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Evidence of ancient underground water reveals Mars may have stayed habitable longer than believed

Scientists from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have uncovered new evidence that water once flowed beneath the surface of Mars, revealing that the planet may have remained habitable for life much longer than previously thought.

The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Planets, shows that ancient sand dunes in Gale Crater, a region explored by NASA’s Curiosity rover, gradually turned into rock after interacting with underground water billions of years ago.

Led by Dimitra Atri, Principal Investigator of NYUAD’s Space Exploration Laboratory, with research assistant Vignesh Krishnamoorthy, the research team compared data from the Curiosity rover with in the UAE desert that formed under similar conditions on Earth.

Alzheimer’s risk calculator could spot danger years before symptoms begin

Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a new tool that can estimate a person’s risk of developing memory and thinking problems associated with Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms appear.

The research, published in The Lancet Neurology, builds on decades of data from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging—one of the world’s most comprehensive population-based studies of .

The study found that women have a higher than men of developing and (MCI), a transitional stage between healthy aging and dementia that often affects quality of life but still allows people to live independently. Men and women with the common genetic variant, APOE ε4, also have a higher lifetime risk.

Wearable ultrasound sensor delivers noninvasive treatment with adjustable, body-conforming design

Conventional wearable ultrasound sensors have been limited by low power output and poor structural stability, making them unsuitable for high-resolution imaging or therapeutic applications.

A KAIST research team has now overcome these challenges by developing a flexible sensor with statically adjustable curvature. This breakthrough opens new possibilities for wearable medical devices that can capture precise, body-conforming images and perform noninvasive treatments using ultrasound energy.

Cellular protein FGD3 boosts breast cancer chemotherapy and immunotherapy, study finds

A naturally-occurring protein that tends to be expressed at higher levels in breast cancer cells boosts the effectiveness of some anticancer agents, including doxorubicin, one of the most widely used chemotherapies, and a preclinical drug known as ErSO, researchers report. The protein, FGD3, contributes to the rupture of cancer cells disrupted by these drugs, boosting their effectiveness and enhancing anticancer immunotherapies.

The discovery is described in the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research.

The new findings were the result of experiments involving ErSO, an experimental drug that killed 95–100% of estrogen-receptor-positive in a mouse model of the disease.

String theory: Scientists are trying new ways to verify the idea that could unite all of physics

In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called “Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?”

Hawking, who later became my Ph.D. supervisor, predicted that a theory of everything—uniting the clashing branches of general relativity, which describes the universe on large scales, and , which rules the microcosmos of atoms and particles— might be discovered by the end of the 20th century.

Forty-five years later, there is still no definitive theory of everything. The main candidate is string theory, a framework that describes all forces and particles including gravity. String theory proposes that the building blocks of nature are not point-like particles like quarks (which make up particles in the atomic nucleus) but vibrating strings.

Optimal scaling for magic state distillation in quantum computing achieved

Researchers have demonstrated that the theoretically optimal scaling for magic state distillation—a critical bottleneck in fault-tolerant quantum computing—is achievable for qubits, improving on the previous best result by reaching a scaling exponent of exactly zero.

The work, published in Nature Physics, resolves a fundamental open problem that has persisted in the field for years.

“Broadly, I think that building quantum computers is a wonderful and inspiring goal,” Adam Wills, a Ph.D. student at MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics and lead author of the study, told Phys.org.

Ultrafast light-driven electron slide discovered

When an intense laser pulse hits a stationary electron, it performs a trembling motion at the frequency of the light field. However, this motion dies down after the pulse, and the electron comes to rest again at its original location. If, however, the light field changes its strength along the electron’s trajectory, the electron builds up an additional drift motion with each oscillation, which it retains even after the pulse. The spatial light intensity acts like a slope that the electron slides down.

This effect, known for decades, is called ponderomotive acceleration. However, due to the low spatial dependence of intensity even in focused light beams, this light-driven sliding effect can only be clearly observed for long-lasting laser pulses with many oscillations of the field.

In a recent study, researchers have demonstrated pronounced ponderomotive acceleration during just a single light oscillation. The crucial trick was the use of sharp metallic needle tips, which exhibit an extremely strong spatial variation in when illuminated with . The work is published in the journal Nature Physics.

Ultrafast electron diffraction captures atomic layers twisting in response to light

A pulse of light sets the tempo in the material. Atoms in a crystalline sheet just a few atoms thick begin to move—not randomly, but in a coordinated rhythm, twisting and untwisting in sync like dancers following a beat.

This atomic choreography, set in motion by precisely timed bursts of energy, happens far too fast for the human eye or even traditional scientific tools to detect. The entire sequence plays out in about a trillionth of a second.

To witness it, a Cornell–Stanford University collaboration of researchers turned to ultrafast electron diffraction, a technique capable of filming matter at its fastest timescales. Using a Cornell-built instrument and Cornell-built high-speed detector, the team captured atomically responding to light with a dynamic twisting motion.

Scientists Puzzled by Strange Star-Forming Regions at the Milky Way’s Center

A new study led by Dr. James De Buizer of the SETI Institute and Dr. Wanggi Lim of IPAC at Caltech has uncovered unexpected findings about how quickly massive stars take shape near the center of the Milky Way. Using data collected primarily from NASAs now-retired SOFIA airborne observatory, the researchers examined three active stellar nurseries, Sgr B1, Sgr B2, and Sgr C, situated in the heart of our Galaxy.

Despite the Galactic Center containing far denser concentrations of gas and dust than other parts of the Milky Way, the formation of massive stars (those more than 8 times the mass of our Sun) appears to occur at a slower pace there.

To investigate further, the team compared these three regions with others of similar size located farther from the center, including areas closer to our solar neighborhood. Their findings confirmed that the rate of new star formation near the Galactic Center is significantly lower than average. Even though the region holds the kind of dense, turbulent clouds that typically give rise to large stars, these environments seem to struggle to produce them.

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