A new study by USC Viterbi School of Engineering examining over 1.27 million federal complaints finds that older Americans and veterans are consistently receiving slower responses from financial companies, and the gap is getting worse.Service-members, including active duty, reserve, and veterans, received slower responses than the general population in every single year of the study. The gap peaked at 1.8 percentage points in 2016 before narrowing, settling at 0.3 points by 2022. The trajectory for older Americans is more alarming. In 2014, seniors were actually doing slightly better than the general population. By 2017, that advantage had evaporated, and by 2022 older adults were faring the worst of all three groups.

Researchers have developed a technique for detecting and measuring the concentration of many rare-earth elements in plants, without destroying the plant. The technique can be used to optimize “plant mining” efforts, in which plants take up and concentrate these critical materials so that they can be harvested for practical use.

Malonic acid is a high-value dicarboxylic acid with strong industrial demand, used in diverse products including automotive coatings, flavor and fragrances, biodegradable polymers, and anodic oxide films in batteries. Yet its current production heavily relies on petrochemical feedstocks. In a new paper, researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) report the first systematic study for sustainable production of malonic acid via oxidation of the precursor chemical 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP) with a Pd/Carbon catalyst.

(Santa Barbara, Calif,) — Could the next big antibiotic or cancer therapy be found on the nearest coral reef?  Researchers have found that reefs are home to a vast array of previously unknown bioactive metabolites — small biomolecules that have the biotechnological potential to provide the basis for new drugs, and a host of other products.

Using human-on-a-chip technology, UCF researchers reveal that movement-related Alzheimer’s symptoms may start in the body’s nerves and muscles. 

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have developed an improved method for creating insulin-producing cells from human stem cells. The results, published in Stem Cell Reports, demonstrate that these cells effectively regulate blood sugar levels in laboratory tests and can reverse diabetes in mice.