Team cracks 100 year-old rubber mystery

Scientists have solved a decades-old mystery behind reinforced rubber—a material used in everything from tires to industrial systems.

Every time you drive, board a plane or water your lawn, you’re relying on a material that has quietly powered modern life for nearly a century—reinforced rubber.

It’s in car and aircraft tires, industrial seals, medical devices, and countless everyday products. Yet despite its ubiquity and its central role in the $260 billion global tire industry, scientists have never fully understood why it works so well.

Until now.

A research team led by University of South Florida College of Engineering Professor David Simmons solved one of the oldest mysteries in materials science: How adding tiny particles known as carbon black transforms soft, stretchy rubber into something strong enough to support the weight of a fully loaded jet.

Their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provide an answer and offer a new way of thinking about how to design safer, longer-lasting materials.

“How is it that we’ve been using this for 80, 90, 100 years and haven’t really known how it works?” Simmons says.

“It’s been through enormous trial and error. The tire companies can purchase many different grades of carbon black—basically fancy soot—and they just have to use trial and error to figure out what’s worth paying more for and what isn’t.”

Now, after running 1,500 molecular dynamics simulations totaling about 15 years of computing time, the researchers unified competing theories and revealed the true mechanism—a phenomenon called Poisson’s ratio mismatch, which forces rubber to fight against its own incompressibility.

The basic recipe for reinforced rubber has changed little over the past century. Add microscopic particles—usually carbon black—to rubber, and the material becomes dramatically tougher and more durable. That’s why tires are black and can endure years of wear, heat, and repeated stress without falling apart.

But the reasons behind that transformation remained elusive for scientists, sparking “a major debate for multiple decades now,” Simmons says.

Some suggested the particles formed chain-like networks inside the rubber. Others argued the particles acted like glue, stiffening the material around them. Still others thought the particles simply took up space, forcing the rubber to stretch more.

Each theory failed to capture the full picture.

Instead of attempting to observe the various processes directly, something nearly impossible because of their nanoscale size, Simmons and his team recreated them virtually.

Simmons, together with USF postdoctoral scholar Pierre Kawak and doctoral student Harshad Bhapkar, used advanced molecular simulations to model how hundreds of thousands of atoms interact inside reinforced rubber.

By refining existing models to better reflect the real structure of carbon black and how it disperses inside rubber, they zeroed in on the material in ways experiments can’t.

“It’s not that we literally had a simulation running for 15 years,” Simmons says. “What it means is if you ran a calculation using your laptop for one hour and it used up the whole laptop with six cores, it would be six computing hours. We used USF’s large computing cluster with many, many cores for many months.”

The breakthrough centered around Poisson’s ratio, which measures how materials change shape when stretched.

Simmons compares it to pulling back the plunger of a sealed, water-filled syringe. Water doesn’t compress easily, so the harder you pull the more resistance you feel.

Rubber likewise strongly resists changes in volume. Stretching a normal rubber band makes it thinner as it lengthens, keeping its volume largely unchanged.

But when carbon black particles are added to rubber, they act like tiny supports, preventing it from thinning as much as it normally would. When the material is stretched, it’s forced to increase in volume, something it strongly resists.

In essence, the rubber “fights against itself,” producing a dramatic increase in stiffness and strength.

Notably, the findings don’t discard earlier theories. They unify them.

The team found that previously proposed mechanisms—including particle networks, sticky interactions, and space-filling effects—contribute to volume-resistance behavior. Rather than competing explanations, they are pieces of a larger puzzle.

By integrating them into a single framework, the researchers created the first comprehensive explanation of rubber reinforcement.

The breakthrough came after initial models fell short. When the simulations didn’t match real-world data, the team incorporated ideas from earlier scientific literature into their approach. The result was a model that aligned with the observed behavior.

For the tire industry and consumers, the findings are potentially transformative.

The “Magic Triangle” of tire design aims to improve fuel efficiency, traction, and durability at the same time, a near-impossible balancing act. Enhancing one or two outcomes often comes at the expense of the third.

Until now, manufacturers relied on trial and error to navigate those trade-offs, an expensive and time-consuming process.

