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Making In Vivo Progress in CAR Therapeutic Development

As scientists work toward moving in vivo CAR methods from concept to clinic, they must ensure that complex, multistep discovery and development workflows yield reliable and biologically meaningful data. In this article, learn more about materials for in vivo CAR discovery and development.

Learn more in this new issue of the TS Digest.


In vivo gene delivery, precise immune profiling, and robust quality controls reshape how researchers develop the next generation of CAR therapies.

A “dormant” brain protein turns out to be a powerful switch

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine report that they have uncovered a promising drug target that could allow scientists to increase or decrease the activity of specific brain proteins. The discovery may lead to new treatments for psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and schizophrenia, as well as a neurological disorder that affects movement and balance. The work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health.

The proteins at the center of the research are known as delta-type ionotropic glutamate receptors, or GluDs. These proteins are known to play an important role in how neurons communicate with each other. According to the researchers, mutations in GluDs have been linked to psychiatric disorders, including anxiety and schizophrenia. Despite this connection, scientists have struggled for years to understand exactly how these proteins work, making it difficult to design treatments that could regulate their activity.

“This class of protein has long been thought to be sitting dormant in the brain,” says Edward Twomey, Ph.D., assistant professor of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Our findings indicate they are very much active and offer a potential channel to develop new therapies.”

Physicists challenge a 200-year-old law of thermodynamics at the atomic scale

A long-standing law of thermodynamics turns out to have a loophole at the smallest scales. Researchers have shown that quantum engines made of correlated particles can exceed the traditional efficiency limit set by Carnot nearly 200 years ago. By tapping into quantum correlations, these engines can produce extra work beyond what heat alone allows. This could reshape how scientists design future nanoscale machines.

Two physicists at the University of Stuttgart have demonstrated that the Carnot principle, a foundational rule of thermodynamics, does not fully apply at the atomic scale when particles are physically linked (so-called correlated objects). Their findings suggest that this long-standing limit on efficiency breaks down for tiny systems governed by quantum effects. The work could help accelerate progress toward extremely small and energy-efficient quantum motors. The team published its mathematical proof in the journal Science Advances.

Traditional heat engines, such as internal combustion engines and steam turbines, operate by turning thermal energy into mechanical motion, or simply converting heat into movement. Over the past several years, advances in quantum mechanics have allowed researchers to shrink heat engines to microscopic dimensions.

Hubble uncovers the secret of blue straggler stars that defy aging

Some stars appear to defy time itself. Nestled within ancient star clusters, they shine bluer and brighter than their neighbors, looking far younger than their true age. Known as blue straggler stars, these stellar oddities have puzzled astronomers for more than 70 years. Now, new results using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are finally revealing how these “forever young” stars come to be and why they thrive in quieter cosmic neighborhoods.

Why blue stragglers puzzle astronomers Blue straggler stars stand out in old star clusters because they appear hotter, more massive and younger than stars that should all have formed billions of years ago. Their very existence contradicts standard theories of stellar aging, prompting decades of debate over whether they are created through violent stellar collisions or through more subtle interactions between pairs of stars.

A new study provides some of the clearest evidence yet that blue stragglers owe their youthful appearance not to collisions, but to life in close stellar partnerships, and to the environments that allow those partnerships to survive. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

A simple discovery is shaking the foundations of spintronics

A long-standing mystery in spintronics has just been shaken up. A strange electrical effect called unusual magnetoresistance shows up almost everywhere scientists look—even in systems where the leading explanation, spin Hall magnetoresistance, shouldn’t work at all. Now, new experiments reveal a far simpler origin: the way electrons scatter at material interfaces under the combined influence of magnetization and an electric field.

DOI Not Found

This Research Article adds new information to our understanding of critical illness phenotypes.

Narges E-Gen Alipanah-Lechner & team perform multi-omics analysis of patients with ARDS, revealing 4 molecular signatures associated with death, all characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction.


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