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New brain cell formation stalls in adults with depression, study shows

Findings from a new study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggest that the trickle of neurons created in the adult hippocampus could be instrumental in preventing depression. Most of the brain’s 100 billion neurons are created before birth.

Published in the journal Nature Medicine, the study shows for the first time that neurogenesis stalls in the brains of adults with major depressive disorder and identifies the molecular programs that control neurogenesis, which may help researchers develop new therapies.

“Historically, depression was thought to be a disease of neurotransmitter deficiency, especially serotonin, but we now think that depression stems from multiple issues that affect our neurons’ ability to adapt to stress and changing environments,” says Maura Dupont, a professor of psychiatry who led the research.

Super-resolution microscopy reveals how a cancer drug triggers cellular breakdown

Cancer drugs are often designed to block specific molecular targets, but what happens after they enter a cell is not always well understood. A new study published in Biophotonics Discovery demonstrates how advanced imaging technology can help answer that question.

Using super-resolution microscopy, researchers tracked the cancer drug sunitinib inside living cells and observed how it altered several of the cell’s most important structures. The work provides a detailed view of drug behavior at the microscopic level and highlights the growing role of optical imaging in drug development and cellular engineering.

Sunitinib is used to treat several cancers, including kidney cancer. Its therapeutic activity has traditionally been linked to its ability to inhibit enzymes that drive tumor growth. However, researchers have increasingly recognized that where a drug travels inside a cell can also influence its effectiveness and side effects.

LHC collisions reveal oxygen and neon’s shifting nuclear geometry

Many people are aware that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN smashes tiny subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light to test foundational laws of physics and discover new fundamental particles, but some experiments also help scientists better visualize the actual structure of atoms we are already familiar with, like oxygen and neon.

While science textbooks often feature pictures of these and other atoms as if their nuclei are well-defined structures, the reality is more complicated. A new study, published in Physical Review Letters, reveals new details about the internal structure of oxygen and neon from the flow of particles coming out of oxygen-oxygen and neon-neon collisions in the LHC.

Laser-cut aluminum foil could replace costly terahertz polarizers

When physicists at the ARC Centre for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) needed a key component for their terahertz experiments, they ran into a frustrating problem—they needed tiny optical devices, known as wire-grid polarizers, but these cost thousands of dollars each.

“We were doing experiments in the terahertz frequency range and figured that some of the components—particularly polarizers—were extremely expensive,” says Professor Ilya Shadrivov from TMOS at The Australian National University. He is the co-author of a new study published in Optics and Laser Technology.

“So we looked at how they were made and thought, surely there’s a way to make them cheaper and faster.”

New Monte Carlo method accelerates simulations of densely entangled polymer melts

Long polymer chains are everywhere: in synthetic materials, soft matter, biological systems such as chromosomes, and mathematical models of filaments and knots. When many such chains are densely packed, they form what physicists call a polymer melt. In this crowded environment, each chain is constrained by the others around it. These entanglements are central to the behavior of polymeric materials, but they also make the systems extremely difficult to simulate. As chain length increases, the time needed to obtain a new independent configuration grows very rapidly. For very large systems, conventional simulations can therefore become computationally prohibitive.

For more than 70 years, scientists have used many “tricks” to speed up this process, including so-called Monte Carlo methods with ingenious moves designed to accelerate the evolution of the system. These methods helped, but the basic problem remained: In a dense melt, changes still had to propagate through a highly tangled system, slowing down the simulation.

‘Rainbow-on-a-chip’ could help unlock 6G networks and precision timing for quantum technologies

Loughborough University physicists and an international team have demonstrated that a grain-of-rice-sized microchip can be used to produce a spectrum of precisely spaced frequencies of light, which is then converted into multiple high-frequency electromagnetic signals known as millimeter waves.

Millimeter waves are of growing interest for future communications because they offer much more bandwidth—essentially more space for transmitting data—but generating them with the precision and stability needed for advanced technologies remains challenging.

“The world is becoming increasingly data hungry. We want to send and receive more information, faster and in higher resolution, and millimeter waves could help provide the capacity to do that,” said Dr. Luke Peters, of Loughborough University’s Emergent Photonics Research Center.

“I Jumped From My Chair” — Astronomers Discover a Hidden Star Orbiting Betelgeuse

Direct imaging has revealed strong evidence that Betelgeuse is orbited by a companion two to three times as massive as the Sun.

For generations, Betelgeuse has appeared to the naked eye as a single reddish point in the constellation Orion. Now astronomers have obtained their strongest evidence yet that the famous star has company.

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), a team led by French astronomer Miguel Montargès captured the clearest image so far of what is likely Betelgeuse B, a star orbiting the red supergiant. “This is the conclusion of a century-long quest,” says Montargès.

JWST Finds a “Star” 100 Billion Times Brighter Than Any Star Should Be

Something in the young universe is shining like a star that should not be possible.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected a compact red object so luminous that ordinary nuclear fusion cannot plausibly explain it. Although the source has a star-like appearance and may be surrounded by gas on the scale of the solar system, it radiates roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star could physically produce.

The leading explanation is far stranger: the glow may come from a rapidly feeding black hole buried inside an enormous, dense envelope of hydrogen.

Scientists Turn an Overlooked Chip Layer Into a Powerful New Light Source

A layer once dismissed as mere support has transformed a tiny photonic chip into a powerful generator of new light frequencies.

A laser usually produces one narrow color of light. A device small enough to sit on a fingertip can turn that single input into hundreds of precisely spaced frequencies, creating a tool for measuring time, identifying chemicals, transmitting data, and studying distant objects in space.

Researchers have now expanded what such photonic chips can do by making two of their materials work together. Instead of treating the outer layer as simple packaging, the team used it to generate additional light frequencies that the chip’s main material could not efficiently produce on its own.

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