With a better understanding of how reinforced rubber actually works, engineers can begin to design materials more precisely. The result could be tires that last longer, grip better in wet conditions, and improve fuel economy—all at once.

“The struggle always is to get more than two of the three to be good, and this is where trial and error only gets you so far,” Simmons says. “With these findings, we’re laying a new foundation for rationally designing tires.”

The impact extends beyond tires, since reinforced rubber is used in critical infrastructure ranging from power plants to aerospace systems. Past failures in the materials have sometimes been catastrophic, including the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

“If you remember, the reason the Challenger failed was a rubber gasket that got too cold,” Simmons says.

“A lot of energy systems, power plants have rubber parts. Everybody’s had a garden hose that started leaking because a rubber gasket failed. Now imagine that happening in a power plant or a chemical plant.”

This research was supported by the US Department of Energy Office of Science.

Source: University of South Florida

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Lunar dust could help build stuff on the moon

New research turns lunar dust into building blocks for future infrastructure on the moon.

As space agencies and private companies look toward sustained human presence on the moon, a fundamental challenge centers on how to build strong, durable infrastructure without hauling every material from Earth.

The new research from Rice University points to an unexpected solution—transforming one of the moon’s most stubborn obstacles, its abrasive dust, into a valuable building resource.

Led by Denizhan Yavas, assistant teaching professor of mechanical engineering at Rice, in collaboration with Ashraf Bastawros of Iowa State University, the study demonstrates that lunar regolith simulant, a terrestrial stand-in for the moon’s fine, abrasive dust, can be used to strengthen advanced composite materials.

The work appears in Advanced Engineering Materials.

“This work started with a simple but powerful question,” Yavas says. “Lunar dust is typically viewed as a major obstacle for exploration because of how abrasive and pervasive it is. We asked whether that same material could instead be used as a resource—something that could actually improve the performance of structural materials.”

The researchers explored how lunar regolith simulant could be incorporated into fiber-reinforced polymer composites, a class of lightweight materials already widely used in aerospace and high-performance engineering applications. By integrating the simulant as a reinforcing phase, they found measurable improvements in strength, toughness, and resistance to damage with performance increases of up to 30-40%.

“Our results show that you can take a material that is inherently challenging and convert it into something structurally beneficial,” Yavas says. “That shift in perspective is critical for building sustainably beyond Earth and enabling long-term exploration.”

The idea emerged from earlier work focused on developing nanoscale polymer surfaces designed to repel lunar dust. As the team worked to mitigate the hazards posed by the material, a broader opportunity came into focus.

“Instead of only trying to keep lunar dust away, we began to think about how to use it,” Yavas says. “That led us to this concept of embedding it directly into composite systems as reinforcement.”

The implications extend beyond laboratory testing. Lightweight, high-performance composites reinforced with lunar material could play a key role in constructing habitats, protective barriers and other infrastructure needed for sustained human presence on the moon.

The researchers emphasize the importance of reducing dependence on Earth-supplied materials, noting that one of the biggest constraints in space exploration is the cost and logistics of transporting them. If engineers could utilize what is already available on the lunar surface, it greatly increases the feasibility of longer missions and infrastructure development.

“Our long-term vision is to design materials that are not only high performing but also deeply integrated with the environment in which they are built,” Yavas says.

“For the moon, that means leveraging lunar regolith as much as possible to create resilient, scalable infrastructure.”

Source: Rice University

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Could humans regrow limbs like salamanders?

Researchers have successfully regenerated skeletal and connective tissue—even if not perfectly formed—demonstrating the next, critical step in limb regeneration.

For centuries, the inability to regrow lost body parts has been considered a defining limitation of humans and other mammals. While animals like salamanders can regenerate entire limbs, humans are left with scar tissue.

But new research suggests that this limitation may not be permanent.

“This changes the way we think about what’s possible.”

Instead, the capacity for regeneration may still exist—hidden within the body’s normal healing process.

“Why some animals can regenerate and others, particularly humans, can’t is a big question that has been asked since Aristotle,” says Ken Muneoka, a professor in the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS)’ veterinary physiology and pharmacology department (VTPP).

“I’ve spent my career trying to understand that.”

In their study in Nature Communications, Muneoka and his colleagues detail a newly developed two-step treatment that led to the regeneration of bone, joint structures, and ligaments.

