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Recent studies challenge the long-held belief that the Milky Way.

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System and is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is a barred spiral galaxy that contains an estimated 100–400 billion stars and has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years. The name “Milky Way” comes from the appearance of the galaxy from Earth as a faint band of light that stretches across the night sky, resembling spilled milk.

For the first time in history, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have uncovered evidence of dark stars, colossal celestial objects powered not by nuclear fusion but by the enigmatic annihilation of dark matter. If confirmed, these mysterious entities could rewrite our understanding of the early universe and the nature of dark matter.

A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label whole rodent brains and other large tissue samples in a single day.

In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across whole brains can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods.

Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience and related fields because the proteins a cell is expressing at a given moment can reflect the functions the cell is trying to perform or its response to its circumstances, such as disease or treatment.

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have used machine learning to design nano-architected materials that have the strength of carbon steel but the lightness of Styrofoam.

In a new paper published in Advanced Materials, a team led by Professor Tobin Filleter describes how they made nanomaterials with properties that offer a conflicting combination of exceptional strength, light weight and customizability. The approach could benefit a wide range of industries, from automotive to aerospace.

“Nano-architected materials combine high performance shapes, like making a bridge out of triangles, at nanoscale sizes, which takes advantage of the ‘smaller is stronger’ effect, to achieve some of the highest strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios, of any material,” says Peter Serles, the first author of the new paper.

Water is the essence of life. Every living thing on Earth contains water within it. The Earth is rich with life because it is rich with water.

This fundamental connection between water and life is partly due to water’s extraordinary properties, but part of it is due to the fact that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe.

Made from one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, its structure is simple and strong. The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element. Oxygen is created in the cores of large stars, along with carbon and nitrogen, as part of the CNO fusion cycle.

The chameleon, a lizard known for its color-changing skin, is the inspiration behind a new electromagnetic material that could someday make vehicles and aircraft “invisible” to radar.

As reported today in the journal Science Advances, a team of UC Berkeley engineers has developed a tunable metamaterial microwave absorber that can switch between absorbing, transmitting or reflecting microwaves on demand by mimicking the chameleon’s color-changing mechanism.

“A key discovery was the ability to achieve both broadband absorption and high transmission in a single structure, offering adaptability in dynamic environments,” said Grace Gu, principal investigator of the study and assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “This flexibility has wide-ranging applications, from to advanced communication systems and energy harvesting.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday (Jan. 23) that accelerated advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in biology, can lead to a doubling of human lifespans in as little as five to 10 years “if we really get this AI stuff right.”

During a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amodei called this the “grand vision.” He explained that if AI today can shrink a century’s worth of work in biology to five to 10 years, and if one believes it would take 100 years to double the average length of human life, then “a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy, and if AI is able to accelerate that we may be able to get that in five to 10 years.”

Amodei also said that Anthropic is working on a “virtual collaborator,” an AI agent capable of doing higher-level tasks in the workplace such as opening Google Docs, using the Slack messaging channel, and interacting with workers. A manager will only need to check in with this AI agent “once in a while,” similar to what management does with human employees.