Flu is rising rapidly across the U.S., driven by a new variant of the virus—and cases are expected to keep growing with holiday travel.

That variant, known as “subclade K,” led to early outbreaks in the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada. In the U.S., flu typically begins its winter march in December. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported high or very high levels of illness in more than half the states.

The CDC estimated there have been at least 7.5 million illnesses, 81,000 hospitalizations and 3,100 deaths from flu so far this season...

A research team affiliated with UNIST has introduced a technology that generates electricity from raindrops striking rooftops, offering a self-powered approach to automated drainage control and flood warning during heavy rainfall.

Led by Professor Young-Bin Park of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UNIST, the team developed a droplet-based electricity generator (DEG) using carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP). This device, called the superhydrophobic fiber-reinforced polymer (S-FRP-DEG), converts the impact of falling rain into electrical signals capable of operating stormwater management systems without an external power source...

Beneath the moon’s cratered surface lie networks of lava tubes and deep pits, natural caves that could shelter future lunar bases from cosmic radiation and wild temperature swings. These underground structures represent some of the most scientifically valuable areas in the solar system, but they come with the very real challenge of simply getting there.

The entrances to these caves feature steep, rugged terrain with rocks and loose regolith. Small rovers, preferred for lunar exploration because you can deploy many of them to reduce mission risk, face an inherent limitation. Their compact wheels simply can’t climb over obstacles much larger than the wheel diameter itself...

In collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, hotter than the Sun’s core by a staggering margin, scientists have finally solved a long-standing mystery: how delicate particles like deuterons and their antimatter twins can exist at all. Instead of forming in the initial chaos, these fragile nuclei are born later, when the fireball cools, from the decay of ultra-short-lived, high-energy particles...