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Earth’s Inner Core Could Be Full Of Extreme Hydrogen Unlike Anything on The Surface

The Earth is akin to a rocky, molten-in-the-middle nesting doll – or perhaps a rotting, soft-centered onion, though the latter analogy affords our majestic planet much less dignity.

Although only several handfuls (39 fingers’ worth, to be exact) of people have alighted on the ocean’s deepest depths or upon the surface of the Moon, there’s one relatively nearby alien environment that no human will ever personally explore: the Earth’s core.

Approaching it, each Earthly layer differs in composition and increases in pressure and temperature, displaying unique material properties that become murkier the deeper we delve.

Rates of Systemic Treatment for Metastatic Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer Among Older Adults

This cohort study characterizes the prevalence of treatment for metastatic non–small cell lung cancer and predictors of its receipt over a time span ranging from when empiric cytotoxic regimens dominated to the recent availability of targeted therapies and immunotherapy.

In 1924, Arctic charr from Lake Geneva were stocked into Lake Allos; a century later, their descendants showed distinct metabolic responses under identical conditions

1924, Arctic charr from Lake Geneva were introduced into Lake Allos. A hundred years later, scientists found that their descendants had developed different metabolic responses, even when raised under the same laboratory conditions.

Zoox gets the green light to offer paid rides

The Department of Transportation has approved a request from the driverless vehicle company Zoox to start offering rides to paying customers. A California-based company owned by Amazon, Zoox has been testing its driverless electric vehicle with free rides. Now, it has approval to commercially deploy up to 5,000 vehicles over the next two years, starting in Las Vegas. Unlike Google’s Waymo, which adds driverless technology to existing vehicles, Zoox’s vehicles look like a box on wheels and don’t have steering wheels or pedals. Find “NPR News Now” wherever you listen to podcasts. Host: Jeanine Herbst/NPR Reporter: Camila Domonoske/NPR Producer: Michael Zamora/NPR

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70millionyearold mammal fossil discovered in Mongolia rewrites the story of early mammal evolution

The fossil record has a habit of reshaping ideas that once seemed settled. In the Late Cretaceous, long before the extinction of the dinosaurs, small mammals occupied a world dominated by much larger reptiles.

Plasmonic metamaterial time crystal

To achieve the ultra-fast changes needed, they hit the metamaterial with powerful laser pulses. This violently accelerated the material’s free-floating electrons, dynamically altering their energy and making their “effective mass” shift by up to 80% of their rest mass in fractions of a trillionth of a second. This massive, rapid shift forced the material into a time-crystal state.

A plasmonic metamaterial driven at terahertz frequencies achieves strong, ultrafast temporal modulation and shows a transition to the photonic time crystal regime with reduced plasmonic losses.

How molecular tethers and asynchronous replication drive parasite proliferation

Malaria parasites proliferate in an unusual way. Rather than dividing into two daughter cells like human cells, they first amplify their genetic material tenfold, hundredfold or even thousandfold before simultaneously producing a corresponding number of daughter parasites. Until now, the mechanisms controlling these processes were only partly understood.

Two recently published studies by researchers from Heidelberg University’s Faculty of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) provide important insights into the molecular basis of this proliferation strategy and reveal how the parasite makes particularly efficient use of limited resources within infected blood cells. The findings open new perspectives for the development of future antimalarial drugs.

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