One of the most iconic visual representations in biological science is the double helix – the twisting, twin-stranded ladder that defines the shape of DNA molecules.
But not all DNA follows this same recognizable pattern. Alternative kinds of DNA structures do exist, and new technologies are helping to reveal them.
In a study last year, scientists identified where these “non-canonical” forms of DNA (aka non–B DNA) emerge in human and other primate genomes.
Like spies evading detection by mastering disguises, many cancer cells are adorned with a copious coat of sugar-derived molecules that throws the proverbial hounds of the immune system off the scent.
Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and collaborators across North America published findings Aug. 7, 2026, in Science Advances showing that cancer cells’ cloaking costumes can result from changes in the nearby neighborhood of immune cells, connective tissue, blood vessels, proteins and carbohydrates called the tumor microenvironment. The researchers also found a way to thin this sugary shroud, enabling cancer cells to be recognized and eliminated by the immune system.
Lead and corresponding author Kevin Tharp, Ph.D., knew that cells squeezed by their surroundings change their mitochondrial function in surprising ways. He realized that a key place where cells would experience this kind of physical pressure was in the tumor microenvironment.
Parkinson’s disease affects more than 10 million people worldwide. The disease is characterized by the buildup of abnormal clumps of the protein alpha-synuclein inside brain cells, but scientists have long struggled to understand exactly how these toxic forms of the protein cause neurons to malfunction and eventually die.
Researchers from the Tofaris lab, part of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and based in the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, combined advanced molecular analyses of human stem cell models of Parkinson’s disease with studies of postmortem brain tissue from people with Parkinson’s disease to investigate the earliest stages of the disease process.
The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Cancer adapts and overcomes many different obstacles in order to survive. Since tumors are masses of rapidly growing cells, it takes a lot of nutrients, signaling, and proteins to help maintain proliferation. Over the last two decades, researchers have discovered that nerves provide tumors with signals, neurotransmitters, growth factors, and molecules to aid in cancer genesis, growth, survival, and progression. This process of nerves growing around and within the tumor is known as ‘tumor innervation’ or ‘nerve hacking’. This provides a source of nutrients for the tumor and makes the tumor microenvironment (TME) more complex or difficult to treat. Solid tumors in particular benefit from nerve hacking and more nerves innervating the tumor correlate with worse outcomes in patients. Therefore, researchers are working on understanding this process and how to best treat patients with increased tumor innervation.
Novel research published by scientists at the University of Oklahoma demonstrated how breast cancer cells can attract nerves to fuel their growth. It has been a mystery how nerves get to the tumor, until recently. This new study in Cell Death & Differentiation concludes that triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) uses the body’s own immune system to interconnect with nerves. The study performed by Dr. Maureen A. Cox and others clearly show that a specialized immune cell, known as a macrophage, is directly responsible for nerve hacking and tumor progression.
Cox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology within the College of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. Her work focuses on the nervous systems and how nerves and immune cells interact to respond to cancer. Specifically, Cox investigates how immune cells facilitate nerve growth and subsequently promote cancer through indirect mechanisms.
What if everything you think you know about reality is only the surface? His followers believe Dr. Jacobo Grinberg may have unlocked a hidden world beneath our everyday experience, one where consciousness reshapes reality itself.
On December 8, 1994, this brilliant neuroscientist vanished without a trace, disappearing into thin air while investigating mysteries most scientists dared not touch.
Dr. Jacobo Grinberg was no ordinary scientist. He was a bold explorer of the mind, a pioneer in consciousness, on a quest to unlock new chapters of reality. But was Dr. Grinberg’s disappearance the end of his story, or the beginning of something far stranger?
Quantum bits (qubits) enable these conditions. The quantum voting protocol involves creating a quantum state of many quantum-entangled qubits known as a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, with one qubit for each voter. The state can be prepared so that each qubit measurement randomly produces 0 or 1, but the entanglement guarantees that the total number of 1s is either even or odd. These states can be prepared using, for example, photons as qubits, with 0 and 1 corresponding to distinct polarization states.
Such a protocol was proposed in 2022 by quantum information theorist Federico Centrone of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology in Spain and his co-workers [3]. Implementing it requires that the voters be able to verify that they have been given a true GHZ state and not some other state that subverts the protocol. Such verifications can be carried out, but each qubit can only be used once—either for voting or for verification. So extra sets of GHZ states must be produced for multiple rounds of verification.
Two research teams have now demonstrated the fundamental features of the protocol using photons as qubits, although several practical challenges remain before it can be used in a real election. Joey Marcellino, a PhD student at the University of Geneva, and his co-workers randomly assign each round as either a verification or a voting round [1]. Meanwhile, Laurent-Puig and his colleagues (including Centrone) simply chose to postpone the verification aspect of the protocol for future work [2].
For the first time, researchers have determined the shape of the actinide nucleus of fermium-255 and measured its structure with high precision and resolution.
This breakthrough, published in Physical Review Letters, supports modern theoretical models and opens new possibilities for understanding the behavior of the heaviest atomic nuclei.
Studying the shapes of atomic nuclei provides essential insights into their internal structure. In very heavy nuclides, nuclear shape is closely linked to their stability against spontaneous fission and is therefore a key factor in the search for longer-lived superheavy elements. Spontaneous fission arises from the strong repulsion between the many protons in heavy nuclei and ultimately limits the existence of elements beyond uranium (element 92).
Measuring faint magnetic fields is useful in a number of areas, including mapping brain activity, monitoring hearts and probing fundamental physics. Typically, picking up such weak signals requires expensive or bulky equipment, such as liquid-helium cooling tanks or specially shielded rooms that block out Earth’s magnetic field.
In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers report creating a miniature floating magnet that detects these faint signals at room temperature.
To build their magnetometer, the team suspended a tiny permanent magnetic disk, smaller than a grain of rice, inside a glass vacuum chamber, where it levitated in midair. An overhead stack of magnets pulled the disk upward against gravity, while a graphite plate beneath it provided a repulsive force to help stabilize it.
Scientists in China predict that stacking two microscopic layers of boron could set a new record for superconductivity. Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance. Traditional types need temperatures close to absolute zero to work, requiring complex and expensive cooling equipment.
However, in this new research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team predicted a single-element superconductor that works at a much less extreme temperature. If replicated in the real world, it could mean much lower cooling costs and a major step toward improving the efficiency of power grids and technologies like medical MRI scanners and maglev trains.
Currently, the best-known elemental superconductor, scandium, reaches 36 Kelvin (K) (−237°C [-395°F]) only at about 260 gigapascals of pressure. In the new study, scientists predict a threshold of 68 K (−205°C [-337°F]) for the stacked boron layers.