EverythingScience

Heartbeats physically stop cardiac cancer from growing — and that could be key to thwarting other cancers, too The force of a pumping heart changes how cancer cells function, halting their ability to multiply and spread, a new study shows. The finding may help to explain why heart cancer is so rare, occurring in fewer than 2 in 100,000 people per year. A protein called Nesprin-2 is key to this phenomenon. Found in the outer membrane of a cell's nucleus, the protein was already known to sense and respond to mechanical forces. Now, Nesprin-2 has been found to sense the force of heartbeats and stop cancerous cells from multiplying. In addition to offering a possible explanation for why heart cancer is so rare, the findings could open the door for new therapies for other cancers, researchers concluded in the study, which was published April 23 in the journal Science. We're going to "try to exploit this knowledge to develop a mechanical therapy for cancer," study author Serena Zacchigna, head of the Cardiovascular Biology Laboratory at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Italy, told Live Science. Zacchigna and colleagues are developing bands that can be strapped around tumors on the skin and then reproduce the force of a beating heart. Because metastatic skin cancer is one of the more common cancers to spread to the heart, this is a good first clinical case to look at, Zacchigna said. Source:Live Science @EverythingScience

289-Million-Year-Old Reptile Mummy Reveals Origin of Human Breathing System Every breath you take traces back to a deep evolutionary past. The steady rise of your chest, the muscles between your ribs expanding outward, and the flow of air into your lungs feel routine. Yet this familiar process has ancient origins. A small, mummified reptile that died in an Oklahoma cave around 289 million years ago has revealed the earliest known example of this breathing system in amniotes – a group that includes reptiles, birds, mammals, and their shared ancestors, some of the first animals to fully adapt to life on land. Ancient Fossil Reveals Early Breathing System In a study published in Nature, researchers describe the remarkable preservation of Captorhinus aguti, a small reptile from the early Permian period. Though only a few inches long, this fossil contains far more than bones. It preserves three-dimensional skin, calcified cartilage, and even traces of proteins. These protein remnants are nearly 100 million years older than any previously identified in fossils. “Captorhinus is an interesting lizard-looking critter that is critical to understanding early amniote evolution,” said Ethan Mooney, who co-led the study while a student at the University of Toronto in co-author Professor Robert R. Reisz’s lab and is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University where he works with paleontologist Professor Stephanie Pierce. These early reptiles ranged in size from just a few centimeters to several feet and were among the first to explore life on land. They were widespread and successful during their time. Source:SciTechDaily @EverythingScience

New Research Reveals That Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Formed in a System Far Colder Than Our Own 3I/ATLAS created quite the buzz as it flew through our Solar System. As just the third interstellar object (ISO) ever detected, what our instruments observed as it approached our Sun and began heading back to deep space provided tantalizing clues about the star system in which it formed. In particular, new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have yielded the first-ever measurement of deuterated water (or "semi-heavy water") in an ISO. The discovery provides a chemical window into the cold conditions that characterize its home star system. The research was led by PhD student Luis E. Salazar Manzano, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, and assistant professor Teresa Paneque-Carreño, the Principal Investigator of the ALMA Director's Discretionary Time program that made the discovery. They were joined by researchers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the Laboratory for Instrumentation and Research in Astrophysics (LIRA), the Leach Science Center, the Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS), and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The team's observations were made in December 2025, six days after 3I/ATLAS reached its closest point to the Sun. This narrow observation window was made possible by two things. First, there's the ALMA's Atacama Compact Array (ACA), a series of four 12-meter (39.4 ft) and 7-meter (23 ft) telescopes grouped in a compact configuration to combine measurements (aka short-baseline interferometry), allowing them to see very faint objects in space. Second, there's ALMA's unique ability to point toward the Sun, which most optical telescopes cannot. As Paneque-Carreño noted in an NRAO press release Most instruments can't point toward the Sun, but radio telescopes like ALMA can. We were able to observe the comet within days after perihelion, just as it peeked out from its transit behind the Sun. This gave us a constraint on these molecules that's not possible using other instruments. Source:Universe Today @EverythingScience

