Washington, DC - The National Science Foundation (NSF) announces an important milestone in its Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) effort. In collaboration with an industry consortium of 28 networking companies and associations, NSF is supporting the development and deployment of the first two PAWR research platforms, based in Salt Lake City and New York City. These platforms will power research motivated by real-world challenges on experimental, next generation wireless test beds at the scale of cities and communities. The goal is to advance the state of the art for wireless technology beyond today's 4G, LTE and emerging 5G capabilities.

Los Angeles, California - Led by scientists at UCLA, an international team of researchers has discovered that bacteria have a “memory” that passes sensory knowledge from one generation of cells to the next, all without a central nervous system or any neurons.

Los Angeles, California - More than halfway across the universe, an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus is the farthest individual star ever seen. Normally, it would be much too faint to view, even with the world’s largest telescopes. Through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, however, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint this faraway star. They also used Icarus to test a theory of dark matter, and to probe the makeup of a foreground galaxy cluster.

Washington, DC - A newly identified coronavirus that killed nearly 25,000 piglets in 2016-17 in China emerged from horseshoe bats near the origin of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which emerged in 2002 in the same bat species. The new virus is named swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV). It does not appear to infect people, unlike SARS-CoV which infected more than 8,000 people and killed 774. No SARS-CoV cases have been identified since 2004.

Arlington, Virginia - In a survey to assess treatment preferences for high blood pressure, respondents were more likely to choose a daily cup of tea or a pill over exercise, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions 2018, a premier global exchange of the latest advances in quality of care and outcomes research in cardiovascular disease and stroke for researchers, healthcare professionals and policymakers.

Rochester, Minnesota - Growing up in South Africa, Virend Somers and his two cousins would lie on a big bed with their grandfather as he told them stories. “We really enjoyed the stories. But what we also looked forward to - I say this with a bit of guilt now - is when he’d fall asleep. He would start snoring, and he’d stop breathing for these long periods. There’d be these incredible gasps when he’d breathe again. It was fascinating to us to study this from a child’s point of view. But we didn’t quite realize the implications,” he recalls.