Your brain’s “stop eating” signal may come from an unexpected source. Researchers found that astrocytes—once thought to just support neurons—actually play a key role in controlling appetite. After a meal, glucose triggers tanycytes, which send signals to astrocytes that then activate fullness neurons. This newly discovered pathway could lead to innovative treatments for obesity and eating disorders.
The Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) has discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Known as Cosmic Noon, this is an epoch in the early universe when galaxies were growing their fastest. To spur this growth, they would have needed access to vast reservoirs of hydrogen gas, a key building block for stars. However, until recently, astronomers had only found a handful of these essential structures.
A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal has now increased the known number of hydrogen gas halos by a factor of 10: from roughly 3,000 to over 33,000. This confirms suspicions that they are not rare curiosities. The study also increases the range of known sizes, providing a more representative sample for astronomers to study as they continue to tease out the origin and evolution of the first galaxies.
“We’ve been analyzing the same handful of objects for the past 20 or so years,” said Erin Mentuch Cooper, HETDEX data manager and lead author on the study. “HETDEX is letting us find many more of these halos and measure their shapes and sizes. It has really allowed us to create an amazing statistical catalog.”
A phase 2 trial found that the apoE mimetic peptide CN-105 was safe and feasible in older adults after surgery, supporting the need for a phase 3 trial to assess effects on postoperative delirium.
This randomized clinical trial investigates the safety and feasibility of the apolipoprotein E mimetic peptide CN-105 vs placebo for reducing postoperative delirium in older patients.
Neuroendocrine cells are unique in their ability to act both as nerve cells and hormone-making cells. They’re scattered throughout the body, including the stomach, intestines, pancreas and lungs. Tumors that arise from these cells are called neuroendocrine tumors and are often rare and slow growing.
Around 70% of all neuroendocrine tumors arise in the pancreas or gastrointestinal tract and are known as gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, or GEP-NETs. Targeting these tumors is often challenging because cells become resistant to treatment.
In a recent study published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, University of Michigan researchers have identified a new target that can suppress tumor growth. Their findings may lead to new treatment methods for GEP-NETs.
“It’s getting slurped up by AI or people are gonna copy it, or something else like that.”
A new microscope captures how atoms rearrange themselves when they are illuminated inside an optical cavity.
When light hits an atom, it exerts a force on the atom. As weak as these light-induced forces may be, understanding them allows scientists to levitate particles, create the coldest atomic gases in the Universe, operate solar sails, and observe gravitational waves. More exotic phenomena occur when light is confined between a pair of mirrors known as an optical cavity. When a gas of atoms is placed inside such a cavity, light emitted by one atom can be absorbed by another atom. Through the exchange of photons, each atom simultaneously tugs on all the other atoms, causing the ensemble to autonomously rearrange itself into a periodic pattern called a density wave. Now Jean-Philippe Brantut and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) have built a microscope to, for the first time, image this light-induced density wave in an ultracold atomic gas [1].
Everyone’s idea of the perfect cup of coffee is different. Whether you have yours black, with a splash of milk or extra sweet, you like it your way. But is there a universal law that governs how that flavor gets into your cup? According to new research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, part of the answer lies in the permeability of the puck, the name for the bed of tightly packed coffee grains through which water passes under high pressure.
To make a really good espresso is essentially trial and error. No matter the coffee type, baristas must constantly adjust how finely the coffee is ground and how much is packed into the puck to achieve the right flow rate. This is the volume of liquid passing through the puck over a specific amount of time and determines how long the water stays in contact with the grounds. This new research helps take some of the guesswork out of the process.
University of Mississippi research offers hope that cancer drug therapies packaged in 3D-printed carriers could deliver medication directly to tumors while reducing many of the side effects that cancer patients endure. In a study published in Pharmaceutical Research, the Ole Miss team demonstrated that 3D-printed spanlastics—a tiny carrier filled with cancer-fighting drugs—could be implanted directly at the site of a tumor and kill those cells.
“This paper introduced a new 3D printing concept called FRESH 3D printing,” said Mo Maniruzzaman, chair and professor of pharmaceutics and drug delivery. “It uses spanlastics as a new nano-drug delivery vehicle for anticancer drug delivery. We actually applied this on breast cancer cells and we got some really, really promising data.”
Traditional chemotherapy is often given orally or injected into the bloodstream, where the circulatory system disperses cancer-fighting therapy throughout the body.
Materials that repel water are used in countless applications, including industrial separation processes, routine laboratory pipetting, and medical devices. When water touches these surfaces, the interface where they meet tends to acquire a small electrical charge—an effect that is ubiquitous, yet poorly understood. KAUST researchers have now studied this in detail and their findings could have broad implications. The findings are published in the journal Langmuir.
“This is not a niche laboratory curiosity,” says Yinfeng Xu, a Ph.D. student who led the experimental work in Himanshu Mishra’s laboratory. “This phenomenon plays a role in environmental processes such as dew droplets and raindrops; in industrial operations involving sprays, condensates, or emulsions; and in modern microfluidic and liquid-handling systems used in laboratories worldwide.”
Debates over how geometry is understood and learned date back at least to the days of Plato, with more recent scholars concluding that only humans possess the foundations of this understanding. However, a new analysis by New York University psychology professor Moira Dillon concludes that geometry’s foundations are shared by humans and a variety of other animals—from rats to chickens to fish.
“Our ability to think geometrically may not come from a built-in, uniquely human ‘math module’ in the brain, but rather from the same cognitive systems that help humans, as well as animals, find their way home,” explains Dillon, whose work appears in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. “Put another way, our understanding of geometry may very well come from wandering rather than from worksheets.”
While Plato and, later, Descartes and Kant all debated the origins of geometry and the role of cognition in its beginnings, only in the latter half of the 20th century did scientists start testing how it is learned.