hold GS-15 or senior leadership positions. Agencies can remove Schedule…

The House Appropriations Committee has approved the Fiscal Year 2027 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $189.3 billion, which is 3% below the FY 2026 level. While the bill includes several increases to medical research, it also codifies some significant reductions and…

Continuing a Biden-era push accelerated by the Trump administration, the NIH is making research findings available to the public and requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit the author-accepted version of their peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC) and make it available at the time of publication. Many publishers enforce a six to 12-month embargo period before…

Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), the inner layer of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), this week. The garment was designed for NASA’s Artemis IV, which is scheduled to land on the moon in 2028.  “By bringing together the best in both aerospace engineering as well as luxury…

Researchers at Washington University have genetically engineered hookworms to produce and secrete a human antibody, creating a “living pharmaceutical biofactory,” according to the study published in Nature Communications.  To survive within the human gut, hookworms secrete over 800 molecules to modulate inflammation and maintain homeostasis.  “We thought: what if we make it secrete one more…

The Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a $368 million network of over 900 deep-ocean instruments that provide researchers with real-time, long-term data on marine ecosystems, coastal environments and global climate patterns.  This could lead to permanent gaps in long-term oceanographic datasets, disrupting longitudinal studies on climate change and ocean health. The…

A team of researchers recently uncovered living microorganisms on the remains of the 5,300-year-old Iceman, revealing a methodological gap in modern genomics. In a study published in Microbiome, the team showed that while DNA analysis can map the presence of ancient genetic material, traditional petri dish cultivation remains necessary to determine if those microorganisms are…

Stanford scientists have discovered a new kind of cell death in flatworm immune cells. Called ruptosis, the mechanism results in the cell exploding and taking out approximately 70 cells surrounding it.  The flatworms, Schmidtea mediterranea, evolved to sacrifice healthy cells through this process in order to ensure the elimination of biological threats. Unlike vertebrate immune…

NASA today announced the four members of the Artemis III crew and gave updates on the mission, including how a recent explosion during a Blue Origin test is affecting the timeline.  The Blue Origin New Glenn rocket exploded during a hotfire test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 28. The incident destroyed the…

Blue Origin’s uncrewed New Glenn rocket exploded during a hotfire test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station last week. No casualties were reported, but the incident destroyed the rocket and damaged the launch infrastructure.  The explosion could also threaten the timeline of NASA’s Artemis program, as Blue Origin is one of two primary contractors, alongside…

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a 400-page document last week outlining proposed revisions to the administration of federal awards. The document proposes expanding agency authority to monitor awards from pre-application through closeout and increasing the influence of political appointees and the White House over award decisions.  “The OMB’s proposed rule is an…

Under the leadership of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services has endured the departure of top officials at the CDC, FDA and NIH as well as significant staff reductions across the agency. This could erode American science as scientists look to move abroad. More than 75% of scientists who…

Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA are reportedly imposing new limitations on international scientific collaborations. NIH is allegedly directing grantees to ask permission for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, while NASA has reportedly told some grantees that papers co-authored with researchers in China may violate…