The metabolite citraconate can preserve T cell stemness and suppress exhaustion, promoting antitumor immunity and responses to immunotherapies in mice.
Learn more in Science Immunology.
Sci. Immunol. 11, eadz0348 (2026). DOI:10.1126/sciimmunol.adz0348
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An international team led by researchers from the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN-CSIC) has identified a key mechanism that has shaped Earth’s continents over billions of years. This mechanism is the deep re-lamination of subducted continental crust, a process that explains the origin of certain magmas and offers a new perspective on continental evolution from the Archean (between 3.8 and 2.5 billion years ago) to recent times.
The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, combines numerical geodynamic modeling and high-pressure experiments to unravel how fragments of continental crust can give rise to hybrid magmas that fuel major magmatic events following continental collisions, generating new crust.
During continental collisions, one plate sinks beneath another—a process known as subduction. This study demonstrates that the less dense crust breaks away from the subducted plate and rises again, becoming integrated into the lithospheric mantle of the overlying plate in a process called relamination.
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In two recently published studies, the nucleoporins NUP98 and NUP153 have been identified as key host factors in orthoflavivirus infection.
NUP98 and NUP153 are normally part of the nuclear pore complex, which regulates the transport of proteins and RNA between the cell nucleus and the cytosol, the fluid in which the cell’s internal components are suspended. Since orthoflaviviruses copy their RNA in the cytosol, these proteins had not previously been linked to the viral life cycle.
The researchers now show that during infection, both nucleoporins are recruited to viral replication sites in the cytosol, where they bind directly to viral RNA. In addition, NUP153 also interacts with viral proteins.
“It was surprising to see how proteins that normally act as ‘gatekeepers’ to the nucleus instead become active participants in the virus’s replication machinery,” says the first author.
The studies show that NUP98 and NUP153 have distinct roles during infection. NUP98 is required for efficient replication of viral RNA, while NUP153 influences how much of the different viral proteins are produced.
NUP153 binds to a specific region of the viral RNA located between the sequences encoding structural and non-structural proteins. Through this interaction, the balance between different viral proteins is regulated, which is critical at an early stage of infection. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission.
A new autonomous laboratory recently navigated through billions of potential material synthesis recipes to identify brighter, lead-free light-emitting nanomaterials in just 12 hours. The work could accelerate development of safer light-emitting nanoplatelets for use in applications ranging from photodetectors to the production of fuel from solar energy. A paper describing this work appears in Nature Communications.
Nanoplatelets are sheet-like crystals only billionths of a meter thick; in this case, they belong to a family of lead-free “double perovskites,” materials whose atomic recipe can be tuned to control how they absorb and emit light.
“One of the big challenges in developing safer optical nanomaterials is the sheer size of the material universe,” says Milad Abolhasani, Alcoa Professor and University Faculty Scholar in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. Abolhasani is the corresponding author of the research.
Newly identified correlated errors in superconducting qubits could limit the performance of error-correction schemes needed for a practical quantum computer.
Building a working quantum computer is challenging because its basic components, qubits, are highly sensitive to environmental disturbances that compromise computation. Whereas classical bits can only undergo bit-flip errors that change 0 to 1 or vice versa, qubits also suffer from so-called phase errors that degrade the fundamental quantum interference effects essential for quantum computation. Joining several good, but not perfect, physical qubits into a logical qubit makes quantum error correction possible (see Research News: Cracking the Challenge of Quantum Error Correction). But that strategy can fail if too many qubits become faulty at the same time. In one leading hardware platform, superconducting circuits, such correlated qubit errors are typically triggered every few tens of seconds when ionizing radiation from the environment deposits energy into the chip hosting the circuits.
Using various telescopes, an international team of astronomers has performed multi-wavelength observations of a recently identified gamma-ray burst source designated GRB 250416C. Results of the observational campaign, published April 23 on the v pre-print server, could help us better understand the nature of GRB 250416C and gamma-ray bursts in general.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful electromagnetic explosions in the universe, usually caused by the destruction of massive stars. In general, they are observed as bursts of highly energetic gamma rays lasting from less than a second to several minutes.
Over the past decades, technological advances have fueled great innovation in a wide range of fields. Emerging and rapidly developing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) systems, three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional (4D) printing, digital twins (i.e., virtual representations of physical objects, systems or processes) and advanced robots, are set to further transform many industries and sectors.
Researchers at London South Bank University explored the idea of metaverse manufacturing, an industrial ecosystem that would blend technology-enhanced physical production processes with immersive visual environments. In a paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, they tried to envision how this ecosystem could work and what technologies it would rely on, while also considering its possible advantages in terms of sustainability and productivity.
The study was conducted within the Mechanical Intelligence (MI) Research Group at London South Bank University, which focuses on bioinspired design and adaptive engineering systems.