Science & Medicine
Here we bring you the latest on all things science from physical science, evolution, astronomy, space, physics, chemistry, and medicine.
2.8 Days to Disaster: Low Earth Orbit Could Collapse Without Warning
By Andy Tomaswick, Universe Today – SciTechDaily
A new analysis suggests modern satellite networks could suffer catastrophic collisions within days of losing control during a major solar storm.
The phrase “House of Cards” is often associated today with a Netflix political drama, but its original meaning refers to a structure that is inherently unstable. That idea is exactly how Sarah Thiele, who began this work as a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and is now at Princeton, and her co-authors describe today’s satellite mega constellation system in a new study released as a preprint on arXiv.
Their choice of words is supported by the numbers. Across all Low-Earth Orbit mega constellations, calculations show that a “close approach”, defined as two satellites passing within less than 1 kilometer of each other, happens about once every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, such encounters occur roughly every 11 minutes. In addition, each of Starlink’s thousands of satellites must carry out an average of 41 maneuvers each year to avoid collisions with other objects in orbit. Read more here.
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Physicists Challenge Long-Held Assumptions about Nature of Dark Matter
News Staff / SciNews
For decades, physicists have classified dark matter according to how fast its constituent particles moved, with cold dark matter being slow enough to clump together under gravity and help shape galaxies and galaxy clusters.
This model has been central to the standard cosmological framework, explaining the web-like structure of the Universe.
But the new findings suggest that dark matter could have decoupled from the early Universe’s hot plasma while still ultrarelativistic — essentially at extremely high speeds — and then cooled sufficiently before cosmic structures formed.
This nuanced picture expands the range of possible behaviors for dark matter particles, and widens the spectrum of candidate particles that physicists might pursue in experiments and astronomical observations.
The study hinges on a period in the early cosmos known as reheating, which followed the explosive expansion of the Universe called inflation. Read more here.
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Scientists Find Way to Turn Tumor-Protecting Cells Into Cancer Killers
By The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) – SciTechDaily
A new cancer therapy wakes up immune cells inside tumors and turns them against cancer.
Tumors contain immune cells called macrophages that are naturally capable of attacking cancer. However, the tumor environment blocks these cells from functioning properly, preventing them from mounting an effective defense. Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have now developed a new therapeutic strategy that overcomes this problem by transforming immune cells already inside tumors into active anticancer treatments.
KAIST Develops an In-Tumor Immune Cell Therapy: KAIST (President Kwang Hyung Lee) announced that a research team led by Professor Ji-Ho Park of the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering has created a new therapy that works directly at the tumor site. When the drug is injected into a tumor, macrophages already present in the body absorb it and begin producing…Read more here.
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NASA launches Pandora telescope, taking JWST’s search for habitable worlds to a new level
Daniel Apai / LIVESCI=NCE
Exoplanets are worlds that orbit other stars. They are very difficult to observe because — seen from Earth — they appear as extremely faint dots right next to their host stars, which are millions to billions of times brighter and drown out the light reflected by the planets. The Pandora telescope will join and complement NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in studying these faraway planets and the stars they orbit.
I am an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in studies of planets around other stars and astrobiology. I am a co-investigator of Pandora and leading its exoplanet science working group. We built Pandora to shatter a barrier — to understand and remove a source of noise in the data — that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them.
Observing exoplanets… Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing the planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study starlight that…Read more and see videos here.
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