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Category: innovation

Human hair grows through ‘pulling’ not pushing, study shows

Scientists have found that human hair growth does not grow by being pushed out of the root; it’s actually pulled upward by a force associated with a hidden network of moving cells. The findings challenge decades of textbook biology and could reshape how researchers think about hair loss and regeneration.

The team, from L’Oréal Research & Innovation and Queen Mary University of London, used advanced 3D live imaging to track individual cells within living human hair follicles kept alive in culture. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that cells in the outer root sheath—a layer encasing the hair shaft—move in a spiral downward path within the same region from where the upward pulling force originates.

Dr. Inês Sequeira, Reader in Oral and Skin Biology at Queen Mary and one of the lead authors, said, “Our results reveal a fascinating choreography inside the hair follicle. For decades, it was assumed that hair was pushed out by the dividing cells in the hair bulb. We found that instead that it’s actively being pulled upwards by surrounding tissue acting almost like a tiny motor.”

Catalyst insight may unlock safer, on-demand ozone water disinfection

University of Pittsburgh researchers have made an important step toward providing hospitals and water treatment facilities with a safer, greener alternative to chlorine-based disinfection.

The team, which includes scientists from Drexel University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, uncovered key design principles for catalysts that can generate ozone, a disinfecting agent, on demand. The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis.

This breakthrough addresses a critical challenge in water sanitation. Chlorine, commonly used to kill bacteria on surfaces and in water—including most municipal drinking water—is hazardous to transport and store, and its byproducts can be carcinogenic. These risks limit its use and motivate the search for safer disinfectants.

Mixture of Experts Powers the Most Intelligent Frontier AI Models, Runs 10x Faster on NVIDIA Blackwell NVL72

“With GB200 NVL72 and Together AI’s custom optimizations, we are exceeding customer expectations for large-scale inference workloads for MoE models like DeepSeek-V3,” said Vipul Ved Prakash, cofounder and CEO of Together AI. “The performance gains come from NVIDIA’s full-stack optimizations coupled with Together AI Inference breakthroughs across kernels, runtime engine and speculative decoding.”

This performance advantage is evident across other frontier models.

Kimi K2 Thinking, the most intelligent open-source model, serves as another proof point, achieving 10x better generational performance when deployed on GB200 NVL72.

Bill Gates’ TerraPower gets NRC green light for safety in construction of its first nuclear plant

Nuclear power company TerraPower has passed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s final safety evaluation for a permit to build a reactor in Wyoming. The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America.

TerraPower’s Natrium design pairs a small modular reactor (SMR) with an integrated thermal battery. The SMR generates 345 megawatts of continuous electrical power. The thermal battery, which stores excess heat in molten salt, allows the system to surge its output to 500 megawatts for more than five hours, generating enough energy to power 400,000 homes at maximum capacity.

“Today is a momentous occasion for TerraPower, our project partners and the Natrium design,” said company CEO Chris Levesque in a statement issued Monday. The favorable assessment “reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”

Scalable thermal drawing method creates liquid metal fibers for wearable electronics

Over the past decades, many research teams worldwide have started working on electronic fibers. These are yarn-like components with electronic properties that can be weaved or assembled to create new innovative textile-based electronics, clothes or other wearable systems that can sense their surroundings, monitor specific physiological signals or perform other functions.

Electronic fibers typically contain both regions via which electric current can flow (i.e., conductive domains) and insulating regions that store electric charge (i.e., dielectric domains). Reliably arranging these domains into complex architectures to produce fibers with desired properties can be difficult and most previously introduced methods are difficult to implement on a large scale.

Researchers at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne recently demonstrated the potential of a scalable technique known as thermal drawing for creating highly performing, elastomer and liquid metal-based electronic fibers. This approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, allowed them to create electronic fibers that were successfully used to fabricate a new textile-based capacitive strain sensor.

Samsung launches its first multi-folding phone as competition from Chinese brands intensifies

Samsung Electronics’s Galaxy Z TriFold media day at Samsung Gangnam in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec. 2, 2025.

Anadolu | anadolu | getty images.

Samsung Electronics on Monday announced the launch of its first multi-folding smartphone as it races to keep pace with innovations from fast-moving rivals.

Why your faucet drips: Water jet breakup traced to angstrom-scale thermal capillary waves

Some phenomena in our daily lives are so commonplace that we don’t realize there could be some very interesting physics behind them. Take a dripping faucet: why does the continuous stream of water from a faucet eventually break up into individual droplets? A team of physicists studied this question and reached surprising conclusions.

The breakthrough in understanding how a water jet breaks up into droplets was made by a team consisting of Stefan Kooij, Daniel T. A. Jordan, Cees J. M. van Rijn, and Daniel Bonn from the University of Amsterdam (Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute / Institute of Physics), along with Neil M. Ribe from the Université Paris-Saclay. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

New Breakthrough to Strengthen Bone Could Reverse Osteoporosis

A recent study points to a key bone-strengthening mechanism at work in the body, which could be targeted to treat the bone-weakening disease, osteoporosis.

Led by researchers from the University of Leipzig in Germany and Shandong University in China, the study identified the cell receptor GPR133 (also known as ADGRD1) as being crucial to bone density, via bone-building cells called osteoblasts.

Variations in the GPR133 gene had previously been linked to bone density, leading scientists to turn their attention to the protein it encoded.

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