Moon dust could stop being a nuisance and start reshaping how humans may build beyond Earth As space agencies and private companies look toward a sustained human presence on the moon, a fundamental challenge centers on how to build strong, durable infrastructure without hauling every material from Earth. New research from Rice University points to an unexpected solution—transforming one of the moon's most stubborn obstacles, its abrasive dust, into a valuable building resource. The study demonstrates that lunar regolith simulant, a terrestrial stand-in for the moon's fine, abrasive dust, can be used to strengthen advanced composite materials. The work, published in Advanced Engineering Materials, was also selected for the cover of the journal's latest issue. The research was led by Denizhan Yavas, assistant teaching professor of mechanical engineering at Rice, in collaboration with Ashraf Bastawros of Iowa State University. "This work started with a simple but powerful question," Yavas said. "Lunar dust is typically viewed as a major obstacle to exploration because of how abrasive and pervasive it is. We asked whether that same material could instead be used as a resource—something that could actually improve the performance of structural materials." The researchers explored how lunar regolith simulant could be incorporated into fiber-reinforced polymer composites, a class of lightweight materials already widely used in aerospace and high-performance engineering applications. By integrating the simulant as a reinforcing phase, they found measurable improvements in strength, toughness and resistance to damage with performance increases of up to 30–40%. "Our results show that you can take a material that is inherently challenging and convert it into something structurally beneficial," Yavas said. "That shift in perspective is critical for building sustainably beyond Earth and enabling long-term exploration." Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago Today's octopuses are intelligent, remarkably flexible animals that lurk in reefs, hide in crevices, or drift through the deep sea. But new research suggests that their earliest relatives may have played a far more predatory role in ocean ecosystems. A study led by researchers at Hokkaido University has found that the earliest known octopuses were giant predators that hunted at the very top of the food web, alongside large marine vertebrates. The study is published in Science. Fossil jaws reveal hidden history Octopuses are soft-bodied animals, and they rarely fossilize well. This makes their evolutionary history especially difficult to trace compared with animals that leave behind bones or shells. In this study, the researchers used fossil jaws of early octopuses, a feeding organ with a high fossilization potential, to reconstruct their hidden history. Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence model, they found fossil jaws hidden inside rock samples from the Late Cretaceous period, spanning 100 million to 72 million years ago. These fossils, found in Japan and Vancouver Island, had been well preserved in calm seafloor sediments, retaining fine wear marks that revealed how these animals fed. The fossils belonged to a group of extinct finned octopuses, known as Cirrata. By analyzing the size, shape, and wear patterns of the jaws, the team concluded that these animals were active predators that likely crushed hard prey with powerful bites. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

'A landmark moment for the field': FDA approves first-ever gene therapy for inherited deafness The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first-ever gene therapy for inherited deafness. The therapy, called Otarmeni, is approved to treat a form of hearing loss caused by mutations in the OTOF gene, which codes for a protein called otoferlin. Cells in the inner ear need otoferlin to translate vibrations into signals that can be interpreted by the brain. When people carry two defective copies of the OTOF gene — one from each parent — this line of communication between the inner ear and brain is cut, resulting in severe-to-profound hearing loss. Source:Live Science @EverythingScience

