UC San Diego engineers have developed a low cost, low power technology to help robots accurately map their way indoors, even in poor lighting and without recognizable landmarks or features. The technology uses WiFi signals, instead of light, to help the robot "see" where it’s going.

How will future warming of the planet impact cold-water corals? A new analysis of ancient evidence from the last major global warming event identifies food and oxygen supply as key environmental factors that influence the vitality of cold-water corals in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Rodrigo da Costa Portilho-Ramos of the University of Bremen, Germany, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Biology on May 19th.

Combining a genetic risk score with a clinical risk score improved the prediction of type 2 diabetes in British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi individuals, especially in the young, according to a new study publishing May 19th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Sarah Finer of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and colleagues.

The ‘ghost’ fossils are imprints of single-celled plankton called coccolithophores and their discovery is changing our understanding of how plankton in the oceans are affected by climate change.

Everyone has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but a new study by Lude Franke and colleagues of the University of Groningen, Netherlands finds that some individuals weathered the stress of the pandemic better than others, in part, due to their genetics. The new study is publishing May 12th in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics.

An international research team, led by DIPC and Princeton University, discovered that almost all materials in nature exhibit at least one topological state, contradicting the 40-year-old assumption that topological materials are rare and esoteric. In a paper published this week in Science, the team also introduces the new concept of “supertopological” to the theory of band topology.