Limited access to iron at high temperatures impairs growth and function of microalgae that live within coral cells. How well corals respond to climate change could depend in part on the already scarce amount of iron available in their environment, according to a new study led by Penn State researchers. The study reveals that the combination of hot water temperatures and low iron levels compromises the algae that live within coral cells, suggesting that limited iron levels–which could decline with…

The NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has tracked the fading light of a supernova in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525, located 70 million light years away. Supernovae like this one can be used as cosmic tape measures, allowing astronomers to calculate the distance to their galaxies. Hubble captured these images as part of one of its major investigations, measuring the expansion rate of the Universe, which can help answer fundamental questions about our Universe’s very nature. The supernova, formally known as…

Researchers at the University of Freiburg established the world’s largest collection of moss species for the peat industry and science. Peatlands with their huge diversity of peat moss species store about 30 percent of the earth’s soil carbon. This means they store roughly twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. However, peat harvesting and climate change are threatening these long-term carbon stores because there is not enough founder material for cultivating peat mosses on a large scale….

New approach facilitates the control of reversible conductivity in semiconductors. The semiconductor gallium oxide is thought to be a promising candidate for potential use in power electronics. So far, however, a number of obstacles have stood in its path, especially how to specifically influence the material’s electrical conductivity. In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-62948-2), a team of researchers involving scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have now demonstrated how the conductivity of gallium oxide…

JILA physicists have boosted the signal power of their atomic “tweezer clock” and measured its performance in part for the first time, demonstrating high stability close to the best of the latest generation of atomic clocks. The unusual clock, which uses laser tweezers to trap, control and isolate atoms, offers unique possibilities for enhancing clock performance using the tricks of quantum physics as well as future applications in quantum information processing, quantum simulation, and measurement science. Described in a Nature…

… wakes solid tumors to respond to therapy. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, which uses engineered T cells to treat certain types of cancers, has often been a challenging approach to treating solid tumors. CAR T cells need to recognize a specific target on cancer cells to kill them. However, cancer cells do not always have the target, or they find ways to hide the target and stay invisible to CAR T cell attack. A new study from…

Hoverflies use a combination of the sun and their body clock to navigate when they fly south for the winter, new research shows. The insects keep the sun on their left in the morning, then gradually adjust to maintain a southward route as the day goes on. Pied and yellow-clubbed hoverflies – which are important pollinators – spend their summers in locations such as the UK and Scandinavia, then fly to the Mediterranean and North Africa in autumn. These migrations…

Machine learning algorithms are shedding light on neoantigen T cell-receptor pairs. Researchers and data scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center and MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed an artificial intelligence technique that can identify which cell surface peptides produced by cancer cells called neoantigens are recognized by the immune system. The pMTnet technique, detailed online in Nature Machine Intelligence, could lead to new ways to predict cancer prognosis and potential responsiveness to immunotherapies. “Determining which neoantigens bind to T cell receptors and which…

An international team of researchers has made the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime, which may help answer questions about the early universe. An international team of physicists led by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington has announced the world’s most precise measurement of the neutron’s lifetime. The results from the team, which encompasses scientists from over 10 national labs and universities in the United States and abroad, represent a more than two-fold improvement over previous measurements — with…

How gentle nuclear reactions with fragile nuclei could help us better understand the universe and fight cancer. It’s strange to think that there are nuclear reactions that physicists classify as gentle. After all, the particle accelerators that let scientists study these reactions are nicknamed “atom smashers,” not “atom coddlers.” But gentle nuclear reactions represent more than a strange-sounding curiosity. These reactions let researchers stress-test certain scientific models that account for how the universe’s fundamental rules work, said Kaitlin Cook of the Facility for…

To celebrate the 60th birthday of King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway in 1889, the journal Acta Mathematica offered a prize for manuscripts that could help solve the following question, generally referred to as the 3-body problem: Can we predict the orbits of planets, moons and other celestial bodies over time? Although mathematician Henri Poincaré was awarded the gold medal and 2,500 Swedish kronor prize for his submission (later found to have an error), the general analytical solution to the “n-body”…

