A process that normally occurs in developing embryos—the changing of one basic cell type into another—has also been suspected of playing a role in cancer metastasis. Now a study from HMS researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center has associated this process, called the epithelial-mesenchymal transition, or EMT, with disease progression and treatment response in breast cancer patients. The report also identifies underlying mechanisms that someday may become therapeutic targets....

In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, physicists in the UK and Singapore report a new family of electromagnetic pulses, the exact solutions of Maxwell’s equation with toroidal topology, in which topological complexity can be continuously controlled, namely supertoroidal topology. The electromagnetic fields in such supertoroidal pulses have skyrmionic structures as they propagate in free space with the speed of light. Skyrmions, sophisticated topological particles originally proposed as a unified model of the nucleon by Tony Skyrme in 1962, behave like nanoscale magnetic vortices with spectacular textures....

The Pencil Nebula is pictured in a new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. This peculiar cloud of glowing gas is part of a huge ring of wreckage left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11,000 years ago. This detailed view was produced by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope. Despite the tranquil and apparently unchanging beauty of a starry night, the Universe is far from being a quiet place....

The study, led by the University of Galway’s Professor James P O’Gara and Dr. Merve S Zeden, was recently published in the journal mBio. Professor of Microbiology James O’Gara said: “This discovery is important because it has revealed a potentially new way to treat MRSA infections with penicillin-type drugs, which remain the safest and most effective antibiotics.” The antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis is one of the greatest threats to human health with superbugs like MRSA placing a significant burden on global healthcare resources....

Researchers from the HSE have discovered genes that are specific to the most aggressive subtype of clear cell renal carcinoma. Grigory Puzanov, a research fellow at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science International Laboratory of Bioinformatics, analyzed data from 456 patients with the disease and identified cancer subtypes that either had a favorable or unfavorable prognosis. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. Clear cell renal carcinoma (ccRCC) is the most common type of kidney cancer....

In the last decade, technologies to measure gene expression in individual cells have revolutionized biology. No longer do biologists need to average out gene expression over many cells within tissues; now they can detect which genes are active in each cell at any time. Computational power has struggled to keep up with this explosion of data, however. For example, a single experiment can look at 100,000 cells and measure information from hundreds of thousands of transcripts (fragments of RNA produced when a gene is active), resulting in tens of billions of sequenced fragments....

Of the nearly 100 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines currently undergoing clinical trials, only seven are delivered intranasally — despite this vaccine type’s long success in providing protection from influenza. In a Perspective, Frances Lund and Troy Randall argue that intranasal vaccines could be beneficial in the continued fight against COVID-19, especially considering respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 predominantly enter the nasal passage first. Currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines are delivered via intramuscular injection, where they elicit systemic immune responses and central immune memory....

Most emerging infectious diseases of humans (like COVID-19) are zoonotic – caused by viruses originating from other animal species. Identifying high-risk viruses earlier can improve research and surveillance priorities. A study published in PLOS Biology on September 28th by Nardus Mollentze, Simon Babayan, and Daniel Streicker at University of Glasgow, United Kingdom suggests that machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) using viral genomes may predict the likelihood that any animal-infecting virus will infect humans, given biologically relevant exposure....

Researchers at EPFL have developed a novel way of predicting lightning strikes to the nearest 10 to 30 minutes and within a radius of 30 kilometers. The system uses a combination of standard data from weather stations and artificial intelligence. Lightning is one of the most unpredictable phenomena in nature. It regularly kills people and animals and sets fire to homes and forests. It keeps aircraft grounded and damages power lines, wind turbines, and solar panel installations....

Spending on cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine by Americans reached nearly $150 billion in 2016, with a large proportion of spending coming from the small share of people who use drugs on a daily or near-daily basis, according to a new RAND Corporation report. Researchers estimate that from 2006 to 2016, the total amount of money spent by Americans on these four drugs fluctuated between $120 billion and $145 billion each year....

According to one of the study’s authors, Subhashis Pal, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in endocrinology at the Emory University School of Medicine, the findings highlight the significance of the gut microbiome in overall health and suggest that physicians should carefully consider the gastrointestinal effects when using antibiotic therapies to treat cancer or other diseases. “Any disease or therapy that harms the gut microbiome could have a negative impact on our health,” said Dr....

The critical parameter of a brown dwarf is its mass, but it is difficult to measure the mass of a lens using microlensing. Using this method, one measures the magnified and distorted stellar image as it changed in time (it varies as the Earth’s vantage point moves), but the technique offers no handle on the distance, and the larger the distance, the larger is the mass needed to generate the same-sized distortion....

Nestled among a triplet of young galaxies more than 12.5 billion light-years away is a cosmic powerhouse: a galaxy that is producing stars nearly 1,000 times faster than our own Milky Way. This energetic starburst galaxy, known as AzTEC-3, together with its gang of calmer galaxies may represent the best evidence yet that large galaxies grow from the merger of smaller ones in the early Universe, a process known as hierarchical merging....

Astronomers at Swinburne University of Technology and their international collaborators have found evidence that galaxies that are located in groups might be running out of gas. Galaxies like our own Milky Way possess large reservoirs of hydrogen gas, which is the fuel out of which new stars are formed. Accurate measurements of the gas content, in addition to the stellar properties, are critical in predicting how a galaxy will evolve....

In a paper published Wednesday (June 13) in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Southern Queensland have identified more than 100 giant planets that potentially host moons capable of supporting life. Their work will guide the design of future telescopes that can detect these potential moons and look for tell-tale signs of life, called biosignatures, in their atmospheres. Since the 2009 launch of NASA’s Kepler telescope, scientists have identified thousands of planets outside our solar system, which are called exoplanets....

Our Sun, and most other stars, experience pulsations that spread through the star’s interior as sound waves. The frequencies of these waves are imprinted on the light of the star, and can be later seen by astronomers here on Earth. Similar to how seismologists decipher the inner structure of our planet by analyzing earthquakes, astronomers determine the properties of stars from their pulsations — a field called asteroseismology. Now, for the first time, a detailed analysis of these pulsations has enabled Earl Bellinger, Saskia Hekker, and their colleagues to measure the internal structure of two distant stars....

The galaxy Abell 2597 lies near the center of a cluster about one billion light-years away in the midst of a hot nebula (tens of millions of degrees) of cluster gas. Astronomers have long theorized that intergalactic matter like the plasma around Abell 2597 can fall onto galaxies, cool, and provide fresh material for the galaxy’s star formation. They have, however, also discovered the opposite activity: galaxies’ central supermassive black holes are ejecting jets of material back out into the hot intracluster medium....

In our solar system, everything seems to be in order: The smaller rocky planets, such as Venus, Earth, or Mars, orbit relatively close to our star. The large gas and ice giants, such as Jupiter, Saturn or Neptune, on the other hand, move in wide orbits around the sun. In two studies published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers from the Universities of Bern and Geneva and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS show that our planetary system is quite unique in this respect....

Located 530 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Grus (The Crane), π1 Gruis is a cool red giant. It has about the same mass as our Sun, but is 350 times larger and several thousand times as bright. Our Sun will swell to become a similar red giant star in about five billion years. An international team of astronomers led by Claudia Paladini (ESO) used the PIONIER instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope to observe π1 Gruis in greater detail than ever before....

The discovery is a huge step forward for astronomers as they use the brightness of this kind of supernovae to measure the rate of expansion of the universe. The project began when scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in the US first noticed strange light curve behaviors while studying late-time Type Ia supernovae in 2015. This year they then confirmed light curve plateaus in Type Ia supernovae....