On Christmas Day in 1968, the three-man Apollo 8 crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders found a surprise in their food locker: a specially packed Christmas dinner wrapped in foil and decorated with red and green ribbons. Something as simple as a “home-cooked meal,” or as close as NASA could get for a spaceflight at the time, greatly improved the crew’s morale and appetite. More importantly, the meal marked a turning point in space food history.
Learning how to study the leopard-like spots found on both terrestrial and Martian rocks can prepare scientists for when the real samples arrive from space. A curious red Martian rock nicknamed Sapphire Canyon has scientists excited, as its spotted appearance hints at possible organic origins. On Earth, researchers tested a powerful laser technique, O-PTIR, on a similar rock found by chance in Arizona, proving it can rapidly and precisely reveal a material’s chemical makeup. This high-resolution method could play a key role in analyzing Mars samples once they arrive, adding to its growing track record in NASA missions like Europa Clipper.
In 2024, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance collected an unusual rock sample. The rock, named Sapphire Canyon, features white, leopard-like spots with black borders within a red mudstone and might hold clues about sources of organic molecules within Mars.
Here on Earth, in Review of Scientific Instruments, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology used a technique called optical photothermal infrared spectroscopy (O-PTIR) to study a visually similar rock. They wanted to determine if O-PTIR can be applied to the Sapphire Canyon sample when it is eventually brought here for study.
World’s first pig lung transplant in brain-dead man lasts nine days in China.
In a medical first, a pig lung was transplanted into a brain-dead human, where it functioned for nine days.
Surgeons at Guangzhou Medical University, China, performed the cross-species lung transplantation.
The recipient, a 39-year-old man who had suffered a brain hemorrhage, received the left lung from a Chinese Bama Xiang pig that had undergone genetic modifications.
Mercedes-AMG EV shatters 25 endurance records with 24,901-mile run in 7.5 days.
Mercedes-AMG’s electric Concept GT XX smashed 25 endurance records by covering 24,901 miles in just 7.5 days at Italy’s Nardò test track.
LVK reveals latest catalog of gravitational-wave discoveries
People with type 2 obesity-driven diabetes tend to have more aggressive breast cancers, but no one knows exactly why. A new study by researchers at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and published in Communications Biology found that tiny particles in the blood, known as exosomes, which are altered by diabetes, can reprogram immune cells inside tumors, making them weaker and allowing the cancer to grow and spread more easily.
“This is the first study to directly link exosomes from people with type 2 diabetes to suppressed immune activity inside human breast tumors,” said corresponding author Gerald Denis, Ph.D., the Shipley Prostate Cancer Research Professor at BU.
In the study, researchers used tumor samples from breast cancer patients to grow 3D tumor models in the lab. Known as patient-derived organoids, these models contain the immune cells originally found in the tumor. These mini-tumors were treated with blood exosomes from people with and without diabetes but also without any cancer. The researchers analyzed the organoids using single-cell RNA sequencing to see how the exosomes affected the immune cells and the tumor itself.
Birds are some of the most striking creatures on Earth, coming in a rainbow of colors that serve several important functions, such as attracting a mate and communicating with other birds. These vibrant hues are produced by pigments, primarily melanin, but a major unknown until now was how much these pigments weigh. Since wings need to be as light as possible for flight, understanding pigmentation weight may tell us something about the trade-off between the evolutionary benefits of colored feathers and the physical cost of carrying that weight.
In a new study published in the journal Biology Letters, scientists from Spain have investigated how much melanin adds to the weight of feathers and the difference in weight between the two main chemical forms of melanin—eumelanin (responsible for brown and black colors) and pheomelanin (responsible for reds and lighter colors).
The researchers analyzed the feathers from 109 bird specimens across 19 different species, including the common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis), the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) and the Eurasian bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula). They examined feathers with mixed colors and those with single, pure colors, and used a chemical process involving sodium hydroxide or caustic soda, as it is more commonly known, to extract the pigments. Once extracted, they were weighed and compared to the original weight of the feathers.