Between 2008 and 2010, polarization in society increased dramatically alongside a significant shift in social behavior: the number of close social contacts rose from an average of two to four or five people. The connection between these two developments could provide a fundamental explanation for why societies around the world are increasingly fragmenting into ideological bubbles.

Xuanhong Cheng, a professor of bioengineering and materials science and engineering at Lehigh University, and her team are collaborating with materials science company Dow Inc. to study how microbes—microscopic organisms that digest sewage—interact with and potentially biodegrade viscosifiers, polymers used in consumer products like shampoos, detergents, and cosmetics to keep ingredients suspended and stable in solution. Their proposal recently received a three-year GOALI award from the National Science Foundation. The program funds projects that support university-industry collaborations.

Sporadic-E is a phenomenon that occurs in the ionosphere that can disrupt radio communications. Through simulations, researchers have found that rising CO₂ levels in our atmosphere could lead to sporadic-E becoming stronger, occur at lower altitudes, and persist longer at night.

Atomic clocks are very precise - but nuclear clocks are even better. This completely new technology was made possible by a major breakthrough in 2024. Now, this technology can be used to answer some of the deepest questions in physics: are the natural constants really constant?

A fundamental link between two counterintuitive phenomena in spin glasses— reentrance and temperature chaos—has been mathematically proven for the first time. By extending the Edwards–Anderson model to include correlated disorder, researchers at Science Tokyo and Tohoku University provided the first rigorous proof that reentrance implies temperature chaos. The breakthrough enhances understanding of disordered systems and could advance applications in machine learning and quantum technologies, where controlling disorder and errors is crucial.