Imagine tiny fists punching their way through your body. For some cancer patients, this may be the reality. Melanoma cells can mechanically tunnel their way through tissue using fleshy membrane protrusions without the need for chemicals that chew up the environment, researchers report June 12 in Developmental Cell. Cells have various modes of movement (SN: … Read more
Supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies may be churning out a lot of the universe’s high-energy neutrinos. Two teams using data from IceCube, the world’s premier neutrino observatory located in Antarctica, have independently identified a common type of these active galaxies, called Seyfert galaxies, as likely neutrino producers. These findings, reported in … Read more
Meet graphene’s newest metallic cousin, goldene. For the first time, researchers have created a free-standing sheet of gold that’s just one atom thick. The development, reported in the April 16 Nature Synthesis, could someday allow scientists to use less gold in electronics and chemical reactions, says materials physicist Lars Hultman of Linköping University in Sweden. … Read more
Rogue waves are freakishly large ridges of water known for rising out of the blue to ambush hapless ships and beachgoers. But a new artificial intelligence model can predict most of these surprising swells up to five minutes in advance, mechanical engineers Thomas Breunung and Balakumar Balachandran of the University of Maryland in College Park … Read more
Keep your eyes on the night sky this summer, scanning for the constellation Corona Borealis, and if you are lucky, you may glimpse what appears to be a new star winking on in the dark. The brightening point of light will not be a new star, but a nova eruption about 3,000 light-years from Earth. … Read more
The cosmos may have something in common with a doughnut. In addition to their fried, sugary goodness, doughnuts are known for their shape, or in mathematical terms, their topology. In a universe with an analogous, complex topology, you could travel across the cosmos and end up back where you started. Such a cosmos hasn’t yet been … Read more
When bloodstream infections set in, fast treatment is crucial — but it can take several days to identify the bacteria responsible. A new, rapid-diagnosis sepsis test could cut down on the wait, reducing testing time from as much as a few days to about 13 hours by cutting out a lengthy blood culturing step, researchers … Read more
Head-scratching observations of distant galaxies are challenging cosmologists’ dominant ideas about the universe, potentially leading to the implication that the strange substance called dark matter doesn’t exist. That’s one possible conclusion from a new study published June 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The finding “raises questions of an extraordinarily fundamental nature,” says Richard Brent … Read more
Neutrinos are known for funny business. Now scientists have set a new limit on a quantum trait responsible for the subatomic particles’ quirkiness: uncertainty. The lightweight particles morph from one variety of neutrino to another as they travel, a strange phenomenon called neutrino oscillation (SN: 10/6/15). That ability rests on quantum uncertainty, a sort of fuzziness intrinsic … Read more
In an unexpected twist, metal-rich nodules found on the seafloor are generating oxygen, new research suggests. This meager but steady supply of the vital gas may help support seafloor ecosystems in areas currently targeted for deep-sea mining, scientists say. Scientists have long presumed that much of the dissolved oxygen in the deep sea was transported … Read more