While the results were imperfect, the team believes this approach could be used more immediately to reduce scarring and improve tissues repair after amputations.

Redirecting the body’s natural response

In mammals, injuries typically trigger fibrosis, a process in which fibroblast cells rapidly close the wound and form scar tissue. This response prioritizes survival by sealing the injury quickly, but also limits the body’s ability to rebuild missing structures.

In regenerative species, like salamanders that can regrow lost limbs, those same types of cells organize into a blastema, a temporary structure that enables tissue regrowth.

“It’s as if these cells can move in two different directions,” Muneoka says. “They could either make a scar or make a blastema. Our research focused on redirecting the behavior of fibroblasts already present at the injury site.”

To test whether mammalian healing could be shifted toward regeneration, researchers developed a sequential treatment using two well-studied growth factors.

The first step involved applying fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) after a wound had already closed. This timing allowed the body to complete its typical healing response, and then the team “changed what happens next,” Muneoka says.

FGF2 stimulated the formation of a blastema-like structure—something that does not normally occur in mammals following this type of injury; several days later, a second treatment—using bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2)—was applied, triggering those cells to begin forming new structures.

“This is really a two-step process,” Muneoka says. “You first shift the cells away from scarring, and then you provide the signals that tell them what to build.”

Challenging assumptions

A key implication of the study is that regeneration does not depend on adding external stem cells, as many current approaches in regenerative medicine attempt to do.

“You don’t have to actually get stem cells and put them back in,” Muneoka says. “They’re already there—you just need to learn how to get them to behave the way you want.”

Larry Suva, a VTPP professor who worked on the study, says the findings shift how researchers think about the limits of mammalian healing.

“The cells that we thought to be unprogrammable, in fact are,” Suva says. “The capacity is not absent—it’s just obscured.”

The study also showed that cells can be redirected to form structures beyond their original location—a concept known as positional re-specification, which plays a critical role in development.

This means cells that would normally contribute to one part of the body can be instructed to rebuild a different structure after injury.

Not perfect

Although the regenerated structures were not exact replicas of the original anatomy, researchers were able to restore all the expected components removed during amputation, such as the bone, tendon, ligament, and joint.

The results included both skeletal elements and connective tissues, organized in a way that reflects the natural structure.

“We regenerated what you would expect to see at that level of injury,” Muneoka says. “The structures are there—just not in a perfect form.”

The findings also revealed that regeneration occurs through multiple biological pathways, indicating that rebuilding tissue is more complex than relying on a single mechanism.

Potential applications for humans

While the research is still in early stages, it may have more immediate applications in improving how wounds heal.

Rather than focusing solely on regrowing entire structures, researchers believe the approach could first be used to reduce scarring and improve tissue repair.

“People should start thinking about using these signals during the healing process,” Muneoka says. “Even shifting the response slightly away from scarring could have real benefits.”

Because BMP2 is already FDA approved for certain medical uses and FGF2 is in multiple clinical trials, the pathway to clinical exploration may be more accessible for entirely new therapies.

The study represents a shift in how scientists understand regeneration in mammals—not as a lost ability, but as one that remains present but inactive.

“This changes the way we think about what’s possible,” Suva says. “Once you show that regeneration can be activated, it opens the door to asking entirely new questions.”

For Muneoka, those questions have guided decades of research—and now, finally, have a new foundation.

“Regenerative failure in mammals can be rescued,” he says. “Now we have a model to begin figuring out how.”

Source: Texas A&M University

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AI-generated code is vulnerable

Vibe coding programmers are releasing batches of vulnerable code, according to researchers who have scanned over 43,000 security advisories across the web.

The programming style relies on using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create software code using tools like Claude, Gemini, and GitHub Copilot.

According to graduate research assistant Hanqing Zhao of the Systems Software & Security Lab (SSLab) at Georgia Tech, no one had been tracking these common vulnerabilities and exposures before the launch of their Vibe Security Radar.

“The vulnerabilities we found lead to breaches,” he says. “Everyone is using these tools now. We need a feedback loop to identify which tools, which patterns, and which workflows create the most risk.”

