For centuries, we’ve ignored the interstitium, but research is now revealing that this body-wide network of fluid is instrumental to our health and points the way to new treatments
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NASA’s Roman Telescope Enclosed in SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Fairing
Teams have finished preparing NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for launch. On Aug. 21, the team encapsulated the observatory inside the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket’s fairing in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 43-foot-tall fairing encloses the spacecraft and is mounted atop the Falcon Heavy rocket. On the ground, the fairing and its ground support equipment maintain a safe, controlled environment for Roman and allow the team to transport it out of the facility.
During ascent, the fairing protects Roman from acoustic vibrations, aerodynamic pressure, and heating as the rocket travels through Earth’s atmosphere. A few minutes into the flight, once conditions are safe, the fairing separates, allowing Roman to continue its journey toward its destination at Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2). Meanwhile, the two fairing halves will return to Earth and be recovered by SpaceX.
Living circuit boards built by printing bacterial transistors
It points toward a future in which computation isn’t necessarily confined to silicon. Instead, we could build living materials that sense, communicate, compute, and respond—with the “circuit board” itself made of living cells.
Electronic circuit boards carry out different operations on the basis of the configuration of their components. Now, equivalent biological circuits are engineered that compute functions on the basis of the spatial arrangement of different bacterial strains printed on a surface.
Mapping thorium’s preferred sites could pave the way for nuclear clocks
For decades, physicists have used a technique called Mössbauer spectroscopy to peer inside solid materials, revealing fine details of their surroundings by studying how their atomic nuclei absorb and re-emit gamma rays.
Through new research published in Science, a team led by Takahiro Hiraki at Okayama University has pushed this approach into entirely new territory, using visible-adjacent light instead of gamma rays to study the nuclei of thorium-229 atoms. The advance offers a promising new route toward nuclear clocks, devices that could one day keep time more precisely than anything built before.
Meteorite dust holds records of magnetism that may have helped form the sun
4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a giant ball of gas and dust. Over the next few million years, this “solar nebula” underwent a huge transformation, flattening into a disk of matter that then condensed to form the central sun and orbiting planets.
Scientists have assumed that the early solar system was shaped mainly through gravity. But a new study finds that magnetism also likely played a role.
MIT scientists have discovered records of ancient magnetism in the oldest samples of meteorites known today. The team analyzed microscopic grains embedded in a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica in 2008. These grains, called calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, or CAIs, originally formed during the solar system’s first 200,000 years, making the samples the oldest known solar system material.
Lung cancer patient became tumourfree after treatment with selenite
A patient with advanced, treatment-resistant lung cancer became tumour-free after treatment with the selenium compound selenite. This is shown in a new study from Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Oncology and Therapy as a case report. The findings may contribute to increased knowledge about selenite as a possible cancer treatment.
