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Biomaterials are ubiquitous in modern medicine, from prosthetic limbs to device coatings, and hold promise for future applications like scaffolding for tissue regeneration. Biomaterial design presents a key challenge, however: applications often require materials to be both mechanically rigid (to promote strong cell adhesion) and bioactive (i.e. able to communicate specific cues to contacting cells). To date, achieving one of these features usually required sacrificing the other. “Increasing film rigidity through chemical crosslinking often suppresses film bioactivity, whether by inhibiting the mobility or accessibility of embedded biomolecules or by chemically altering them,” says Connie Wu, a chemical engineering undergraduate student and lead author of the paper....

Transurethral ultrasound ablation effectively treats prostate cancer with minimal side effects.Clinically significant cancer was eliminated in 80% of the study participants.The noninvasive technique can also treat benign enlargement of the prostate. A novel MRI-guided procedure that uses therapeutic ultrasound effectively treats prostate cancer with minimal side effects, according to a new study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Researchers said the incision-free technique could also be used to treat benign enlargement of the prostate gland....

The Planck space mission has released the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe, revealing new information about its age, contents and origins. Planck is a European Space Agency mission. NASA contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments, and U.S., European and Canadian scientists work together to analyze the Planck data. The map results suggest the universe is expanding more slowly than scientists thought, and is 13....

A collaboration led by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and McMaster University has led to the discovery and diagnosis of an aggressive malignant bone cancer — an osteosarcoma — for the first time ever in a dinosaur. No malignant cancers (tumors that can spread throughout the body and have severe health implications) have ever been documented in dinosaurs previously. The paper was published on August 3rd in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Oncology....

Weather and climate modelers understand pretty well how seasonal winds and ocean currents affect El Niño patterns in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, impacting weather across the United States and sometimes worldwide. But new computer simulations show that one driver of annual weather cycles in that region — in particular, a cold tongue of surface waters stretching westward along the equator from the coast of South America — has gone unrecognized: the changing distance between Earth and the sun....

We know a lot about Ceres from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which explored the dwarf planet for three and a half years before running out of fuel in October 2018. Its data gave clues to the materials present on and below the surface of Ceres, which help scientists trace the history of the dwarf planet and figure out what’s happening there now. In laboratories in the United States and Europe, scientists have been using Dawn’s findings to create experiments that allow them to further explore these materials....

Additionally, the study revealed that rapamycin only delayed the onset of age-related pathological changes in the gut of female fruit flies. The researchers concluded that biological sex plays a crucial role in determining the effectiveness of anti-aging drugs. The life expectancy of women is significantly higher than that of men. However, women also suffer more often from age-related diseases and adverse drug reactions. “Our long-term goal is to make men live as long as women and also women as healthy as men in late life....

Get out of the city if you’re in one, look up, and you’re likely to see sporadic ‘shooting stars’ ripping with speed through the atmosphere. Less common, but not entirely unusual, are distant, seemingly slow-moving comets, sometimes visible to the naked eye. This real color image shows comet Leonard streaming through the sky on the morning of December 7, 2021, taken by ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC), part of the Agency’s Planetary Defence Office, using the Calar Alto Schmidt telescope in Spain....

The discovery that many small galaxies throughout the universe do not ‘swarm’ around larger ones like bees do but ‘dance’ in orderly disc-shaped orbits is a challenge to our understanding of how the universe formed and evolved. The finding, by an international team of astronomers, including Professor Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney’s School of Physics, is announced in the journal Nature. “Early in 2013 we announced our startling discovery that half of the dwarf galaxies surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy are orbiting it in an immense plane” said Professor Lewis....

This image shows a region of the Milky Way that lies within the constellation of Scorpius, close to the central plane of the galaxy. The region hosts a dense cloud of dust and gas associated with the molecular cloud IRAS 16562-3959, clearly visible as an orange smudge among the rich pool of stars at the center of the image. Clouds like these are breeding grounds for new stars. In the center of this cloud, the bright object known as G345....

