UC Berkeley scientists are in charge of two identical satellites, nicknamed Blue and Gold to honor the university's colors, set to launch for Mars as soon as Sunday. Leading NASA's ESCAPADE mission, the team based at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory's mission operations center will manage the twin satellites as they take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this weekend and travel to Mars by 2027.
In math, a knot is a tangled piece of string with its ends glued together. Two knots are the same if you can twist and stretch one into the other without cutting the string. But it's hard to tell if this is possible based solely on what the knots look like. A knot that seems really complicated and tangled, for instance, might actually be equivalent to a simple loop.
By observing the brightness of distant dying stars, astronomers have long come to believe that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. In fact, that apparent reality is deeply built into cosmological models: a mysterious force that influences the universe on the largest scales, dubbed dark energy, is believed to explain the acceleration. However, not everybody agrees with this widely accepted scientific consensus.
Toyota's next-generation electric vehicle batteries could vastly improve the driving range and charging speeds compared to today's packs. The company is reportedly working on cells that can last four decades and be reused multiple times during that period. The aging will happen with minimal energy degradation, the company claims. Writing about solid-state batteries feels like waiting for a train that's always five minutes away, but it never actually arrives.
The UK Government has announced more than £14 million in new funding to accelerate the commercial use of quantum technology across healthcare, defence, transport and energy, in a move it says will help power Britain's next industrial revolution. The investment, unveiled on Friday at the National Quantum Technologies Showcase in London, marks a major milestone in the country's National Quantum Technologies Programme - part of its wider plan to translate cutting-edge science into real-world applications that drive economic growth.
Until now, preclinical trials relied primarily on two-dimensional cell cultures and animal models, which often failed to accurately replicate human biology. Since 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not required animal testing, thanks in part to organoids, which Hans Clevers (Eindhoven, 68 years old), professor of molecular genetics at Utrecht University, has been researching since the beginning of the century.
Tested by the valley's extreme summertime heat, the flowering shrub Arizona honeysweet (Tidestromia oblongifolia) thrives. The humble-looking, seafoam green plant considers 113°F optimal for photosynthesis - the highest known temperature tolerance of any major crop species, according to new research. A team of scientists published the find on Friday in the journal Current Biology, revealing the plant's tricks for growing fast in heat and drawing lessons for how to engineer crops to withstand climate change.
As cities sprawl ever outwards, they bring their big lights with them, and the once-dark night skies overhead are being lost. But in New Zealand, thanks to its low population density, the skies have remained surprisingly dark, and over 96 percent of its landmass still has views of the Milky Way at night. DarkSky International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the night sky, has identified some of the best spots for witnessing the wonders of the cosmos across the island country.
The agency is once again calling on citizen innovators to help design the future, this time through a new HeroX challenge to develop better wheels and more robust tires for lunar rovers. The competition, called the Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge, offers $155,000 in prizes for top designs that can handle the punishing surface of the moon. As with previous NASA and HeroX challenges, everyone from amateur inventors working out of their garages to teams of students or professional companies are welcome to participate.
On the same day, Biohub said it wouldpartner with EvolutionaryScaleto leverage AI to "dramatically accelerate scientific progress toward understanding and addressing human disease." "When we started, our goal was to help scientists cure or prevent all diseases this century," Zuckerberg said in a press release. "With advances in AI, we now believe this may be possible much sooner. Accelerating science is the most positive impact we think we can make. So we're going all in on AI-powered biology for our next chapter."
For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal to cure, prevent or manage all disease if not in their lifetime, then in their children's. But during that time, they also funded underprivileged schools, immigration reform and efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion. Now, the billionaire couple is shifting the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the pair's science organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery.
In early July, astronomers spotted a mysterious object, later dubbed 3I/ATLAS after it was confirmed to be the third-ever interstellar visitor cruising through our solar system. Last week, the object, which is now generally believed to be a comet, reached its closest point to the Sun, or its perihelion, brightening up at an unexpected rate and turning " distinctly bluer." And it may be getting a major boost that's unaccounted for by the Sun's gravitational pull as well.
The clutch of remora fish are holding on tight, but collectively release their grip just as the humpback whale they are riding breaches the surface of the ocean. Moments later, everyone is back on board, as the whale re-enters the water, all hurtling together off the coast of south-east Queensland. This rare footage of suckerfish was captured by marine scientist Dr Olaf Meynecke from Griffith University using camera tags attached to humpback whales. The remora are able to sense the change in speed and water depth, he said. It was amazing to see how fast and nimble they were during several different rides with the whales.
The number of Chinese scientists taking on leadership roles in international science projects is growing rapidly. They now lead more than half of all research projects with the United Kingdom, and are expected to lead an equal number of projects with Europe and with the United States in the next couple of years, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week. Hongjun Xiang, a physicist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, says the projections are consistent with what he has observed in the country, particularly in fields such as physics and engineering. But China needs to strengthen its leadership capabilities in disruptive basic research, "as Nobel-level original breakthroughs remain rare", he adds.
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I was a third-year medical student at Northwestern on my ICU rotation the first time I saw a dopamine drip. The patient was pale and motionless, his blood pressure dropping by the minute despite large volumes of IV fluids. My senior resident said to the bedside nurse, "Let's start a dopamine drip at five micrograms per kilogram per minute." I stood at the foot of the bed, watching the monitor as the patient's heart rate and pressure began to climb.
Magnetorheological (MR) materials, a class of smart materials that can reversibly change rheological and mechanical properties under magnetic fields15,16,17, are composed of soft magnetic particles within a fluid or elastomeric carrier18,19. Under external magnetic fields, the magnetized particles attract each other through dipole-dipole interaction to form fibre-like structures-known as the MR effect-that increase the viscosity and stiffness of the MR materials20,21. Among these materials, anisotropic MR elastomers with predefined fibre-like soft magnetic structures exhibit directional responses, including sheer stiffening22 and rotational actuation23, to magnetic fields.
Historically, ER sheets have been considered the predominant site of secretome mRNA translation, largely owing to their enrichment in membrane-bound polysomes5. Yet, recent reconstructions from diverse mammalian cell types reveal that ribosomes, including polysome-associated and monosome-bound forms, are distributed across nearly all ER morphologies, encompassing sheets, tubules and tubule-tubule junctions6. Notably, a substantial subset of ER-bound ribosomes corresponds to non-translating subunits, particularly the 60S7,8, suggesting that ribosome association is not synonymous with active elongation and may reflect regulatory or pre-initiation states.
Taking place at Centre Concord, the show is meant not just for collectors of glittery, hard things, but for anybody curious about the way the planet's put together. "Step inside and explore a dazzling world of minerals, gems, fossils, meteorites, crystals, beads, jewelry and slabs from expert vendors and collectors," the organizers write. "Discover Earth's hidden beauty up close through live lapidary demonstrations, educational displays and interactive exhibits that bring geology to life."
GRBs are extremely energetic explosions that rank among the most powerful astrophysical events in the universe, so luminous they can be seen from billions of light-years away. They're most commonly caused by either a merging pair of neutron stars or a very massive star ending its life in a supernova called a collapsar; in both of these classical cases, the resulting stellar cataclysm can spit out a giant, tightly focused jet of radiation and particles.
