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NASA Announces $1 Million to Students for Moon Base Challenge

On Sunday, NASA announced the opening of its $1 million Moon Base Student Challenge during a MAX POWER event at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. As part of a Golden Age of Science, the competition invites student teams at U.S. high schools and post-secondary schools to contribute designs for the Moon Base.

“We’re looking for students ready to think creatively, work as a team, and take on real problems connected to NASA’s future on the Moon,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “You do not have to wait until graduation to contribute. Curiosity, creativity, and the willingness to tackle hard problems without obvious answers are exactly the qualities we need as we build what comes next.”

NASA is building a Moon Base where astronauts will live, work, and explore at the lunar South Pole region. A permanent human presence on the Moon paves the way for future crewed missions to Mars and requires talent from various industries and backgrounds.

New mRNA therapy reawakens heart muscle cells to repair damage

Scientists have developed a treatment that ‘reawakens’ heart muscle cells so they start to divide and help repair damaged muscle.

In a study in mice, this produced a stronger heartbeat and increased the amount of blood pumped through the heart with each heartbeat by around 10%, compared with mice that received a mock treatment, following a heart attack.

While this is not a full cure, even small improvements to heart function have been linked to lower mortality in patients and a better ability to carry out daily activities.

Finland is pouring 100 million gallons of water into a 66-foot-deep basin to create world’s largest pit heat storage; one charge holds 18,000 megawatt-hours of heat and could supply water to around 20,000 people at a time

Finnish city of Hyvinkaa with about 47,000 residents is filling a former gravel pit with roughly 100 million gallons of tap water.

A hidden limit of space and time could unlock electronics 100,000 times faster

Scientists have discovered a surprising quantum limit that prevents electrons from being tracked with unlimited precision in both space and time. The breakthrough could pave the way for manipulating chemical reactions and developing electronics hundreds of thousands of times faster than today’s technology.

Norway Halts Power Connections for New Data Centers

Norway will suspend further reservation of electricity connections for data centers while the country figures out how to handle the burden they place on the grid.

The measures introduced involve a temporary halt in new connection reservations, system operator Statnett AS said in a statement Monday. The halt is expected to be lifted no later than Aug. 1, 2027.

A quantum breakthrough makes light behave like both a solid and a liquid

Scientists have demonstrated an extraordinary form of quantum matter that combines two properties that seem incompatible. Known as a supersolid, this unusual state has the orderly structure of a crystal while also displaying the frictionless flow associated with a special kind of liquid. Even more remarkably, researchers have now observed this behavior at room temperature, eliminating the need for the extreme cooling traditionally used to investigate such phenomena.

The breakthrough was achieved by an international team from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology (Poland), IBM Research Zurich, and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Rather than relying on atoms cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, the scientists created a supersolid using particles that combine properties of light and matter.

In rain and darkness, how should self-driving cars trust their sensors?

Many of today’s self-driving cars “see” the road through two senses at once. Cameras capture color, texture and the outline of a pedestrian, while light detection and ranging (LiDAR) fires laser pulses to measure exactly how far away that pedestrian stands. Together, they provide complementary information and outperform either sensor alone.

This pairing has a weakness, however. Trained mostly on clear daytime footage, the fusion model learns to lean on whichever sensor performs best there and may fail in challenging scenarios. Rain can scatter LiDAR beams, for instance, while a night drive leaves cameras battling darkness and glare.

To address this, assistant professor Zhao Na at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) led two studies that built different models. In “CCF: Complementary collaborative fusion for domain generalized multi-modal 3D object detection,” the research team rebalances how a detector weighs its sensors so it holds up in new surroundings. In “PanDA: Unsupervised domain adaptation for multimodal 3D panoptic segmentation in autonomous driving,” they harness unlabeled data from a new environment to help the model adapt once it arrives.

The JAK2 V617F revolution in myeloproliferative neoplasms

1951, William Dameshek (1900−1969) penned an editorial in Blood highlighting shared phenotype (i.e., trilineage proliferation, splenomegaly, bone marrow fibrosis) among the myeloproliferative and related myeloid neoplasms, including chronic myeloid leukemia (CML; then referred to as “chronic granulocytic leukemia”), polycythemia vera (PV), essential thrombocythemia (ET; then referred to as “megakaryocytic leukemia”), and primary myelofibrosis (PMF; then referred to as “idiopathic or agnogenic myeloid metaplasia of spleen”).1 He also discussed transitional (e.g., post-PV myelofibrosis) and pre-fibrotic states and contended that these “myeloproliferative disorders” were closely interrelated and represented variable manifestations of a constitutively-driven bone marrow proliferative activity arising from a “hitherto undiscovered stimulus”.1

In 1960, Nowell and Hungerford described the Philadelphia chromosome that ultimately led to the identification of BCR::ABL1 as the disease-causing mutation in CML and the successful launching of imatinib (ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitor) as a disease-modifying drug therapy. By contrast, the molecular basis of PV, ET, and PMF remained elusive until the March, 2005 breakthrough communication by James et al., describing a novel Janus kinase 2 JAK/STAT activating mutation (JAK2V617F located in the auto-inhibitory JH2 pseudo-kinase domain — a G to T somatic mutation at nucleotide 1849, in exon 14, resulting in the substitution of valine to phenylalanine at codon 617) in PV, ET and PMF (discovery patent filing in October 2004).2 The authors utilized short interfering RNA to knock down JAK2 expression and demonstrated the essential role of JAK2 in erythropoietin-independent growth in PV (Figure 1).

A sweeter future? AI helps scientists discover new sugar substitutes

Researchers Dr. Shayma El-Atawneh and professor Amiram Goldblum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a new computational framework that identified 92 promising candidates for future sugar substitutes from more than 50 million chemical compounds. The study, published in the journal Food Chemistry, demonstrates how artificial intelligence and molecular modeling could accelerate the discovery of new sweeteners while helping overcome one of the industry’s persistent challenges: unwanted bitter aftertastes.

As demand for low-calorie sugar alternatives grows, scientists are seeking sweeteners that provide pleasant taste along with favorable safety and stability profiles. Excessive sugar consumption has been linked to several health and environmental concerns. High sugar intake can increase the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and cardiovascular disorders. The FDA has approved artificial sweeteners and established recommended daily amounts per kilogram for each.

However, widely used artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, saccharin and sucralose have limitations, including bitter or metallic aftertastes. Discovering new compounds that are sweet without undesirable characteristics remains a significant challenge.