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Category: evolution

Cancer Vaccines Improve Personalized Medical Care

The concept of cancer vaccines has developed over the last century with initial promise from a young doctor, William Coley. In the late 19th to early 20th century Dr. Coley developed a treatment that elicited strong immune response. This elixir was referred to as Coley’s toxin, which comprised of bacteria that generated an inflammatory response in patients. As a result, the generated response recognized and targeted the patient’s tumor. However, his treatment did not yield consistent clinical benefit. He also had his critics among physicians. At the time, the scientific community debated how safe the toxin was and whether it really worked. Colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering and other top institutions questioned Coley’s motive for the toxin, since there was little empirical data or scientific basis for its use. Although Coley’s toxin proved to be an inconsistent treatment, it laid the foundation for future immunotherapies as preventative and therapeutic cancer vaccines were developed.

Cancer vaccines were limited in their ability to effectively treat patients with cancer. Preventative cancer vaccines are difficult to developed because of the uncertainty to predict the onset of mutations in patients. Currently, the only U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved preventative cancer vaccine is for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. While it directly protects against HPV, the vaccine indirectly prevents a multitude of cancers, including cervical, anal, and genital. Additionally, researchers have previously struggled to generate a therapeutic vaccine that elicits a strong immune response with limited adverse effects. However, a reinvigorated interest has emerged in therapeutic vaccines due to improved delivery platforms and better biomarkers to target on cancer.

Recently, an article in Cell Reports Medicine, by Dr. Nina Bhardwaj and others, examined the evolution of cancer vaccines. Specifically, the paper focused on tumor biomarker-based vaccines, which are highly personalized and designed to target genetic mutations specific to a patient’s tumor. Bhardwaj is a physician scientist, the Ward-Coleman Chair in Cancer Research, and Director of Vaccine and Cell Therapy Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her work focuses on improving vaccine strategies to provide strong single agent affect against tumors. Bhardwaj’s group studies different cellular pathways to understand how to therapeutically target cancer.

Long-Sought Proof Tames Some of Math’s Unruliest Equations

The trajectory of a storm, the evolution of stock prices, the spread of disease — mathematicians can describe any phenomenon that changes in time or space using what are known as partial differential equations. But there’s a problem: These “PDEs” are often so complicated that it’s impossible to solve them directly.

Mathematicians instead rely on a clever workaround. They might not know how to compute the exact solution to a given equation, but they can try to show that this solution must be “regular,” or well-behaved in a certain sense — that its values won’t suddenly jump in a physically impossible way, for instance. If a solution is regular, mathematicians can use a variety of tools to approximate it, gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon they want to study.

But many of the PDEs that describe realistic situations have remained out of reach. Mathematicians haven’t been able to show that their solutions are regular. In particular, some of these out-of-reach equations belong to a special class of PDEs that researchers spent a century developing a theory of — a theory that no one could get to work for this one subclass. They’d hit a wall.

Ultrafast Movie Reveals Unexpected Plasma Behavior

Using a camera with 2-picosecond time resolution, researchers show that the atoms in a laser-induced plasma are more highly ionized than theory predicts.

With an astonishing 500 billion frames per second, a new movie captures the evolution of a laser-induced plasma, revealing that its atoms have lost more electrons—and thus have stronger interactions within the plasma—than models predict [1]. The movie relies on a ten-year-old technology, called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), that packs all the information for hundreds of movie frames into a single image. The results suggest that models of plasma formation may need revising, which could have implications for inertial-confinement-fusion experiments, such as those at the National Ignition Facility in California.

Dense plasmas occur in many astrophysical settings and laboratory experiments. Their behavior is difficult to predict, as they often change on picosecond (10−12 s) timescales. A traditional method for probing this behavior is to use a streak camera, which collects a movie on a single image by capturing a small slice of each movie frame. “It’s one picture, but every line occurs at a different time,” explains John Koulakis from UCLA. He and his colleagues have used streak cameras to study anomalous behavior in plasmas [2], but the small region of plasma visible with this technique left doubts about what they were seeing, he says.

Beamline measurements of unstable ruthenium nuclei confirm advanced nuclear models

A novel apparatus at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has made extremely precise measurements of unstable ruthenium nuclei. The measurements are a significant milestone in nuclear physics because they closely match predictions made by sophisticated nuclear models.

“It’s very difficult for theoretical models to predict the properties of complex, unstable nuclei,” said Bernhard Maass, an assistant physicist at Argonne and the study’s lead author. “We have demonstrated that a class of advanced models can do this accurately. Our results help to validate the models.”

Validating the models can build trust in their predictions about astrophysical processes. These include the formation, evolution and explosions of stars where elements are created.

How a superionic state enables long-term water storage in Earth’s interior

The cycling of water within Earth’s interior regulates plate tectonics, volcanism, ocean volume, and climate stability, making it central to the planet’s long-term evolution and habitability and a key scientific question. While subducting slabs are known to transport water into the mantle, scientists have long assumed that most hydrous minerals dehydrate at high temperatures, releasing fluids as they descend.

