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Profiles in Versatility

During her uncle’s treatment in 2003, Green experienced what she refers to as a “divine download”—an electrifying idea inspired by her college internships at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the Institute of Optics. “If a satellite in outer space can tell if a dime on the ground is face up or face down, and if a cell phone can target just one cell phone on the other side of the planet,” she recalls thinking, “surely we should be able to harness the technology of lasers to treat cancer just at the site of the tumor, so we won’t have all of these side effects.”

In the nearly two decades that followed, Dr. Green rerouted her career, earned a physics PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham—the second Black woman to do so—and dove into cancer treatment research, with physics as her guide. In 2009, she developed a treatment that uses nanoparticles and lasers in tandem: Specially designed nanoparticles are injected into a solid tumor, and, when the tumor is hit with near infrared light, the nanoparticles heat up, killing the cancer cells. In a preliminary animal study published in 2014, Green tested the treatment on mice, whose tumors were eliminated with no observable side effects.


When Hadiyah-Nicole Green crossed the stage at her college graduation, she felt sure about what would come next. She’d start a career in optics—a good option for someone with a bachelor’s degree in physics—and that would be that.

Life, though, had other plans. The day after she graduated from Alabama A&M University, she learned that her aunt, Ora Lee Smith, had cancer. Smith and her husband had raised Green since she was four years old, after the death of Green’s mother and then grandparents.

Her aunt “said she’d rather die than experience the side effects of chemo or radiation,” says Green, now a medical physicist and founder and CEO of the Ora Lee Smith Cancer Research Foundation.

How to Build in Space — for Life on Earth

🏗️ Q: What are the potential benefits of off-worlding heavy industry to space?

A: Space-based manufacturing can produce sustainable energy, food, and water for a trillion-dollar space economy, allowing Earth to recover as a garden planet for future generations.

Space-Based Manufacturing.

🧬 Q: How can microgravity in low-Earth orbit advance biotech manufacturing?

A: Enable unique manufacturing of protein crystals, tissues, and novel drugs impossible on Earth, with high-throughput production of exceptional quality organoids for Alzheimer’s and cancer drug testing.

☀️ Q: How can space-based solar power solve Earth’s energy challenges?

Deadly fungus in US threatens lives as infection rates rise in These seven states

One study showed that only 59% of organ transplant patients lived for one year after getting invasive aspergillosis. Only 25% of stem cell transplant patients survived that long.

From 2000 to 2013, US hospital stays for invasive aspergillosis went up about 3% each year. By 2014, there were almost 15,000 hospital stays, costing around $1.2 billion. Autopsies in ICUs show aspergillosis is one of the top four infections that can cause death.

Scientists Warn: Long Work Hours May Physically Alter Your Brain

Working long hours may actually change the structure of your brain, according to new research published in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. The study points to alterations in key brain areas responsible for emotional regulation and executive functions like working memory and problem solving.

Researchers believe that chronic overwork could trigger neuroadaptive changes, which might have lasting effects on both cognitive performance and emotional well-being.

The dangers of working too much extend beyond burnout. Long hours have already been linked to higher risks of heart disease, metabolic disorders, and mental health problems. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) reports that overwork contributes to more than 800,000 deaths worldwide each year.

Time matters: the dynamics of plasma membrane repair

The plasma membrane (PM) of eukaryotic cells is constantly exposed to many challenges that can cause wounds that necessitate rapid and efficient repair mechanisms to ensure cell survival. PM wound repair not only encompasses the immediate resealing of the membrane barrier, which involves exocytosis of internal vesicles to deliver membrane, but also subsequent processes that are essential to restore cellular homeostasis. These include restoration of membrane and cortical cytoskeleton structures, as well as replenishment of intracellular organelles consumed during resealing. Recent evidence suggests that the different steps in PM repair, resealing, restructuring, and restoration, are spatiotemporally correlated and regulated by membrane tension. Recent advances in understanding the different phases of PM repair are reviewed and a time-dependent classification of repair mechanisms is proposed.

In stereo: Neurons shift gears between thoughts using brain rhythms

The brain is constantly mapping the external world like a GPS, even when we don’t know about it. This activity comes in the form of tiny electrical signals sent between neurons—specialized cells that communicate with one another to help us think, move, remember and feel. These signals often follow rhythmic patterns known as brain waves, such as slower theta waves and faster gamma waves, which help organize how the brain processes information.

Understanding how respond to these rhythms is key to unlocking how the brain functions related to navigation in real time—and how it may be affected in disease.

A new study by Florida Atlantic University and collaborators from Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, has uncovered a surprising ability of brain cells in the hippocampus to process and encode and respond to information from multiple brain rhythms at once.

Glial replacement therapy slows Huntington’s disease in adult mice

Huntington’s disease has long defied attempts to rescue suffering neurons. A new study in Cell Reports shows that transplanting healthy human glial progenitor cells into the brains of adult animal models of the disease not only slowed motor and cognitive decline but also extended lifespan. These findings shift our understanding of Huntington’s pathology and open a potential path to cell-based therapies in adults already showing symptoms.

“Glia are essential caretakers of neurons,” said Steve Goldman, MD, Ph.D., co-director of the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine and lead author of the study.

“The restoration of healthy glial support—even after symptoms begin—could reset neuronal gene expression, stabilize synaptic function, and meaningfully delay disease progression. This study shifts the perspective on Huntington’s from a neuron-centric view to one that shows a critical role for glial pathology in driving synaptic dysfunction. It also tells us that the adult brain still has the capacity for repair when you target the right cells.”

Enzyme inhibitor strategy converts neuroblastoma cells into healthy neurons in mice

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Lund University in Sweden have identified a new treatment strategy for neuroblastoma, an aggressive form of childhood cancer. By combining two antioxidant enzyme inhibitors, they have converted cancer cells in mice into healthy nerve cells.

The study, “Combined targeting of PRDX6 and GSTP1 as a potential differentiation strategy for treatment,” is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Neuroblastoma is a type of childhood cancer that affects the and is the leading cause of cancer-related death in young children. Some patients have a good prognosis, but those with often cannot be cured despite modern combinations of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

Advanced software uncovers elusive protein variants tied to genetic mutations

Scientists at UCLA and the University of Toronto have developed an advanced computational tool, called moPepGen, that helps identify previously invisible genetic mutations in proteins, unlocking new possibilities in cancer research and beyond.

The tool, described in Nature Biotechnology, will help understand how changes in our DNA affect proteins and ultimately contribute to cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and other conditions. It provides a new way to create and to find treatment targets previously invisible to researchers.

Proteogenomics combines the study of genomics and proteomics to provide a comprehensive molecular profile of diseases. However, a major challenge has been the inability to accurately detect variant peptides, limiting the ability to identify at the protein level. Existing proteomic tools often fail to capture the full diversity of protein variations.