Toggle light / dark theme

A new technique to measure vibrating atoms could improve the precision of atomic clocks and of quantum sensors for detecting dark matter or gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.

So precise.


If chemists built cars, they’d fill a factory with car parts, set it on fire, and sift from the ashes pieces that now looked vaguely car-like.

When you’re dealing with car-parts the size of atoms, this is a perfectly reasonable process. Yet chemists yearn for ways to reduce the waste and make reactions far more precise.

Chemical engineering has taken a step forward, with researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the University of Regensburg in Germany, and IBM Research Europe forcing a single molecule to undergo a series of transformations with a tiny nudge of voltage.

Up until recently, almost all pediatric liver cancers were classified as either hepatoblastoma or hepatocellular carcinoma. However, pediatric pathologists have noted that certain liver tumors have histological characteristics that do not readily match either of these two carcinoma models. The outcomes for patients with these tumors are poor and the tumors are less likely to respond to chemotherapy.

Dr. Pavel Sumazin, an associate professor of pediatrics at Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Center and Baylor College of Medicine, sought to better understand this high-risk cancer.

Scientists are shooting stem cells into space, hoping to make discoveries that help people on Earth.


Researcher Dhruv Sareen’s own stem cells are now orbiting the Earth. The mission? To test whether they’ll grow better in zero gravity.

Scientists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles are trying to find new ways to produce huge batches of a type of stem cell that can generate nearly any other type of cell in the body — and potentially be used to make treatments for many diseases. The cells arrived over the weekend at the International Space Station on a supply ship.

“I don’t think I would be able to pay whatever it costs now” to take a private ride to space, Sareen said. “At least a part of me in cells can go up!”