"Did you see that?" It is a simple phrase we hear every day, but how do we know what "that" refers to? A new study from Kyushu University, published in PLOS One, reveals that children and adults use different strategies to interpret such verbal uncertainties, offering fresh insights into the development of human language comprehension.

Frogs have thrived for hundreds of millions of years, spreading across virtually every corner of Earth, from tropical jungles to subarctic forests. Throughout their evolution, they have developed remarkable defenses—including previously unreported antibiotics—against the hordes of bacteria that thrive in their moist environments. Variants of these compounds may one day protect humans from drug-resistant pathogens.

For the first time on a global scale, 20 years of observations on Mars have been condensed into a single study led by Francisco Brasil and Pedro Machado, both researchers from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon (CIÊNCIAS ULisboa). This study, an extensive and comprehensive analysis of the red planet's atmospheric waves, has just been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Mesoscale eddies, oceanic gyres about 100 kilometers in diameter, are ubiquitous features of the global ocean and play a vital role in marine ecosystems. Eddies, which form in biologically productive coastal upwelling regions, are important transporters of carbon and nutrients. These eddies trap water masses and migrate into the open ocean, where productivity is comparatively low. As such, they have a significant influence on the nutrient and carbon cycles within the ocean.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have tested a quantum computing approach to an old challenge: solving classical fluid dynamics problems.

The pathogen C. diff—the most common cause of health care-associated infectious diarrhea—can use a compound that kills the human gut's resident microbes to survive and grow, giving it a competitive advantage in the infected gut.

Genetic engineering in non-human primates has long been limited by the need for virus-based gene delivery methods. Recently, researchers in Japan successfully used a nonviral system to introduce a transgene—that is, a gene that has been artificially inserted into an organism—into cynomolgus monkeys, which is a species of primate closely related to humans. The paper is published in the journal Nature Communications.

In some countries, the number of dogs has increased so much that it now exceeds the number of children. While the emotional significance of dogs is clearly rising worldwide, it remains uncertain whether people are choosing to keep dogs instead of having children or whether other factors are driving this trend. According to Professor Enikő Kubinyi, head of the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), there is indeed a connection between dog ownership and declining birth rates—but not in the way we might think.

What happens when a quantum physicist is frustrated by the limitations of quantum mechanics when trying to study densely packed atoms? At EPFL, you get a metamaterial, an engineered material that exhibits exotic properties.

Proteins interacting with cell membranes play a vital role in countless biological processes, from how cells communicate to how they respond to external signals like hormones or medications. Understanding these interactions at a molecular level is crucial for advancing medicine, especially in designing drugs that target these proteins.