An international study provides the first global evaluation of all terrestrial vertebrate species that have not been declared extinct and identifies more than 500 species considered to be ‘lost’—those that haven’t been seen by anyone in more than 50 years.

Some 1.7 million Americans each year acquire hospital infections, resulting in nearly 100,000 deaths from infection-related complications. The biggest culprits: medical devices like catheters, stents and heart valves, whose surfaces often become covered with harmful bacterial films. A novel surface treatment developed by a UCLA-led team of scientists stops microbes from adhering to medical devices. The new findings are published May 19 in the journal Advanced Materials.

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.

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.