Author: Rojitson

Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from our cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says. To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his team put a plastic robot finger in a soup…

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been struck by a small space rock. A micrometeoroid hit one of its main mirrors, but NASA doesn’t expect a significant effect on the observatory’s data. JWST launched at the end of 2021 and reached its permanent orbit in January. Since then, the craft’s engineering team has been preparing the telescope’s instruments for science observations. The most delicate and finicky part of the observatory is its primary mirror, which is made up of 18 smaller, hexagonal mirrors coated in gold. The solar system is full of micrometeoroids, most about the size of a grain…

Despite evidence that monarch butterflies are seeing dramatic losses in overwintering sites in North America, the summer population has been stable for the past 25 years. “It’s one of the most widespread and abundant butterflies in North America right now,” says Andy Davis at the University of Georgia. Around September, the insects (Danaus plexippus) leave breeding grounds in the US and Canada and head south to central Mexico and southern California. A survey of their wintering grounds last year found that the eastern population of onarchs have suffered losses of around 70 percent since the mid-1990s, while those in the…

For the first time, researchers have seeded part of an offshore wind turbine with thousands of coral larvae. If the larvae latch onto the structure and flourish, turbines in tropical waters could become havens for struggling corals. The project, called ReCoral, is a partnership between Danish energy company Ørsted and researchers at Penghu Marine Biology Research Centre in Taiwan.First, the scientists collected coral sperm and eggs during a spawning event off the coast of Taiwan, just 50 kilometres north of Ørsted’s new set of offshore wind farms. They then brought the spawn back to their lab in the city of Magong…

The patient was a success story, his advanced melanoma erased by a popular new cancer treatment. Known as immune checkpoint inhibitors, the drugs coax the immune system to seek and destroy cancer cells—and in this case, they “worked beautifully,” says Kerry Reynolds, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) who helped care for the man. But about a month after an infusion, without a melanoma cell detectable in his body, the 64-year-old was admitted to the hospital, gravely ill. The drugs were sending his immune system into overdrive, wreaking havoc on his colon and nervous system. Doctors struggled for more…

Astronomers have found carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of a Saturn-size planet 700 light-years away. The discovery, made by the James Webb Space Telescope, is the first unambiguous detection of the gas in a planet beyond the Solar System and provides clues to how the planet formed. The result also shows just how quickly Webb could identify a spate of other gases that could hint at a planet’s potential habitability for life. Webb, which started observing in late June, is “ushering in this new era of the atmospheric science of exoplanets,” says Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge,…

Chips from Google’s Sycamore quantum computer IT is official – there is now proof that quantum computers can perform some tasks exponentially faster than classical computers, and it could massively boost their usefulness.Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, to measure and extract information. Unlike the bits of classical computers, which can store a 1 or 0, qubits can store multiple values at the same time. This theoretically gives them a huge speed advantage over classical computers and algorithms.However, demonstrating that the machines have this quantum advantage, and can beat regular machines, hasn’t been easy. In 2018, for instance, an…

A new kind of time crystal has been made that could explain how these mysterious substances function and reveal the scale at which quantum effects kick in. The existence of time crystals was proposed in 2012 by Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Normal crystals have patterns that repeat in three-dimensional space, creating a lattice structure. Wilczek imagined a crystal-like quantum system whose constituent parts would perpetually move to create patterns that repeat in time, instead. Because these theoretical substances required eternal movement without consuming energy, however, they appeared impossible under the laws of physics. They didn’t remain…

A genetic technique can identify which parts of your genome came from your biological mother and which from your biological father. The method could be useful in cases where an individual is carrying a disease-associated gene variant by helping to establish which other family members should consider undergoing screening for the gene.Steven Jones at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and his colleagues developed the approach using DNA sequence data from the genomes of five people, which had been analysed in previous studies. The researchers also had access to genomes belonging to the biological parents of each of the five…

A differentiating stem cell from umbilical cord blood A girl who was critically ill with heart failure is doing well after receiving an experimental treatment made from her sister’s umbilical cord stem cells, in the first case of its kind. The girl, from Germany, has an inherited form of pulmonary arterial hypertension, or high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs. This causes malformation of the blood vessels in the lungs, leading to progressive and usually fatal heart failure. Doctors had recommended that the girl, who is now 6, have a lung transplant at 3 years old, a procedure…