Honeybees pass their math test, upending an animal intelligence debate We've run the numbers and the verdict is in: Honeybees do have the ability to process numerical information. New research led by Monash University has now addressed recent international debate over whether bees are truly assessing numbers or simply reacting to visual patterns. The study highlights the necessity of designing cognitive experiments that align with an animal's specific sensory and biological constraints. When stimuli are evaluated from a bee's-eye view, the evidence for numerical cognition is strengthened rather than diminished. The study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, re-examined previous critiques of bee intelligence by accounting for the honeybee's unique sensory and perceptual constraints. By evaluating experimental stimuli from a biologically relevant perspective, researchers demonstrated that previous criticisms, which suggested bees were merely sensitive to visual cues like spatial frequency, do not hold up. Monash University Senior Lecturer Dr. Scarlett Howard, from the Monash School of Biological Sciences, said the findings underscore the importance of avoiding human-centric biases in animal research. "We must put the animal's perspective first when assessing their cognition or we may under or overestimate their abilities," said Dr. Howard. "We see and experience the world quite differently from animals, so we must be careful of centering human perspectives and senses when studying animal intelligence." The research team argues that to accurately assess cognitive abilities, experiments must be designed to match the natural sensory capacities of the subject species. Dr. Mirko Zanon, from the Center for Mind Brain Sciences at the University of Trento and first author on the study, said that ignoring how an animal perceives the world risks leading scientists to the wrong conclusions. "There has been a debate about whether bees are really 'counting' or just reacting to visual patterns. Our results show that this criticism doesn't hold when you consider the biology of the animal," said Dr. Zanon. "When we analyze the stimuli in a way that reflects how bees actually see the world, what remains is actual sensitivity to number." Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

Happy Earth Day! 🌎🌍🌏 To mark this special day, we’re tuning in to sen, the world’s first continuous 4K video livestream from space. Sen’s cameras are hosted on our Columbus module of the International Space Station, with data delivered via the Airbus Space platform. Streaming in real time, it shows breathtaking views of our planet as the International Space Station passes over cities, oceans and deserts. Watch Earth from above, just like our astronaut Adenot Sophie does on the εpsilon mission. 🌐Watch Sen Source: @esa @EverythingScience

LHC decay anomaly reveals possible crack in the Standard Model Recent findings from research we have been carrying out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern in Geneva suggest that we might be closing in on signs of undiscovered physics. If confirmed, these hints would overturn the theory, called the Standard Model, that has dominated particle physics for 50 years. The findings suggest the way that specific sub-atomic particles behave in the LHC disagrees with the Standard Model. Fundamental particles are the most basic building blocks of matter—sub-atomic particles that cannot be divided into smaller units. The four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force—govern how these particles interact. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

A beautiful launch of New Glenn's third mission. This mission was the second flight of the booster Never Tell Me The Odds, which also launched NG-2. Source: @dwisecinema @EverythingScience

Blue Origin reuses New Glenn booster for the first time in Florida launch Blue Origin, the U.S. space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Sunday successfully reused and recovered a booster for its New Glenn rocket, confirming its mastery of a technical feat that could boost its launch cadence and expand its rivalry with SpaceX. But the uncrewed mission also suffered a partial setback: the satellite carried into space by the rocket did not settle into the right orbit. The company has launched the New Glenn twice before, but only with new rocket boosters. It has previously launched its smaller New Shepard rocket, primarily used for suborbital space tourism, with reused components in a less technically challenging operation. The novel recycling approach comes amid fierce competition between Bezos's firm and fellow tech titan Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has also recovered a booster from a launched rocket. The New Glenn rocket, standing at 98 meters (321 feet) tall, lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral with its reused booster at about 7:25 a.m. (1125 GMT) carrying a communications satellite for the company AST SpaceMobile. After liftoff, the rocket's two stages separated, with the upper stage continuing its journey carrying the satellite into space. Its booster successfully landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean about nine minutes and 30 seconds after takeoff. Blue Origin said later in a statement on X that the satellite turned on properly but was placed in "an off-nominal orbit." The gravity of this error was not immediately known. The company said it was assessing the mishap. In November, Blue Origin recovered a New Glenn booster for the first time, succeeding in the complex technical challenge that culminated with a controlled vertical landing on a floating platform. A previous attempt in January 2025 to recover the booster was unsuccessful after its engines failed to reignite during descent. The booster used in Sunday's launch was refurbished after its previous flight. For this first reuse, the company replaced all of its engines and made several other modifications. Source:Phys.org @EverythingScience

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as Christina H Koch is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. Victor Glover was in window 3 watching with Jeremy R. Hansen next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy. Source: @astro_reid @EverythingScience