Years before he conducted the research that would earn him a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, Shinya Yamanaka, MD, Ph.D., was a postdoctoral scientist at Gladstone Institutes, studying genes. There, he helped discover a gene (now called eIF4G2) that’s essential for early embryonic development.
Then, the story pauses. Without the technology needed to develop an animal model to further investigate the gene, Yamanaka moved on to develop induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells—adult cells that have been reprogrammed into an embryonic state. That work earned him the Nobel Prize, but he never forgot his first gene.
Now, 30 years since his postdoc, Yamanaka has circled back to eIF4G2.
Researchers have developed, for the first time in the world, incoherent dielectric tensor tomography (iDTT), a technology that can read complex three-dimensional optical fingerprints inside materials using only everyday LED illumination.
The study is published in Nature Photonics, and the research team was led by Professor YongKeun Park of the Department of Physics, in collaboration with Professor Seung-Mo Hong’s team at Asan Medical Center and Professor Seokwoo Jeon’s team at Korea University.
Some materials possess an inherent property called optical anisotropy, in which the refractive index changes depending on the direction in which light passes through. This is a decisive optical fingerprint that reveals the internal structure and molecular arrangement of the material.
Peter Diamandis is one of the most extraordinary minds I’ve ever had the privilege of calling a friend, a man who doesn’t just predict the future, he builds…
Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the HI-STEM Stem Cell Institute have deciphered a key mechanism that contributes to treatment failure in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). They show that there are not just one, but four different subtypes of leukemia stem cells. This diversity could explain why one of the most important AML drugs does not work sufficiently in some patients or loses its effectiveness over time—resulting in the return of leukemia.
This discovery lays an important foundation for more precise and long-term successful treatment strategies that could specifically overcome resistance mechanisms. The findings are published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive form of blood cancer that primarily affects older people and often has a poor prognosis despite improved therapies. In recent years, the targeted drug venetoclax has significantly improved treatment. In combination with other drugs, venetoclax often shows good therapeutic success in AML and will, at least in part, replace highly aggressive chemotherapy in the future. However, AML returns in nearly all patients—usually because individual cancer stem cells become resistant to the drug.
A recent study using advanced cell mapping shows that lithium chloride changes the activity of multiple enzymes linked to Alzheimer’s disease. These findings could help researchers design safer, more effective treatments for cognitive decline and dementia.
A team of researchers from the Universities of Tübingen, Bayreuth, and Kassel, and the Polish Academy of Sciences has developed a method for precisely controlling the movement of magnetic microparticles based on their size. These suspended particles, known as colloidal particles, range in size from a few tens of nanometers to several micrometers. Controlling them is important for applications such as drug delivery, medical laboratory tests, and the synthesis of new materials. The team’s study has now been published in Physical Review Letters.
The new method involves positioning microparticles above a magnetic layer that is patterned like a chessboard. In previous studies, magnetic transportation of the colloidal particles was limited to a specific height. At this distance, although the magnetic forces appear to balance each other out, the particles move regardless of their size. Therefore, it was not possible to control the particles specifically based on their size.
For years, quantum computers have lived under a huge bubble of hype, promising to revolutionize numerous fields, from medicine and battery design to materials science and cybersecurity. But realizing their potential on any serious practical level will only be possible if large numbers of qubits (the basic units of information) can interact with each other with high precision and flexibility.
One of the main things holding that back is that traditional qubits are fixed in place, meaning they can only talk to their immediate neighbors. But in a new paper published in Nature, scientists describe how they overcame this limitation by using mobile qubits that can be moved around a chip. Lars R. Schreiber at the JARA-FIT Institute for Quantum Information in Germany has also published a News & Views piece in the same journal.
A new computational method could dramatically accelerate efforts to map the body’s cells in space, according to a study published in Nature Genetics. Spatial multi-omics technologies—often described as ultra-high-resolution maps of tissues—allow scientists to see not only which genes or proteins are active in a cell, but exactly where that activity occurs. That spatial context is critical for understanding complex organs such as the brain, immune tissues and developing embryos.
Unfortunately, capturing multiple molecular layers at once remains expensive and technically challenging, said David Gate, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology’s Division of Behavioral Neurology, who was a co-author of the study.
“In practice, investigators end up with ‘mosaic’ datasets: different slices or batches that each capture only some of the layers, often from different technologies or labs, with batch effects and missing pieces,” said Gate, who also leads the Abrams Research Center on Neurogenomics.
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Imagine a civilization reaches something like a Type II level, advanced enough to move through interstellar space and keep large populations alive for generations. At that stage, the challenge is developing ships that can cross the void, and also making sure the people inside them can survive radiation, isolation, and extreme travel times. That could mean heavy genetic engineering before the journey begins, changing bone density, metabolism, resistance to disease, tolerance for low gravity, or even sensory systems and respiration. But when they finally arrive, they may still find that the planet is wrong for them, maybe the air is toxic, the gravity is crushing, the temperatures are extreme, or the native chemistry is incompatible with human biology.
At that point, they face two paths. One is terraforming, which means trying to remake an entire planet into something closer to Earth. That could involve thickening or thinning an atmosphere, warming a frozen world, cooling a hot one, importing water, altering soil chemistry, introducing engineered microbes, building orbital mirrors or shades, and managing the planet for centuries or even millennia. The scale of that project is absurdly expensive, not just in money but in energy, infrastructure, labor, time, and raw materials. You are not changing a city or even a continent, you are trying to rewrite a whole world.
The other option is pantropy. Instead of forcing the planet to become Earth-like, the colonists change themselves to fit the planet. They might alter their lungs to breathe a different atmospheric mix, redesign their skin to handle harsher radiation, reduce their size for lower resource use, strengthen their bodies for higher gravity, or even become something so biologically different that they no longer look fully human. That is the core idea of pantropy, adapting the colonists to the world rather than adapting the world to the colonists.
The term was coined by James Blish, and he used it in connection with the stories collected in The Seedling Stars, especially “Surface Tension.” which was first published in 1952 in Galaxy Science Fiction.
