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Category: biotech/medical – Page 463

Finding buried treasures with physics: ‘Fingerprint matrix’ method uncovers what lies beneath the sand

Can we reveal objects that are hidden in environments completely opaque to the human eye? With conventional imaging techniques, the answer is no: a dense cloud or layer of material blocks light so completely that a simple photograph contains no information about what lies behind it.

However, a between the Institut Langevin and TU Wien has now shown that, with the help of innovative mathematical tricks, objects can be detected even in such cases—using what is known as the fingerprint .

The team tested the newly developed method on metal objects buried in sand and in applications in the field of medical imaging. A joint publication on this topic has just been published in the journal Nature Physics.

Meet Irene Curie, the Nobel-winning atomic physicist who changed the course of modern cancer treatment

The adage goes “like mother like daughter,” and in the case of Irene Joliot-Curie, truer words were never spoken. She was the daughter of two Nobel Prize laureates, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, and was herself awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935 together with her husband, Frederic Joliot.

While her parents received the prize for the discovery of natural radioactivity, Irene’s prize was for the synthesis of artificial radioactivity. This discovery changed many fields of science and many aspects of our everyday lives. Artificial radioactivity is used today in medicine, agriculture, energy production, food sterilization, industrial quality control and more.

We are two nuclear physicists who perform experiments at different accelerator facilities around the world. Irene’s discovery laid the foundation for our experimental studies, which use artificial radioactivity to understand questions related to astrophysics, energy, medicine and more.

Rising early-onset cancer diagnoses in the US appear to be driven by increased detection, not disease

Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Dell Medical School researchers report that rising rates of early-onset cancer in the United States may reflect more diagnoses rather than more disease.

Cancer awareness and prevention have intensified over many decades, removing potential environmental risk factors from daily life. Mortality of all cancers combined in adults under 50 has decreased by nearly half since the 1990s.

Still, public concern has climbed amidst rising diagnoses and high-profile early-onset cases. PubMed citations related to early-onset cancer more than tripled and screening ages have been shifted down to 45 for and 40 for breast cancer. Uncertainty persists about whether the higher case counts signal greater cancer occurrence or more frequent detection.

300,000-year-old genomes: History of the Schöningen horses deciphered

For the first time, a research team from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen and the Schöningen Research Center have reconstructed the genomes of an extinct horse species, Equus mosbachensis, from the archaeological site of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, which is approximately 300,000 years old.

Thanks to exceptionally favorable preservation conditions, the researchers were able to identify the oldest DNA yet discovered from an open-air site. Their analyses show that the Schöningen horses belong to a lineage that is considered to be the origin of all modern horses. The study is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Domestic and , donkeys and zebras all belong to the sole genus of the family Equidae still in existence today. But a look into the shows that more than 35 different genera and hundreds of now extinct equine species occurred throughout the past.

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