Solar Orbiter was launched on February 10, 2020. Since then, and with the exception of a brief shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, scientists and engineers have been conducting a series of tests and set-up routines known as commissioning. The completion date for this phase was set at June 15, so that the spacecraft could be fully functional for its first close pass of the Sun, or perihelion, in mid-June....

Some videos posted on social media showing people experiencing abnormal movements and walking difficulties after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine may be related to functional neurological disorder — a common neuropsychiatric condition. Videos of people experiencing severe neurological symptoms, including convulsions and difficulty walking, purportedly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, have surfaced on Facebook, YouTube and other social media channels. The millions of people watching these videos might conclude that the vaccine is either quite dangerous to produce such symptoms or that the people in the videos are faking their symptoms....

An international research team studied fossilized pollen dating back 5000 years, extracted from sediments on 27 islands. By analyzing the fossils they were able to build up an understanding of the composition of each island’s vegetation and how it changed from the oldest to the most recent pollen samples. The study was led by Dr. Sandra Nogué, Lecturer in Palaeoenvironmental Science at the University of Southampton, UK and Professor Manuel Steinbauer from the University of Bayreuth, Germany and University of Bergen, Norway....

The news has been packed in recent months with severe climate and weather events—record-high temperatures from the Pacific Northwest to Sicily, flooding in Germany and the eastern United States, wildfires from Sacramento to Siberia to Greece. Events that seemed rare just a few decades ago are now commonplace. A new study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on August 30, 2021, looks specifically at extreme sea levels—the occurrence of exceptionally high seas due to the combination of tide, waves and storm surge....

Driving across the arid American Southwest, one views miles upon miles of scrubby creosote bushes. Well-adapted to the hot, thirsty landscape, the evergreen shrub, also known as greasewood, chaparral and gobernadora, produces tufts of fluffy, white fruit capsules. Living among the plants are similarly fluffy white insects, difficult to distinguish from the fruit, that are, in fact, a species of wasps known as Thistle-down velvet ants. “Their scientific name is Dasymutilla gloriosa and they’re one of my favorites,” says Utah State University biologist Joseph Wilson....

Six teams of researchers are publishing their work on October 5 in the journal Science, based on findings from Cassini’s Grand Finale. That’s when, as the spacecraft was running out of fuel, the mission team steered Cassini spectacularly close to Saturn in 22 orbits before deliberately vaporizing it in a final plunge into the atmosphere in September 2017. Knowing Cassini’s days were numbered, its mission team went for gold. The spacecraft flew where it was never designed to fly....

Why are we excited about the multiple-sol drive? It creates an opportunity to drive a great distance in a longer plan, typically during holidays or weekends when new planning doesn’t occur on Earth. Recently in the sol 350-352 plan we commanded a three-sol drive that resulted in the longest-single-sol total distance recorded by any Mars rover (319.79m) on sol 351, and the longest distance of any Mars rover in a single plan without ground intervention (509....

These images were taken of comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on October 19, 2014, during the comet’s close flyby of Mars and the spacecraft. Comet Siding Spring is on its first trip this close to the sun from the Oort Cloud at the outer fringe of the solar system. This is the first resolved imaging of the nucleus of a long-period comet. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired images of this comet from a minimum distance of about 86,000 miles (138,000 kilometers), yielding a scale of about 150 yards (138 meters) per pixel....

The millirobots are characterized by their maneuverability. The tiny vehicle, a strip of elastic silicon just four millimeters long, can be used in a variety of locomotion modes, allowing the millirobot to maneuver even through a complex environment. Previous microrobots, on the other hand, can only maneuver to a limited extent and meet their match, especially in difficult terrain. The researchers from the Stuttgart-based Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems found inspiration for the development of the maneuverability talent in nature: “When we build robots, we look at the mechanics of the movement of soft-bodied biological organisms, for example, and are inspired by them”, says Metin Sitti, Director of the Physical Intelligence Department....

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — that generates massive amounts of energy. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity. “The main goal of the experiment was to see if we could lay down a layer of boron using a powder injector,” said PPPL physicist Robert Lunsford, lead author of the paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion....