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A team of researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom has made a significant breakthrough in physics by visualizing the shape of a single photon for the first time. This achievement was facilitated by an innovative computer model that simplifies the complex interaction between light and matter, a major challenge in the fields of physics and quantum mechanics.

Photons, the particles of light, have long captivated scientists. Since their discovery, it has been proven that light behaves both as a wave and a particle, a phenomenon known as wave-particle duality. This concept, which took centuries to be accepted, has been pivotal for the advancement of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that studies subatomic interactions.

Photons are central to many phenomena, including lighting, telecommunications, and even touchscreen technology. However, despite their significance, the precise nature of their shape remained unknown until this team of researchers discovered a new way to visualize them.

Investigators at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed the largest collection of sarcoma patient-derived organoids to date that can help improve the understanding of the disease and better identify therapies that are most likely to work for each individual patient.

The approach, detailed in the journal Cell Stem Cell, uses patients’ own tumor cells that replicate the unique characteristics of a patient’s tumor allowing scientists to quickly screen a large number of drugs in order to identify personalized treatments that can target this rare and diverse group of cancers.

“Sarcoma is a rare and complex disease, which makes conducting clinical trials to identify effective treatments particularly challenging. Some of the rarer subtypes lack standard treatment altogether. Even when multiple therapy options are available, there is often no reliable, data-driven method to determine the best course of action for an individual patient. Choosing the most effective treatment is akin to searching for a needle in a haystack,” said Dr. Alice Soragni, the senior author of the study and assistant professor in the department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Testing drugs with patient-derived tumor organoids has potential to help predict how a patient may respond to treatment, with the goal of improving patient outcomes for diseases where treatment options are often limited.”

For the first time, researchers used lab-grown organoids created from tumors of individuals with glioblastoma (GBM) to accurately model a patient’s response to CAR T cell therapy in real time. The organoid’s response to therapy mirrored the response of the actual tumor in the patient’s brain. That is, if the tumor-derived organoid shrunk after treatment, so did the patient’s actual tumor, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine, published in Cell Stem Cell.

Lab-grown tumors respond to cell therapy the same as tumors in the patients’ brains, according to researchers at Penn Medicine.

Scientists unveil a cutting-edge nanoparticle platform that supercharges vaccines for stronger, longer-lasting immunity tailored to every age group.

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Discover how probing the components of the half-asteroid, half-comet hybrids reveals that carbon dioxide was present during the solar system’s formation.

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Here’s what you should be focusing on instead.

A groundbreaking discovery by an international team of astronomers has revealed a completely new class of cosmic X-ray sources.

Led by researchers from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw, this finding, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is shedding light on mysterious celestial phenomena.

Cosmic X-ray Phenomena

Our radio signals have only traveled 200 light-years—just a tiny fraction of the galaxy.