University of Exeter scientists have discovered new information about the tiny propellers used by single-cell organisms called archaea. Like bacteria, archaea are found in a vast range of habitats – including inside human bodies – but unlike bacteria they are not known to cause disease. Some archaea propel themselves to incredible speeds by rotating a spiral-shaped filament called an archaellum. Using a powerful cryo-electron microscope, the new study examined this closer than ever before. The research team – which included…

No one would ever imagine crumpling up their smartphone, television or another electronic device. Today’s displays – which are flat, rigid and fragile – lack the ability to reshape to interactively respond to users. As part of an overarching quest to build “skin-inspired” electronics that are soft and stretchy, Stanford University chemical engineer Zhenan Bao and her research team have been developing a display to change that. Now, after more than three years of work, they show the proof of principle toward…

One cutting-edge cancer treatment exciting researchers today involves collecting and reprogramming a patient’s T cells – a special set of immune cells – then putting them back into the body ready to detect and destroy cancerous cells. Although effective for widespread blood cancers like leukemia, this method rarely succeeds at treating solid tumors. Now, Stanford University engineers have developed a delivery method that enhances the “attack power” of the modified immune cells, called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. Researchers…

Solid-state nanophotonic technology could potentially replace cabinets of equipment. Rice University photonics researchers have created a potentially disruptive technology for the ultraviolet optics market. By precisely etching hundreds of tiny triangles on the surface of a microscopic film of zinc oxide, nanophotonics pioneer Naomi Halas and colleagues created a “metalens” that transforms incoming long-wave UV (UV-A) into a focused output of vacuum UV (VUV) radiation. VUV is used in semiconductor manufacturing, photochemistry and materials science and has historically been costly…

… to bring health care closer to precisely targeted drug delivery. If you’ve ever swallowed the same round tablet in hopes of curing everything from stomach cramps to headaches, you already know that medicines aren’t always designed to treat precise pain points. While over-the-counter pills have cured many ailments for decades, biomedical researchers have only recently begun exploring ways to improve targeted drug delivery when treating more complicated medical conditions, like cardiovascular disease or cancer. A promising innovation within this…

– with and without water. Studies of a common catalyst suggest strategies for improving the conversion of a natural gas component to useful chemicals. The Science Chemists have been searching for efficient catalysts—substances that speed up chemical reactions—to convert methane into methanol. Methane, a major component of abundant natural gas, is sometimes flared off as waste at wells. Methanol is an easily transported liquid fuel and a building block for making other valuable chemicals. Adding water to the methane conversion reaction…

When carbon atoms stack into a perfectly repeating three-dimensional crystal, they can form precious diamonds. Arranged another way, in repetitive flat sheets, carbon makes the shiny gray graphite found in pencils. But there are other forms of carbon that are less well understood. Amorphous carbon—usually a sooty black material—has no repetitive molecular structure, making it challenging to study. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have utilized a new framework for understanding the electronic…

Using sophisticated electronic tags, scientists have assembled a large biologging dataset to garner comparative insights on how sharks, rays, and skates – also known as “elasmobranchs” – use the ocean depths. While some species spend their entire lives in shallow waters close to our shores on the continental shelf, others plunge hundreds of meters or more off the slope waters into the twilight zone, beyond where sunlight penetrates. This new understanding of how elasmobranchs use the ocean will enable policymakers…

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams has demonstrated an innovative liquid-lithium charge stripper to accelerate unprecedentedly high-power heavy-ion beams. The Science The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) accelerates heavy-ion beams at beam power up to 400 kilowatts into a target to create rare isotopes for scientific research. A charge stripper plays an essential role in this process. It strips additional electrons from the charged-particle beam to accelerate it more efficiently. FRIB’s beam is too powerful for a conventional charge stripper made…