Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 9

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

AI tool reveals what attracts immune cells to tumors and what keeps them away

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and collaborating institutions in Texas developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that helps explain how immune cells find their way to specific locations in the body and why they avoid others. The findings could help scientists better understand cancer, autoimmune diseases and treatment response.

The study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, was co-led by Tao Wang, Ph.D., associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology, and Linghua Wang, M.D., Ph.D., professor of genomic medicine, executive director and head of the Center for Cellular Language Intelligence, associate member of the James P. Allison Institute and focus area co-lead with the Institute for Data Science in Oncology.

“While spatial technologies can show where immune cells are located, this new tool helps us investigate why they gather in certain areas and how they reach and recognize tumor cells,” Tao Wang said. “By identifying local signals that attract immune cells as well as potential barriers that may keep them out, we may be able to identify biomarkers and therapeutic targets that could be used to improve patient outcomes.”

Quantum Teleportation Inspired by Black Holes Produces a Surprise

Beyond a black hole’s event horizon, information as we know it meets a mysterious fate.

There, in one of the most extreme environments in the Universe, quantum information is thought to become scrambled almost beyond recognition, dispersed into a bewildering tangle of quantum interactions.

Connect two such monsters to each other via an umbilical wormhole, however, and something incredible becomes possible.

Scientists just gave the powerhouses of our cells a high-tech upgrade

Scientists have developed a way to coat mitochondria, the tiny structures that produce energy inside our cells, with advanced materials without interfering with their function. The achievement could eventually help researchers develop new approaches to treating diseases caused by malfunctioning mitochondria.

The research was conducted by IRCCS Fondazione Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta (FINCB) and Politecnico di Milano through their joint BraiNs laboratory, established in 2023. The collaboration combines the mitochondrial biology expertise of Dr. Valeria Tiranti (FINCB), a researcher in the Medical Genetics and Neurogenetics Complex Unit (SC) and head of the Fondazione Mariani Centre for Paediatric Mitochondrial Diseases, with the chemistry and materials engineering expertise of Professor Pierangelo Metrangolo (Politecnico di Milano).

Physicists Built a Black Hole in a Lab. Then It Swallowed Sound

Sound can be a tricksy beast to try to harness.

It fills the world around us, bursting from its multitudinous sources, bouncing off surfaces as echoes – a property that makes sound both incredibly useful and deeply vexing, depending on where and how its reverberations occur.

There are some circumstances where echoes can cause problems. The most obvious example is sound recording studios, but one major problem area is probably less obvious because it’s far more ubiquitous – pipes.

Magnetic sculpting transforms single-source fields into predetermined shapes with mathematical precision

Magnetic fields are invisible yet essential components in technologies ranging from MRI scanners and particle accelerators to atomic clocks and future quantum computers. Each of these applications requires magnetic fields with specific shapes and properties. Today, creating such tailored magnetic fields requires researchers and engineers to design specialized, carefully optimized magnets or large systems of coils for each individual application—a complex and resource-intensive process.

Now, a team of physicists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and Chalmers University of Technology has developed a method that makes it possible to transform the magnetic field from a single source, such as a coil or a permanent magnet, into a broad class of predetermined magnetic fields with exact mathematical precision.

Known as magnetic omniconversion, the method enables simple magnetic sources to be used for a wide range of important applications. The research is published in the journal Science Advances.