Many people have narcissistic traits to some degree, for example, confidence in one's own superiority, a sense of entitlement and a desire to be the center of attention. However, some people have notably higher levels of narcissistic traits than others, and the neural basis of so-called "grandiose narcissism" has rarely been studied in socially complex situations.
Generating hydrogen without releasing carbon dioxide sounds simple: pass electricity through water, split water molecules and generate green hydrogen. The hard part is the electrocatalyst. The best ones rely on platinum, ruthenium and iridium, which are scarce and expensive. We wanted to know whether a small amount of iron and nickel oxides, anchored on carbon nanofibers grown by chemical vapor deposition the right way on the right scaffold, could do the job instead. Our results are published in ACS Applied Nano Materials.
In November 1857, during a séance in Jersey City, the medium Leah Brown claimed her body produced luminous particles. So intense was the luminosity emanating from her, she recalled in her memoir, that it almost burned her hands. She rinsed her hands under a tap and then pushed them into the damp earth outside.
Exercise, avoiding alcohol or even getting enough sleep aren't the factors most connected to college students' well-being. Spending face-to-face time with friends and other people is the strongest predictor of their mental health, according to a 2026 study of nearly 80,000 students that I conducted with the help of my students.
Ongoing research is providing a clearer picture of how climate change can affect different aspects of the Coorong in South Australia—and is helping develop strong environmental strategies that can be adapted as the climate changes.
Producers, consumers, and decomposers play different roles in today's ecosystems. Thinking about these familiar roles led me to a question: Could their differences partly reflect the different physical and chemical environments in which early life developed? I wondered whether the organization of ecosystems might offer a useful starting point for thinking about life's beginnings.
Hemp has long been pitched to Kentucky farmers as a way to diversify their income. Research now suggests it could diversify the landscape itself, with measurable benefits for the state's water and wildlife.
Just as it is difficult for a camera to keep both a nearby flower and a distant mountain sharply focused at the same time, conventional optical microscopes face a similar challenge when imaging structures located at different depths inside the body. Tighter focusing of light improves spatial resolution, but at the same time reduces the depth range over which the image remains sharply focused.
Designing structural high-entropy alloys (SHEAs) means solving a problem with an enormous number of moving parts: which combinations of composition and processing conditions will yield the phases, microstructures, and mechanical properties a given application demands? Because these alloys mix multiple principal elements in comparable proportions, that question spans length and time scales that no single experiment or model can cover on its own.
Natural products produced by microorganisms are a promising source of new drugs. Researchers at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) and its Saarbrücken-based site, the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), have now discovered a new family of such compounds, elucidated their unusual biosynthesis and developed a way to produce them synthetically.
