Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have been able to coax human breast cancer cells to turn into fat cells in a new proof-of-concept study in mice.

To achieve this feat, the team exploited a weird pathway that metastasising cancer cells have; their results are just a first step, but it’s a truly promising approach.

When you cut your finger, or when a foetus grows organs, the epithelium cells begin to look less like themselves, and more ‘fluid’ – changing into a type of stem cell called a mesenchyme and then reforming into whatever cells the body needs.

Our observable Universe is an enormous place, with some two trillion galaxies strewn across the abyss of space for tens of billions of light-years in all directions. Ever since the 1920s, when we first unambiguously demonstrated that those galaxies were well beyond the extent of the Milky Way by accurately measuring the distances to them, one fact leaped out at us: the farther away a galaxy is, on average, the more severely shifted towards the red, long-wavelength part of the spectrum its light will be.

This relationship, between redshift and distance, looks like a straight line when we first plot it out: the farther away you look, the greater the distant object’s redshift is, in direct proportion to one another. If you measure the slope of that line, you get a value, colloquially known as the Hubble constant. But it isn’t actually a constant at all, as it changes over time. Here’s the science behind why.

In our Universe, light doesn’t simply propagate through a fixed and unchanging space, arriving at its destination with the same properties it possessed when it was emitted by the source. Instead, it must contend with an additional factor: the expansion of the Universe. This expansion of space, as you can see, above, affects the properties of the light itself. In particular, as the Universe expands, the wavelength of the light passing through that space gets stretched.

A new study has shown a link between heart failure and a class of painkillers that includes ibuprofen. The story has received widespread news coverage, much of which sounds quite alarming.

Artificial intelligence hit some key milestones in 2017. At Facebook, chatbots were able to negotiate as well as their human counterparts. A poker-playing system designed by Carnegie Mellon professors mopped the floor with live opponents. There were even some potentially life-saving breakthroughs, like the machine vision system that can determine whether a mole is cancerous with more than 90 percent accuracy—beating out a group of dermatologists.

From agriculture to medicine and beyond, plenty of startups are using AI in innovative ways. Here are five companies you should expect big things from in 2018.

SoundHound has been around for 13 years, and has spent that time trying to build the most powerful voice assistant ever. The startup began by creating a Shazam-like song recognition app called Midomi; now, the newly released Hound app is capable of answering complex voice prompts like, “Show me all below-average-priced restaurants within a five-mile radius that are open past 10 p.m. but don’t include Chinese or pizza places,” or “What’s the weather like in the capital of the biggest state in the U.S.?”

Pour milk in coffee, and the eddies and tendrils of white soon fade to brown. In half an hour, the drink cools to room temperature. Left for days, the liquid evaporates. After centuries, the cup will disintegrate, and billions of years later, the entire planet, sun and solar system will disperse. Throughout the universe, all matter and energy is diffusing out of hot spots like coffee and stars, ultimately destined (after trillions of years) to spread uniformly through space. In other words, the same future awaits coffee and the cosmos.

This gradual spreading of matter and energy, called “thermalization,” aims the arrow of time. But the fact that time’s arrow is irreversible, so that hot coffee cools down but never spontaneously heats up, isn’t written into the underlying laws that govern the motion of the molecules in the coffee. Rather, thermalization is a statistical outcome: The coffee’s heat is far more likely to spread into the air than the cold air molecules are to concentrate energy into the coffee, just as shuffling a new deck of cards randomizes the cards’ order, and repeat shuffles will practically never re-sort them by suit and rank. Once coffee, cup and air reach thermal equilibrium, no more energy flows between them, and no further change occurs. Thus thermal equilibrium on a cosmic scale is dubbed the “heat death of the universe.”

But while it’s easy to see where thermalization leads (to tepid coffee and eventual heat death), it’s less obvious how the process begins. “If you start far from equilibrium, like in the early universe, how does the arrow of time emerge, starting from first principles?” said Jürgen Berges, a theoretical physicist at Heidelberg University in Germany who has studied this problem for more than a decade.

Such fifth-generation fighters are only now coming into service and others are being developed in Russia, China, and Japan, but they are already obsolete. Even while the F-35 was still in the testing phase, the US Pentagon was looking at a replacement, and countries like France and Germany gave up their own efforts at building a fifth-generation fighter in favor of skipping straight to making a sixth.

The world of aerospace is full of buzzwords and phrases and one that’s been getting a lot of attention in military aircraft circles is “sixth-generation fighters.” Rather than an F-35 or a Typhoon with new trim and chrome hubcaps, these emerging combat aircraft are set to represent a real sea change in tactics and, perhaps, strategy in the middle of the 21st century. But what exactly is the sixth gen? Let’s take a look.

A photograph captured by amateur astronomer Ethan Chappel appears to show an asteroid slamming into the gas giant Jupiter on Wednesday (Aug. 7). So far, astronomers are still waiting to see whether anyone else spotted the sudden flash, which was located over the planet’s South Equatorial Belt.

The night skies in August are full of celestial wonders, including bright planets and a meteor shower.

Venus and Mars are currently blocked from our view by the sun, but this week is a great chance to catch Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction with the moon.

The nearly full moon will appear very close to Jupiter on the night of August 9. Jupiter, the next brightest planet in our sky after Venus, will be visible in the sky beginning at dusk and well until the early hours of the morning around the world, according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

A California “human biohacking” bill calls for warnings on do-it-yourself genetic-engineering kits.