Considered one of the best speakers in the space field, Rick Tumlinson is listed as one of the top 100 influential people in the global space community.
Right now, the remains of three private spacecraft rest on the moon, with one more lost in Earth orbit. And that is incredible.
First came Israel’s Beresheet, which crashed on the lunar surface in 2019. Next was Astrobotic’s Peregrine, which suffered an anomaly and was ordered to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere in early 2024. Then, Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus became the first functioning private vehicle to land on the moon — though it landed harder than expected and didn’t live as long as planned. The company tried again with Athena earlier this month, which touched down on its side but still completed key mission objectives before running out of power. Finally, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost crossed the finish line with a fully successful landing — alive, transmitting and delivering incredible images and other results.
And this is just the beginning. Soon, the U.S.-Japanese iSpace team will attempt its own touchdown, marking yet another milestone in what is quickly evolving into a true private-sector space race.
Researchers are increasingly turning to organ-on-a-chip technology for drug testing and other applications.
Carbon–carbon triple bonds exhibit a distinct Raman response in the region of 1,800–2,800 cm−1, known as the cellularly silent region. This unique chemical signature, coupled with the small size of alkyne moieties, presents these tags as useful imaging alternatives to bulky fluorescent probes. This Primer discusses the various Raman scattering processes used to image alkyne tags in cells, including the optical set-up required, how to choose an alkyne tag and imaging results from different cellular environments.
To explore how the brain deciphers the melody of speech, researchers worked with the rare group of patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of epilepsy treatment. While these patients actively listened to an audiobook recording of “Alice in Wonderland,” scientists tracked activity in multiple brain regions in real time.
Using the intracerebral recordings from the electrodes deep in the patient’s brain, researchers noted the Heschl’s gyrus section processed subtle changes in voice pitch — not just as sound, but as meaningful linguistic units. The brain encoded pitch accents separately from the sounds that make up words.
The author says the research also revealed that the hidden layer of meaning carried by prosodic contours — the rise and fall of speech — is encoded much earlier in auditory processing than previously thought.
Similar research was conducted in non-human primates, but researchers found those brains lacked this abstraction, despite processing the same acoustic cues.
By unlocking the hidden layer of speech, the team discovered how the brain processes pitch accents, revealing profound implications for various fields.
“Our findings could transform speech rehabilitation, AI-powered voice assistants, and our understanding of what makes human communication unique,” the author said.
A new study using intracranial recordings in humans reveals that the thalamus, particularly its higher-order regions, plays a central role in triggering conscious perception.
Researchers have developed a blood test based on a protein biomarker for tau tangles that can help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease and also provide insight on how far the disease has progressed.
Knitted microtissues, seeded with stem cells and other precursor cells, may soon accelerate the healing process of different soft tissues in humans. The work is led by researchers at the Defense Fabric Discovery Center at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as well as the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Uncovering the mechanism for polar sequestration of the major bacterial sugar regulator by high-throughput screens and 3D interaction modeling
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Professor Kenji Osafune (Department of Cell Growth and Differentiation) and his team of researchers have devised an effective means to grow iPS cell-derived kidney progenitor cells, paving the way for renal regenerative therapies to become a reality. The findings are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Modern medicine continues to be hampered by the lack of effective treatments for acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Regenerative medicine, such as cell replacement therapies, represents a new hope for patients. Yet, such therapeutic approaches require large-scale production of the necessary cells, which had remained a challenge until this discovery.
Using a mouse model of AKI, the research team first demonstrated the therapeutic potential of human iPS cell-derived nephron progenitor cells (hiPSC-NPCs). When these cells were transplanted into the kidneys of AKI mouse models induced by an anti-cancer drug, cisplatin, the animals’ survival was vastly improved by preventing the deterioration of kidney function.
A new study reveals that autism-like symptoms in mice emerge when two nerve proteins—MDGA2 and BDNF—fall out of balance.