One of the reasons cancer is so deadly is that it can evade attack from the body’s immune system, which allows tumors to flourish and spread. Scientists can try to induce the immune system, known as immunotherapy, to go into attack mode to fight cancer and to build long-lasting immune resistance to cancer cells. Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) show a non–surgical injection of programmable biomaterial that spontaneously assembles in vivo into a 3D structure could fight and even help prevent cancer and also infectious disease such as HIV....

Pluripotent stem cells can be used to make experimental models of organ systems, but current techniques often produce models that bear limited resemblance to true organs. Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) and Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) developed an improved method to make a sophisticated three-dimensional organoid model of the liver, pancreas, and bile ducts. The model may help researchers understand how these organs form and how genetic mutations can lead to diseases in these organs....

Two and a half years ago, a team of researchers led by groups at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and Boston University announced a milestone: the fabrication of a working microprocessor, built using only existing manufacturing processes, that integrated electronic and optical components on the same chip. The researchers’ approach, however, required that the chip’s electrical components be built from the same layer of silicon as its optical components....

The investigations aboard Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander are destined for Reiner Gamma, one of the most distinctive and enigmatic natural features on the Moon. Known as a lunar swirl, Reiner Gamma is on the western edge of the Moon, as seen from Earth, and is one of the most visible lunar swirls. Scientists continue to learn what lunar swirls are, how they form, and their relationship to the Moon’s magnetic field....

[Update: Element 113 has been named Nihonium.] The Japanese have claimed that they have been able to create a third atom of element 113, known by its temporary name Ununtrium. It took them nine years of painstaking experiments, but this success implies that the element could finally be added to the periodic table. It would be the first artificial element discovered in East Asia, giving the Japanese the right to name it....

Appearing colorful and serene, this environment is anything but. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster. Most of the stars in the cluster were born around the same time but differ in size, mass, temperature, and color. The course of a star’s life is determined by its mass, so a cluster of a given age will contain stars in various stages of their lives, giving an opportunity for detailed analyses of stellar life cycles....

A partial solar eclipse, the scorpion’s sting, and June is for Juno! June 13: For the Washington, D.C. area, and similar latitudes, the earliest sunrise of the year occurs at 5:42:11 a.m. EDT.June 20: Summer solstice is at 11:32 p.m. EDT.June 24: The next full Moon is June 24 and it’s sometimes called the Strawberry Moon. Following last month’s total lunar eclipse, June brings us a solar eclipse. On June 10th, the Moon will slip briefly between Earth and the Sun, partially obscuring our local star from view....

The color-enhanced image is a combination of three separate images taken on April 1 between 3:09 a.m. PDT (6:09 a.m. EDT) and 3:24 a.m. PDT (6:24 a.m. EDT), as Juno performed its 12th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the images were taken, the spacecraft was 15,379 miles (24,749 kilometers) to 30,633 miles (49,299 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a southern latitude spanning 43....

Juno is in a highly-elliptical 53-day orbit around Jupiter. Each orbit includes a close passage over the planet’s cloud deck, where it flies a ground track that extends from Jupiter’s north pole to its south pole. This movie was generated using imagery collected on October 29, 2018, during Juno’s 16th perijove (the point at which an orbit comes closest to Jupiter’s center). Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt created this movie using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager....

New research published in The Journal of Physiology has shown that ketone supplements may be a novel therapeutic strategy for protecting and improving brain health in people with obesity. People with obesity are known to be at a higher risk of developing cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative diseases. This new study found that giving a ketone supplement three times a day for 14 days enhanced blood flow to the brain and improved aspects of cognitive function, like working memory and processing speed, in adults with obesity....

The findings, entitled “Evidence for suprathermal ion distribution in burning plasmas,” were featured in a new paper published in the November 14 issue of Nature Physics. The work reveals that neutron energy measurements on the high-yield burning and igniting inertial confinement fusion experiments (ICF) showed that a higher-than-expected average neutron energy is produced for a deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasma that is in thermal equilibrium. “This implies that the ions undergoing fusion have more energy than expected in the highest-performing shots, something that isn’t predicted — or able to be predicted — by the normal radiation hydrodynamics codes used to simulate ICF implosions,” said Alastair Moore, LLNL physicist and lead author of the paper....

Children are always going to find cunning ways to bunk off school, and the latest trick is to fake a positive COVID-19 lateral flow test (LFT) using soft drinks. So how are fruit juices, cola and devious kids fooling the tests and is there a way to tell a fake positive result from a real one? I’ve tried to find out. First, I thought it best to check the claims, so I cracked open bottles of cola and orange juice, then deposited a few drops directly onto LFTs....

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, designed the next-generation smart lighting system using a combination of nanotechnology, color science, advanced computational methods, electronics, and a unique fabrication process. The team found that by using more than the three primary lighting colors used in typical LEDs, they were able to reproduce daylight more accurately. Early tests of the new design showed excellent color rendering, a wider operating range than current smart lighting technology, and wider spectrum of white light customization....

Researchers affiliated with Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History have published the first detailed scientific account of a recently discovered monkey species living in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is only the second new species of African monkey discovered since the mid-1980s. The slender, medium-sized primate — called a Lesula (luh-SOO-la) and roughly similar to a vervet monkey — represents a rare discovery of a previously undocumented mammal, and helps establish the sparsely settled central Congo as an important source of biodiversity, researchers said....

For many years, Titan’s thick, methane- and nitrogen-rich atmosphere kept astronomers from seeing what lies beneath. Saturn’s largest moon appeared through telescopes as a hazy orange orb, in contrast to other heavily cratered moons in the solar system. In 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft — a probe that flies by Titan as it orbits Saturn — penetrated Titan’s haze, providing scientists with their first detailed images of the surface. Radar images revealed an icy terrain carved out over millions of years by rivers of liquid methane, similar to how rivers of water have etched into Earth’s rocky continents....

“Optical gain with electrically excited quantum dots is now a reality,” said Victor Klimov, head of the quantum dot team at Los Alamos. “We have been working to develop new lasing media, using chemically synthesized quantum dots, although it had been widely believed that quantum dot lasing with electrical stimulation is simply impossible,” he said. “By using our specially designed dots, we can avoid energy losses created by Auger recombination....

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied and Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed an efficient machine-learning algorithm that can do that work quickly. The research is described in Science Robotics. “This new method is an effective and fast way to optimize control parameter settings for assistive wearable devices,” said Ye Ding, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and co-first author of the research....

For several years, the electron spin of individual electrons in a quantum dot has been identified as an ideal candidate for the smallest information unit in a quantum computer, otherwise known as a qubit. Controlled via applied voltages In quantum dots made of layered semiconductor materials, individual electrons are caught in a trap, so to speak. Their spins can be determined reliably and switched quickly, with researchers keeping the electrons under control by applying voltages to the various nanostructures within the trap....

The Orion Nebula, one of the most famous sights in the night sky, contains several clusters of hot young stars, whose intense ultraviolet radiation prompts the gas and dust to glow brightly. The nebula is about 1360 light-years away, making it the closest nursery of massive stars and one of the best-studied such regions. But despite its fame, brightness, and proximity, astronomers still do not understand it very well. It contains dramatic outflows of material, for example, that may be driven by a single star or perhaps by a cluster of stars — astronomers are not sure....

According to the World Health Organization, about 785 million people around the world lack a clean source of drinking water. Despite the vast amount of water on Earth, most of it is seawater and freshwater accounts for only about 2.5% of the total. One of the ways to provide clean drinking water is to desalinate seawater. The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) has announced the development of a stable performance electrospun nanofiber membrane to turn seawater into drinking water by membrane distillation process....