The radar extensively scans public vulnerability databases, finds the error for each vulnerability, and then examines the code’s history to find who introduced the bug. If they discover an AI tool’s signature, the radar flags it.

Of the 74 confirmed cases uncovered so far by the tool, 14 are critical risks, and 25 are high. These vulnerabilities include command injection, authentication bypass, and server-side request forgery. Zhao explains that since AI models tend to repeat the same mistakes, an attacker would need to find these bugs just once.

“Millions of developers using the same models means the same bugs showing up across different projects,” he says. “Find one pattern in one AI codebase, you can scan for it across thousands of repositories.”

Despite its success, the team has only scratched the surface of the problem. The radar can trace metadata like co-author tags, bot emails, and other known tool signatures, but it can’t identify an issue if these markers have been removed.

The next step is behavioral detection. AI-written code has patterns in how it names variables, structures functions, and handles errors.

“We’re building models that can identify AI code from the code itself, no metadata needed,” says Zhao. “That opens up a lot of cases we currently can’t touch.”

The team is also improving its verification pipeline and expanding its sources to include more vulnerability databases. The goal is to get a more complete picture of AI-introduced vulnerabilities across open source, not just the ones that happen to leave signatures behind.

As more programmers rely on vibe coding, Zhao warns that it still needs to be reviewed as thoroughly as any other project.

“The whole point of vibe coding is not reading it afterward, I know,” he says. “But if you’re shipping AI output to production, review it the way you’d review a junior developer’s pull request. Especially anything around input handling and authentication.”

When prompting AI, SSLab also recommends providing more detailed instructions to get it closer to production-ready. There are also tools to check the code for vulnerabilities after code it has been generated. Not double-checking could lead to a catastrophe.

“The attack surface keeps growing,” says Zhao. “More people running AI agents locally means the attacker doesn’t need to break into the company infrastructure. They just need one vulnerability in a model context protocol server that someone installed and never reviewed.”

One reason the attack surfaces are expanding rapidly is AI’s evolution. In the second half of 2025, the Vibe Security Radar found about 18 cases across seven months. Then, in the first three months of 2026, it identified 56. March 2026 alone had 35, more than all of 2025 combined.

Many tools, like Claude, are now more autonomous, allowing developers to write entire features, create files, and even make architecture decisions.

“When an agent builds something without authentication, that’s not a typo,” says Zhao. “It’s a design flaw baked in from the start. Claude Code and Copilot together account for most of what we detect, but that’s partly because they leave the clearest signatures.”

Source: Georgia Tech

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‘Forever chemical’ exposure may weaken your immune system

New research finds that exposure to PFAS may weaken the immune system in adults, raising new concerns about the long-term health effects of these widely used chemicals.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a large class of human-made chemicals used in products ranging from nonstick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics to firefighting foams.

Often called “forever chemicals,” they do not easily break down in the environment and can accumulate in the human body over time.

Some PFAS remain in the body for years. One compound highlighted in the study, perfluorohexanesulfonic acid, or PFHxS, can persist for nearly a decade, making it a particularly important marker of long-term exposure.

In a study of people previously exposed to PFAS through contaminated drinking water, researchers found that individuals with higher levels of the forever chemicals in their blood produced fewer protective antibodies when their immune systems encountered a new virus—a key measure of how effectively the body responds to infection.

“Antibodies act like tiny soldiers, helping the body recognize and fight off viruses,” says Courtney Carignan, senior author of the study and an environmental health researcher at Michigan State University.

When fewer of these “soldiers” are produced, the immune system may be less effective at fighting infection.

“These results raise important concerns about how long-term exposure to PFAS reduces the body’s ability to respond to infections, even in adulthood,” Carignan says.

The effect was strongest among older adults, men and people who were overweight—groups that often have higher PFAS levels in their bodies.

For some families, those effects are already a reality.

“When you find out your family has been exposed, it changes everything—especially how you think about your children’s health,” says Tobyn McNaughton, a Belmont, Michigan, mother whose family was affected by contaminated drinking water.

“We’re poisoned people. We learned that some of my son’s childhood vaccines weren’t fully effective due to his compromised immune system, and that’s something no parent expects to face.”

