The largest Slurpee in the solar system is a billion years old, rubbing stem cells into wounds could be the next big thing, and antimatter behaves according to the laws of physics. What a relief. You never know. It’s still 2016.
A rendering of a hypersonic plane. Image credit: Getty Images
Scientists at the Imperial College London have set a new record for the world’s most heat-resistant material. When they heated a compound of hafnium and carbon called hafnium carbide (HfC) with powerful lasers, they found its melting point at a scorching 3,958 degrees Celsius (7,156 degrees Fahrenheit). By comparison, the surface temperature of the sun is 5,504 degrees Celsius (9,939 degrees Fahrenheit). The team says the material could help engineer skin for new hypersonic space vehicles. Omar Cedillos-Barraza, an associate professor at the University of Texas-El Paso, who carried out the study while at the Imperial College, said that HfC and a sister material called tantalum carbide (TaC) “have not been potential candidates for hypersonic aircraft, but our new findings show that they can withstand even more heat than we previously thought — more than any other compound known to man. This means that they could be useful materials for new types of spacecraft that can fly through the atmosphere like a plane, before reaching hypersonic speeds to shoot out into space. These materials may enable spacecraft to withstand the extreme heat generated from leaving and re-entering the atmosphere.” The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Rubbing Stem Cells Into The Wound
Stem cells have the remarkable ability of becoming any cell type in the body. Doctors are starting to use them to treat disease. Image credit: Getty Images
Researchers working at the University of Liverpool and the University of Bristol have started testing on humans a “living bandage” carrying the patients’ own stem cells. The Cell Bandage, as it is called, was developed by the biotech company Azellon. It’s designed specifically for knee injuries. The doctors first harvested stem cells from bone marrow of the five patients involved in the trial, multiplied them in a lab for two weeks and then “seeded [the cells] onto a membrane scaffold that helps to deliver the cells into the injured site,” according a news release. The Cell Bandage was then “surgically implanted into the middle of the tear and the cartilage was sewn up around the bandage to keep it in place.” Anthony Hollander, chairman of stem cell biology at the University of Liverpool and founder and chief scientific officer of Azellon, said that the trial results were “very encouraging and offer a potential alternative to surgical removal that will repair the damaged tissue and restore full knee function.” He said that he was now developing “an enhanced version of the Cell Bandage using donor stem cells, which will reduce the cost of the procedure and remove the need for two operations.”
Researchers at ALPHA, the international team of scientists working at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), reported that they have observed how antimatter absorbs light for the first time, capping 20 years of research. This a big deal because according to the standard model of physics — the bedrock of our understanding of how the universe works — the Big Bang created roughly the same amounts of ordinary matter, which makes you and me, and antimatter. But we don’t know what happened to the latter. Scientists have been making antiprotons and other antiparticles in the lab for a while, but they couldn’t directly observe how they absorb light, an important step to understanding its behavior. The ALPHA team studied antihydrogen atoms. They reported in the journal Nature that light absorption by antihydrogen caused “no discrepancy with the corresponding energy transition in ordinary hydrogen.” That was a relief. They reported that even “the tiniest violation of this rule would require a serious rethink of the standard model of particle physics.”
A Nonlethal Way To Kill Malaria
An illustration of the stages of the malarian plasmodium cycle in a female mosquito. Image credit: Getty Images
Researchers at Harvard University reported that a synthetic, nontoxic compound that disrupts the reproductive cycle of female mosquitoes could be as effective against malaria as insecticides. “As insecticide resistance is spreading, new intervention methods to control mosquitoes are urgently needed,” said Flaminia Catteruccia, associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-senior author of the study. “Our study provides a new strategy based on the use of a non-toxic compound that prevents transmission of malaria parasites without killing the mosquito.” Her colleague Caroline Buckee, co-senior author and assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard Chan School, said that the research highlighted “the importance of basic research on mosquito biology for developing new tools against malaria.”
The Largest Slurpee In The Solar System (But It’s A Billion Years Old)
Above: This graphic shows a theoretical path of a water molecule on Ceres. Some water molecules fall into cold, dark craters at high latitudes called “cold traps,” where very little of the ice turns into vapor, even over the course of a billion years. Other water molecules that do not land in cold traps are lost to space as they hop around the dwarf planet. Top gif: Ceres Images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Finally, scientists from NASA’s Dawn mission reported that the solar system’s largest asteroid, Ceres, is chock-full of H2O. “On Ceres, ice is not just localized to a few craters. It’s everywhere, and nearer to the surface with higher latitudes,” said Thomas Prettyman, principal investigator of Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron detector. The team reported: “Rather than a solid ice layer, there is likely to be a porous mixture of rocky materials in which ice fills the pores.” Their results were published in the journal Science. Ceres is 945 kilometers in diameter (587 miles) and orbits just past Pluto. The University of Hawaii’s Norbert Schorghofer, a co-author of the Science paper, said that the team was “interested in how this ice got there and how it managed to last so long. It could have come from Ceres’ ice-rich crust, or it could have been delivered from space.” Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said: “By finding bodies that were water-rich in the distant past, we can discover clues as to where life may have existed in the early solar system.”