Aged cranial bone marrow–derived monocytes fuel chronic neuroinflammation after traumatic brain injury, a process reversed by fenofibrate.
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Spinning Liquid into Solid
A new technique for generating solid fibers from a liquid jet is easier to model—and thus easier to control—than past methods.
In traditional spinning, fibers are twisted together into a continuous strand. In modern manufacturing, spinning can involve drawing out liquid streams to produce solid filaments that are woven into advanced materials. But the process is complex and challenging to model theoretically. Now researchers have shown how to greatly simplify the process by using light to catalyze solidification within a stream of freely falling liquid [1]. The technique may offer more control over the manufacture of fibers than current methods can provide.
The complexity of most modern force-driven spinning arrangements led fluid mechanics expert Henri Lhuissier of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues to develop a simpler technique. “Most manufactured fibers are spun,” he says, “but what happens is mostly unpredictable due to the complexity of chemistry, phase changes, fluid mechanics, and other factors.” He says that much remains unknown about how solidification takes place and, therefore, what the ultimate size of the fiber will be.
Scientists discover first type I superconductor that breaks time-reversal symmetry
Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with no resistance and expel magnetic fields when cooled to ultralow temperatures. And depending on their quantum structure, they can also showcase strange properties like magnetic levitation. But now things are getting a little weirder.
One of the most fascinating phenomena related to superconductors is the breaking of time-reversal symmetry. TRS is the principle that a physical system behaves the same way whether time runs forward or backward. Rare unconventional superconductors break this symmetry. When this happens, they spontaneously generate tiny internal magnetic fields when they enter their superconducting state.
Until recently, every superconductor known to do this was a type II material. But in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers report the discovery of a type I superconductor that breaks time-reversal symmetry too.
How much are the world’s oceans warming? New method reveals double-digit percentage gaps from climate models
The world’s oceans behave like a thermometer: As the water warms, it expands and sea levels rise. Geodesy researchers at the University of Bonn are able to measure this and determine how much the oceans are warming. For individual ocean basins, their method has revealed significant deviations from model calculations—in some cases in the double-digit percentage range.
The research is published in the journal Earth System Science Data, and they explain their findings below.
Astronomers discover the lowest-mass double neutron star system to date
Neutron stars, the extremely dense remains of massive stars that exploded at the end of their lives, are widely studied astrophysical objects. Some of these stars, known as pulsars, spin and send out beams of radio waves, making them appear to pulse as the beams sweep past Earth.
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, orbiting neutron stars should emit ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves. The resulting loss of energy should gradually draw pairs of neutron stars closer together, shortening the time they take to complete each orbit.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the State Key Laboratory of Radio Astronomy and Technology in Beijing and other academic institutions in China set out to test this prediction by studying PSR J1856–0039, a double neutron star (DNS) system discovered using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China.
Black holes may grow quietly alongside galaxies even without violent mergers
Astronomers analyzed 2,435 galaxies hosting actively feeding black holes using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Among them, they identified 546 “bulgeless” galaxies—systems with little or no central stellar bulge. Their paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that galaxies without a central bulge grow black holes just as effectively as galaxies that have one—a surprising sign that black holes don’t need galaxy mergers to grow normally.
There is a well-established relationship between a galaxy’s central black hole mass and properties of its host galaxy, such as the bulge mass, total mass in stars and the spread of different velocities within the galaxy. These relationships suggest that the galaxy’s black hole and the galaxy evolve together.
Two things have recently complicated the picture of this coevolution and what drives it. First, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found black holes at high redshift that appear “too big” for their host galaxies compared to what relationships in the local universe predict. Second, JWST also found far more disk galaxies at high redshift than expected.
Computer-designed protein targets immune receptor linked to inflammation at new ‘undruggable’ site
To sense their environment and respond accordingly, cells enlist membrane proteins as communication hubs, receiving molecular messages from outside and triggering responses inside. One of these proteins is Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), an immune receptor that plays an essential role in protecting against infections. But overactivity of TLR4 has been linked to inflammatory disorders like sepsis, arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease, making it an attractive target for therapies. Despite its appeal, TLR4 is difficult to manipulate precisely, and no FDA-approved drugs specifically block it.
Now, in a new PNAS study, scientists at Scripps Research engineered a small synthetic protein that can bind to TLR4 within cell membranes and block subsequent inflammatory responses.
The findings advance understanding of what TLR4’s membrane-embedded region does. Rather than a passive anchor, it’s an active determinant of cross-membrane signaling—mechanistic insight that could guide the design of a new class of anti-inflammatory treatments. More broadly, the study outlines new computational tools that other researchers can use to target proteins within membranes.
Ultrafast X-rays reveal how the light-responsive molecular switch azobenzene changes shape
Azobenzene is one of the best-known molecules that can be switched between two forms by light. However, the question of how the molecule moves in the first few picoseconds (trillionths of a second) after it absorbs light has remained unresolved for nearly 50 years.
A research team led by Hyotcherl Ihee, professor in the Department of Chemistry at KAIST and director of the Center for Advanced Reaction Dynamics (CARD) at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), has identified the process by which the light-responsive molecule azobenzene changes its structure.
The team has shown that, during the initial stage of the reaction, the molecule changes shape through a coordinated motion of the two nitrogen atoms at its center, while its two benzene rings stay nearly in place. The finding is expected to provide useful information for designing materials and molecular-scale machines that operate with light.
New algorithm makes maps of gene activity easier to compare while preserving cell-level detail
Spatial transcriptomics can reveal where thousands of genes are active across a tissue, creating molecular maps at single-cell resolution. But comparing two such maps is difficult: thin slices of tissue may be rotated, stretched or otherwise distorted, so equivalent regions do not automatically line up.
Researchers at Kanazawa University and Sapienza University of Rome have developed a computational method that aligns these maps directly from the individual measurement locations and their gene-activity values. Called Domain Elastic Transform (DET), it smoothly reshapes one digital map to match another without first converting the measurements into a regular grid of pixels.
The research, led by Osamu Hirose of Kanazawa University in collaboration with Emanuele Rodolà of Sapienza University of Rome, was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.