An image shows a mouse

Radioactive beams provide a real-time picture of cancer treatment in mice

Cancer-destroying particle beams have been caught red-handed. Particle beams can deliver a burst of destructive energy directly to tumors – assuming the beam is in the right place. Now, using a radioactive beam, scientists have determined the location of the beam while treating tumors in mice. It is the first successful treatment of tumors with […]
An image of a ring of fire in outer space with a black orb in the center, shown on a diagonal from the side.

A distant quasar may be circling all the galaxies around it

One of the most distant quasars known appears to have shut down the formation of new stars in all galaxies in its vicinity. A quasar is a powerful source of light created by hot gas swirling around a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Intense radiation from a quasar, called VIK J2348-3054, […]
A bright concentration of stars on a dark sky.

The nearest middle-aged black hole could be a crowd of lightweights

Contrary to a previous report, there is no evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way’s most massive and luminous globular star cluster, a new study finds. Instead, a hive of much smaller black holes dipping in and out of the tightly packed star cluster could explain the motion and distribution […]
Schematic of how a building

Zigzag walls can help buildings beat heat

Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? Most “radiant cooling” designs involve roofs designed to receive and then emit the sun’s energy in infrared wavelengths that […]
Bright points are scattered in a weblike pattern over a dark background in a computer simulation of the cosmic web.

A neutrino mass mismatch could shake cosmology’s foundations

As the youthful universe congealed under the pull of gravity, matter knotted itself into galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments, weaving a dazzlingly intricate cosmic web. This web’s structure is thanks, in part, to the handiwork of neutrinos — lightweight, subatomic particles that surge through the cosmos in unimaginable numbers. Because they streak about at high […]
Bhavin Shastri stares into the camera while smiling widely. He

This engineer’s light-based computers take inspiration from the brain

Bhavin Shastri still gets excited when he sees a laser pointer, and he’s been fascinated by them since he was about 10 years old. “I was amazed that a light beam could maintain its brightness, centered in a tiny spot even after traveling a great distance,” Shastri says. “A laser pointer in my hand felt like a […]
A brain network linked to attention is larger in people with depression

A brain network linked to attention is larger in people with depression

Symptoms of depression fluctuate over time, but many brain imaging studies of the condition only study one point in time. That’s made it hard to connect networks of brain activity to various symptoms and mood changes. Now, a new study using long-term brain imaging data shows one brain network involved in guiding attention is nearly […]
Tracy Slatyer is staring at the camera, smiling. There is a black board with equations written on in the background. Slatyer is wearing a black jacket and silver watch. Her light brown (or dark blonde) hair is pulled back in a ponytail.

How did dark matter shape the universe? This physicist has ideas

At age 12, Tracy Slatyer felt sorry for a book. She read a newspaper article about how lots of people were buying A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. “But then … nobody was actually reading it,” she says. “People were just leaving it on their coffee tables.” Determined to rectify this wrong, Slatyer […]
Chong Liu is standing to the right, facing the camera, in a lab. She is wearing a navy jacket and blue nitrile gloves. She has long black hair and wears glasses.

A materials scientist seeks to extract lithium from untapped sources

Electric vehicles promise to help wean us off of fossil fuels, but they introduce a new problem: how to get enough of the lithium that EV batteries require (SN: 5/7/19). Materials scientist Chong Liu of the University of Chicago has some ideas. Existing technology can extract lithium only from sources with highly concentrated ions, like […]
A digital reconstruction of a single nerve cell, colored green, is dotted with smaller red areas.

A study in mice hints at a new way to treat spinal cord injuries

After a devastating spinal cord injury, mice’s nerve cells balloon up in size. Some of these neurons stay swollen longer than expected and begin to die, a study published September 25 in Science Translational Medicine shows. A drug that brought this swelling down improved the mice’s recovery, though it’s not yet known if the approach […]