Whether water can survive the extreme conditions of the deep lower mantle, however, has remained an open question.

As puzzling as a platypus: The JWST finds some hard to categorize objects

The platypus is one of evolution’s lovable, oddball animals. The creature seems to defy well-understood rules of biology by combining physical traits in a bizarre way. They’re egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver-like tails, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind feet. In that regard, it’s only fitting that astronomers describe some newly discovered oddball objects as “Astronomy’s Platypus.”

The discovery consists of nine galaxies that also have unusual properties and seem to defy categorization. The findings were recently presented at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. The results are also in new research titled “A New Population of Point-like, Narrow-line Objects Revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope,” posted to the arXiv preprint server. The lead author is Haojing Yan from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“We report a new population of objects discovered using the data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which are characterized by their point-like morphology and narrow permitted emission lines,” the authors write in their research. “Due to the limitation of the current data, the exact nature of this new population is still uncertain.”

Heisenberg-limited Quantum Sensing Achieves Noise Resilience Via Indefinite-Causal-Order Error Correction

The research extends beyond theoretical analysis by outlining a feasible experimental implementation using integrated photonics. This includes a detailed description of the required optical components and control sequences for realising the ICO gate and performing the quantum sensing measurements. By leveraging the advantages of integrated photonics, the proposed scheme offers a pathway towards compact and scalable quantum sensors with enhanced performance characteristics. The findings pave the way for practical applications in fields such as precision metrology, biomedical imaging, and materials science.

Indefinite Causal Order for Real-Time Error Correction

Realistic noisy devices present significant challenges to quantum technologies. Quantum error correction (QEC) offers a potential solution, but its implementation in quantum sensing is limited by the need for prior noise characterisation, restrictive signal, noise compatibility conditions, and measurement-based syndrome extraction requiring global control. Researchers have now introduced an ICO-based QEC protocol, representing the first application of indefinite causal order (ICO) to QEC. By coherently integrating auxiliary controls and noisy evolution within an indefinite causal order, the resulting noncommutative interference allows an auxiliary system to herald and correct errors in real time.

A Double Helium Tail Wraps Around WASP-121b

“We were incredibly surprised to see how long the helium escape lasted,” said Dr. Romain Allart.

What effects can an exoplanet orbiting close to its star have on the former’s atmosphere? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated a unique atmospheric phenomenon of an ultra-hot Jupiter, the latter of which are exoplanets that orbit extremely close to their stars, and the intense heat causes their atmospheres to slowly strip away. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of ultra-hot Jupiters and their solar systems, and where we could search for life beyond Earth.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data obtained by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-121b, which is located approximately 880 light-years from Earth and orbits its F-type star in only 1.3 days. For context, F-type stars are larger and hotter than our Sun—which is a G-type star—and the closest planet to our Sun—Mercury—orbits our Sun in 88 days. What makes WASP-121b intriguing is not only is its helium atmosphere is slowly being stripped away, also called atmospheric escape, but the data revealed that this has resulted in two helium tails wrapping around WASP-121b while circling approximately 60 percent of the exoplanet’s orbit.

Evidence of ‘lightning-fast’ evolution found after Chicxulub impact

The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate change. But new research shows that it also set the stage for life to rebound astonishingly quickly.

New species of plankton appeared fewer than 2,000 years after the world-altering event, according to research led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and published in Geology.

Lead author Chris Lowery, a research associate professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences, said that it’s a remarkably quick evolutionary feat that has never been seen before in the fossil record. Typically, new species appear on roughly million-year time frames.

NASA supercomputer just predicted Earth’s hard limit for life

Scientists have used a NASA-grade supercomputer to push our planet to its limits, virtually fast‑forwarding the clock until complex organisms can no longer survive. The result is a hard upper bound on how long Earth can sustain breathable air and liquid oceans, and it is far less about sudden catastrophe than a slow suffocation driven by the Sun itself. The work turns a hazy, far‑future question into a specific timeline for the end of life as we know it.

Instead of fireballs or rogue asteroids, the simulations point to a world that quietly runs out of oxygen, with only hardy microbes clinging on before even they disappear. It is a stark reminder that Earth’s habitability is not permanent, yet it also stretches over such vast spans of time that our immediate crises still depend on choices made this century, not on the Sun’s distant evolution.

The new modeling effort starts from a simple premise: if I know how the Sun brightens over time and how Earth’s atmosphere responds, I can calculate when conditions for complex life finally fail. Researchers fed a high‑performance system with detailed physics of the atmosphere, oceans and carbon cycle, then let it run through hundreds of thousands of scenarios until the planet’s chemistry tipped past a critical point. One study describes a supercomputer simulation that projects life on Earth ending in roughly 1 billion years, once rising solar heat strips away most atmospheric oxygen.

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