Scientists trained artificial intelligence on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes. Sixteen of them were viable, yielding new viruses.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 81
Researchers Find a Way To Make Pancreatic Cancer Visible to the Immune System
A combination treatment exposed hidden pancreatic cancer cells to the immune system, reduced their spread, and helped mice live longer.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School have uncovered one reason pancreatic cancer is so difficult for the immune system to recognize and attack. The discovery points to a potential way to make immunotherapy more effective against a disease that has historically resisted many immune-based treatments.
The findings, published in Science Immunology, show that some pancreatic cancer cells can avoid destruction by shutting down the molecular system that normally reveals them to immune cells. Once these cells become harder to detect, they are more likely to survive, spread, and establish tumors elsewhere in the body.
Immunotherapy in Algeria: A Major Advance in Cancer Care
Cancer care.
Immunotherapy.
OncoDaily.
Oncology.
Precision Oncology
Repurposing deep-Earth tools in the hunt for practical superconductors
If scientists could find a material that acts as a superconductor—that is, one that transmits energy with zero resistance—at normal pressures and relatively high temperatures, it would open up a vast number of possibilities. These include medical imaging, quantum computing and numerous other fields. So, yes, it would be a big deal.
“Right now, almost 50% of the energy in transmission is just heat in copper wires,” said Shomeek Mukhopadhyay. “If you can transmit electricity through wires without dissipating energy, that’s a huge economic benefit. I would say it’s equivalent to having thermonuclear fusion.”
Mukhopadhyay, a research scientist in Chemical & Environmental Engineering, is on the third floor of the Kline Geology Laboratory. Nearby, Natalia Nevskaya, a postdoctoral associate in Earth & Planetary Sciences, prepares a massive device called the Kawai multi-anvil press.
An elegant modification doubles the range of low-noise ‘white lasers’ in a single fiber
Supercontinuum light sources—often called “white lasers” because they emit a broad, continuous rainbow of colors—are essential tools for everything from advanced medical imaging to environmental gas detection. However, researchers have historically faced a frustrating trade-off: A broad spectrum comes at the expense of high fluctuations, which has effectively limited their use.
Now, a research team at DTU Electro has found an elegant way to bypass this limitation.
In a newly published study in Optica, the team demonstrated how to double the usable wavelength range of an ultra-low-noise supercontinuum laser. Their system successfully spans from 0.86 to 2.90 micrometers, nearly doubling the spectral range previously achieved by comparable low-noise systems while maintaining an astonishingly stable noise level.
Researchers demonstrate first fully solution-processed solid-state polariton laser
Researchers have demonstrated a solid-state organic laser microcavity fabricated entirely by solution processing. The device operates in the strong light–matter coupling regime, where light and matter form hybrid states called polaritons. This makes the platform not only a new type of solution-processed laser but also a powerful way to study nonlinear polariton interactions. The paper is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Solid-state lasers are used in many modern technologies, from telecommunications and sensing to medical diagnostics and data storage. However, their fabrication often requires complex and energy-intensive manufacturing methods. This new work shows that organic laser devices can be made in a much simpler way by coating each layer from a liquid solution rather than depositing it in a vacuum.
“Our main result is that we can make a complete solid-state laser microcavity using only solution processing. This is important because it shows that simple and scalable fabrication can still produce the high optical quality needed for advanced laser physics,” says Associate Professor Konstantinos Daskalakis from the University of Turku in Finland.
New quantum microscopy trick quadruples microscope resolution
Three years after a team of Caltech scientists showed that pairs of entangled photons could double the resolution of a light microscope, the same lab has figured out a way to double down on that improvement. They have now achieved a fourfold resolution boost compared to a classical microscope, using a new optical design that sends one of the entangled photons through the microscope’s optics three times rather than just once.
The work, led by Lihong Wang, the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Medical Engineering Leadership Chair at Caltech, builds on the lab’s 2023 demonstration of quantum microscopy by coincidence (QMC). The approach relies on one of those bizarre quantum-mechanical phenomena called entanglement, in which two particles are linked such that the state of one particle is intimately tied to the state of the other no matter how far apart they might be.
In QMC, entangled pairs of photons, called biphotons, are split so that one photon, called the signal photon, passes through the sample while its entangled partner, called the idler photon, travels a separate parallel path. In some ways, the pair behaves as a single particle that has twice the momentum of an individual photon.
