Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a technique to stop the movement of cancer cells. When cancer moves from a primary tumor to other sites in the body, it becomes far more dangerous to the patient, and that has driven scientists to work for years to learn more about how cancer cells migrate. This work, which was reported in Nature Communications, may help create therapeutics that can prevent cancer from spreading.

After targeting the “motors” that generate forces in cancer cells to move, the cancer cells switch to a dendritic or “flowing” response to follow pathways in tumors that drive cell migration and promote spreading of the cancer. / Credit: Tabdanov/Provenzano, University of Minnesota

When tumors grow in the body, they can create interior networks that cancer cells can use like a highway, ultimately moving closer to blood vessels and other neighboring tissues. When patients have cancerous tumors with a large number of those highways, there is a lower likelihoood they will survive the cancer. One thing that has eluded researchers, however, is knowing exactly how cancer cells are able to find and move along those highways.

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The eastern section of Antarctica is buried beneath a thick ice sheet. Some scientists simply assumed that under that cold mass there was nothing more than a “frozen tectonic block,” a somewhat homogeneous mass that distinguished it from the mixed up geologies of other continents.

But with the help of data from a discontinued European satellite, scientists have now found that East Antarctica is in fact a graveyard of continental remnants. They have created stunning 3D maps of the southernmost continent’s tectonic underworld and found that the ice has been concealing wreckage of an ancient supercontinent’s spectacular destruction.

The researchers, led by Jörg Ebbing, a geophysicist at Kiel University in Germany, reported their discovery earlier this month in Scientific Reports.

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Researchers have developed catalysts that can convert carbon dioxide—the main cause of global warming—into plastics, fabrics, resins, and other products.

The electrocatalysts are the first materials, aside from enzymes, that can turn carbon dioxide and water into carbon building blocks containing one, two, three, or four carbon atoms with more than 99 percent efficiency.

Two of the products—methylglyoxal (C3) and 2,3-furandiol (C4)—can be used as precursors for plastics, adhesives, and pharmaceuticals. Toxic formaldehyde could be replaced by methylglyoxal, which is safer.

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Mars is lacking in the vast supply of natural resources we’ve come to rely on here on Earth, and astronauts attempting to colonize, or even just visit, the red planet can only bring a limited supply of materials with them. Learning to make do with what Mars has to offer is one of the biggest challenges of visiting our nearest neighbor, but the results of the European Space Agency’s latest 3D-printing experiments prove it isn’t impossible.

We’ve sent probes and rovers to Mars, but to date it’s only been a one-way trip. Our knowledge of what Mars is made from is limited to what Spirit and Opportunity can learn from samples, and studying Martian meteorites that have made their way to Earth. Like our moon, if there’s one thing Mars isn’t lacking, it’s dust. So as a stand in for genuine Mars ingredients, researchers have turned to a simulated version of lunar soil, also known as lunar regolith.

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