McNaughton connected with Carignan in 2018 after high levels of PFAS were found in her family’s drinking water and has since become a clean water advocate with the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network, a group cofounded by her neighbor Sandy Wynn-Stelt that is centered and driven by people affected by toxic PFAS pollution.

Carignan says McNaughton’s and others’ experiences reflect broader patterns seen in the data.

“Previous studies in adults have produced mixed results, in part because prior exposures and existing immunity can make responses difficult to isolate,” Carignan says.

“The pandemic provided a rare opportunity to observe how the immune system responds to a new virus, allowing us to more clearly detect how PFAS exposure may influence antibody production and helping resolve long-standing uncertainty about its effects in adults. Our findings make clear that PFAS exposure can affect immune response in adults in addition to the known effects in children.”

The findings come as the United States continues to debate and implement new drinking water standards for PFAS. The US Environmental Protection Agency finalized its first enforceable drinking water standards for certain PFAS chemicals in 2024, but implementation timelines and enforcement for some compounds have since shifted.

Carignan says the findings support efforts to reduce PFAS exposure—particularly through drinking water—and highlight the importance of continued monitoring and regulation.

“Exposure to PFAS is widespread, but it is also preventable,” Carignan says. “Reducing levels in drinking water is one of the most effective ways to lower exposure and protect public health.”

The research appears in Environmental Health.

Source: Michigan State University

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Are you managing your allergies the wrong way?

If you’re sneezing more than usual this spring, there’s a reason.

Allergy seasons across the US are starting earlier, lasting longer, and hitting harder, driven by warmer temperatures and rising CO2 levels that are increasing pollen production.

What’s more, people who have never had allergies before are suddenly developing them in adulthood—a trend that’s becoming increasingly common.

Lisa Olson-Gugerty, a teaching professor of public health in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a practicing family nurse practitioner, can help explain this year’s allergy season.

Here are some of her insights:

Why this season feels different. Pollen seasons are not only starting earlier—they’re blending together across seasons, meaning the body’s immune system stays activated longer. When multiple trees pollinate at once, exposure becomes stacked and continuous, leading to more severe and persistent symptoms. Pollution compounds the problem by making pollen more irritating to airways. And a lesser-known phenomenon—”thunderstorm asthma”—can trigger severe asthma attacks when storms break pollen grains into tiny particles that travel deep into the lungs.

You are not born with allergies. First-time allergy symptoms in adulthood are very common, and the changing climate is expanding the pool of people affected. Anyone experiencing new seasonal symptoms this year shouldn’t assume it’s just a cold. Olson-Gugerty offers a simple rule of thumb: itching points to allergies; fever and body aches point to infection.

Kids are different, and parents often miss the signs. Children are more likely to develop ear infections, sleep disturbances, and asthma flare-ups during high-pollen periods, but they often can’t articulate their symptoms. Parents should watch for mouth breathing, unusual fatigue, irritability, and dark circles under the eyes—signs that are easy to overlook or misattribute.

The most common mistake allergy sufferers make. Olson-Gugerty says it’s waiting too long to treat. Allergy medications work best when started before symptoms peak, and taking them only as needed rather than consistently is one of the biggest reasons people struggle unnecessarily each spring.

Source: Syracuse University

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Watch: Team turns vapes into musical instruments

A team hacked into disposable e-cigarettes to highlight the problem of e-waste and encourage creative, sustainable use of circuits and batteries.

The squeaky, buzzy sound isn’t exactly musical, but playing or listening to a vape synth will definitely make you smile.

David Rios, Kari S. Love, and Shuang Cai, instructors and researchers in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Interactive Telecommunications Program, are the creative hackers behind the synth, a novelty electronic instrument made from discarded vape cartridges.

Using a salvaged vape’s low-pressure sensor, lithium battery, and mouthpiece, they made a crude ocarina-like device that plays notes when the player sucks in air (sort of the opposite of a wind instrument) and presses buttons on the cartridge.

The team also created a set of open-source instructions so that DIYers can try building their own.

Disposable vapes create a lot of e-waste, and repurposing them into synthesizers or anything else extends the life of the components, keeping them out of the landfill.

In the video below, the NYU makers test their synths and explain their effort to promote sustainability and creative repurposing of discarded electronics:

Source: NYU

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