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Ice XXI: Scientists use X-ray laser to identify new room-temperature phase

The international team of researchers conducted their experiments at European XFEL, the world’s largest X-ray laser, and DESY’s high energy photon source Petra III. Ice XXI is structurally distinct from all previously observed phases of ice. It forms when water is rapidly compressed to supercompressed water at room temperature and is metastable, meaning it can exist for some time even though another form of ice would be more stable at those conditions. The discovery offers important insights into how high-pressure ice forms.

Water or H2O, despite being composed of just two elements, exhibits remarkable complexity in its solid state. The majority of the phases are observed at high pressures and low temperatures. The team has learned more about how the different ice phases form and change with pressure.

“Rapid compression of water allows it to remain liquid up to higher pressures, where it should have already crystallized to ice VI,” KRISS scientist Geun Woo Lee explains. Ice VI is an especially intriguing , thought to be present in the interior of icy moons such as Titan and Ganymede. Its highly distorted structure may allow complex transition pathways that lead to metastable ice phases.

Unified model explains extreme jet streams on all giant planets

One of the most notable properties of the giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—are the extreme winds observed around their equators. While some of these planets have eastward equatorial winds, others have a westward jet stream. For the first time, an international team of scientists led by Leiden Observatory and SRON, can explain the winds on all the giant planets using one model.

So-called fast rotating convection in the atmospheres of the can play a crucial role in driving both east and westward jet streams. This is what a team of astronomers led by postdoctoral researcher Keren Duer-Milner from Leiden Observatory and SRON has found. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Using global circulation models, the team found that differences in atmospheric depth can produce the eastward jets on Jupiter and Saturn and the westward jets on Uranus and Neptune. The system shows a so-called bifurcation: Under the same conditions, the atmosphere can settle into one of two stable states—either eastward or westward equatorial jets—establishing a direct link between jet direction and atmospheric depth.

Blood cancer: Scientists reprogram cancer cell death to trigger immune system

The aim of immunotherapy strategies is to leverage cells in the patient’s own immune system to destroy tumor cells. Using a preclinical model, scientists from the Institut Pasteur and Inserm successfully stimulated an effective anti-tumor immune response by reprogramming the death of malignant B cells. They demonstrated an effective triple-therapy approach for treating forms of blood cancer such as certain lymphomas and leukemias which affect B cells. The study was published on August 15 in the journal Science Advances.

Immunotherapy strategies represent a major breakthrough in . They aim to harness the patient’s so that their own cells can recognize and specifically eliminate . Immune cells can act like sentinels, scanning the body and identifying all residual tumor cells to reduce the risk of relapse. Various novel immunotherapy strategies are emerging, one of which makes use of a cell death mechanism known as necroptosis. Unlike apoptosis, which results in silent cell death, necroptosis releases warning signals that attract and stimulate immune cells so that they can kill any remaining tumor cells.

Scientists from the Dynamics of Immune Responses Unit (a joint Inserm/Institut Pasteur unit) set out to explore the effectiveness of this necroptosis-based immunotherapy strategy on hematological malignancies. They began by observing that necroptosis cannot be easily induced in malignant B cells because of the absence of the MLKL protein.

Millions of carbon credits are generated by overestimating forest preservation, study finds

The majority of carbon offset schemes are significantly overestimating the levels of deforestation they are preventing, according to a study published in Science.

This means that many of the “” bought by companies to balance out emissions are not tied to real-world preservation as claimed.

An international team of scientists and economists led by the University of Cambridge and VU Amsterdam found that millions of credits are based on crude calculations that inflate the conservation successes of voluntary REDD+ projects.

Genetically engineered pig-to-human liver xenotransplantation

The advent of genetically edited porcine-to-human xenotransplantation has predominantly focused on cardiac and renal applications, with no reported cases of porcine-to-human liver xenotransplantation. This study presents the world’s first successful genetically modified pig auxiliary liver xenotransplantation in a living human, achieving an unprecedented survival of 171 days, and provides valuable insights into the critical factors influencing the procedure’s success.

Strain engineering enhances spin readout in quantum technologies, study shows

Quantum defects are tiny imperfections in solid crystal lattices that can trap individual electrons and their “spin” (i.e., the internal angular momentum of particles). These defects are central to the functioning of various quantum technologies, including quantum sensors, computers and communication systems.

Reliably predicting and controlling the behavior of quantum defects is thus very important, as it could pave the way for the development of better performing quantum systems tailored for specific applications. A property closely linked to the dependability of quantum technologies is the so-called spin readout contrast, which essentially determines how clear it is to distinguish between two different spin states in a system.

Researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), the HUN-REN Wigner Research Center for Physics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutes recently showed that strain engineering (i.e., stretching or compressing materials) could be used to control how quantum defects behave and enhance spin readout contrast in quantum systems.

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