A personalized cancer vaccine made by BioNTech, the German company that produced the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, has shown promising results against pancreatic cancer. The vaccine, which teaches patients' immune systems to attack their tumors, provoked an immune response in half of the 16 patients treated, and those patients did not experience relapses of their cancer during the study. The New York Times reports: Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients' tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful COVID vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells. Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient's immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech's COVID shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients' cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells.

The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people's immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients. [...] But the simple fact that scientists could create, quality-check and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly -- patients began receiving the vaccines intravenously roughly nine weeks after having their tumors removed -- was a promising sign, experts said.

In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked. Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests. "It's anecdotal, but it's nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions," said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is the first demonstrable success -- and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study -- of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. "By that standard, it's a milestone."

The study has been published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from MIT Technology Review: Today, researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which they say combines the complete DNA of 47 diverse individuals -- Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups -- into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species. The new map, called a "pangenome," has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe. It was published in the journal Nature today. People's genomes are largely alike, but it's the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren't observable in conventional studies. The pangenome relies on a mathematical concept called a graph, which you can imagine as a massive version of connect-the-dots. Each dot is a segment of DNA. To draw a particular person's genome, you start connecting the numbered dots. Each person's DNA can take a slightly different path, skipping some numbers and adding others.

One payoff of the new pangenome could be better ways to diagnose rare diseases, although practical applications aren't easy to name. Instead, scientists say it's mainly giving them insight into some of the "dark matter" of the genome that's previously been hard to see, including strange regions of chromosomes that seem to share and exchange genes. For now, most biologists and doctors will stick to the existing "reference genome," the one first produced in draft form in 2001 and gradually improved. It answers most questions researchers are interested in, and all their computer tools work with it. The reason a reference genome is important is that when a new person's genome is sequenced, that sequence is projected onto the reference in order to organize and read the new data. Yet since the current reference is just one possible genome, missing bits that some people have, some information can't be analyzed and is usually ignored. Researchers call this effect "reference bias" or, more simply, the streetlamp problem. You don't see where you don't look.

Officials with NIH said they hoped the new update to the genome map would make gene research more "equitable." That's because the more different your genome is from the current reference, the more information about you could be missed. The existing reference is largely the DNA of one African-American man, although it includes segments from several other people as well. "If the genome you want to analyze has sequences that are not in that reference, they will be missed in the analysis," says Deanna Church, a consultant with the business incubator General Inception, who previously held a key role at NIH managing the reference genome. "In reality, the notion that there is a 'human genome' is really the problem," she says. "The current version is the simplest model you can make. It made sense when we started ... But now we need better models."

The first UK baby created with DNA from three people has been born after doctors performed a groundbreaking IVF procedure that aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases. From a report: The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children. Because the embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor's egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material -- about 37 genes -- from the donor.

The process has led to the phrase "three-parent babies," though more than 99.8% of the DNA in the babies comes from the mother and father. Research on MDT, which is also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), was pioneered in the UK by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre. The work aimed to help women with mutated mitochondria to have babies without the risk of passing on genetic disorders. People inherit all their mitochondria from their mother, so harmful mutations in the "batteries" can affect all of the children a woman has.

Researchers have developed a "language" called Remmyo, which relies on specific facial muscle movements that can occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. People who are capable of lucid dreaming can learn this language during their waking hours and potentially communicate while they are asleep. Ars Technica reports: "You can transfer all important information from lucid dreams using no more than three letters in a word," [sleep expert Michael Raduga], who founded Phase Research Center in 2007 to study sleep, told Ars. "This level of optimization took a lot of time and intellectual resources." Remmyo consists of six sets of facial movements that can be detected by electromyography (EMG) sensors on the face. Slight electrical impulses that reach facial muscles make them capable of movement during sleep paralysis, and these are picked up by sensors and transferred to software that can type, vocalize, and translate Remmyo. Translation depends on which Remmyo letters are used by the sleeper and picked up by the software, which already has information from multiple dictionaries stored in its virtual brain. It can translate Remmyo into another language as it is being "spoken" by the sleeper. "We can digitally vocalize Remmyo or its translation in real time, which helps us to hear speech from lucid dreams," Raduga said.

For his initial experiment, Raduga used the sleep laboratory of the Neurological Clinic of Frankfurt University in Germany. His subjects had already learned Remmyo and were also trained to enter a state of lucid dreaming and signal that they were in that lucid state during REM sleep. While they were immersed in lucid dreams, EMG sensors on their faces sent information from electrical impulses to the translation software. The results were uncertain. Based on attempts to translate planned phrases, Remmyo turned out to be anywhere from 13 to 81 percent effective, and in the interview, Raduga said he faced skepticism about the effectiveness of the translation software during the peer review process of his study, which is now published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice. He still looks forward to making results more consistent by leveling up translation methods in the future. "The main problem is that it is hard to use only one muscle on your face to say something in Remmyo," said Raduga. "Unintentionally, people strain more than one muscle, and EMG sensors detect it all. Now we use only handwritten algorithms to overcome the problem, but we're going to use machine learning and AI to improve Remmyo decoding."

Louise Lerner writes via Phys.Org: Inside a lab, scientists marvel at a strange state that forms when they cool down atoms to nearly absolute zero. Outside their window, trees gather sunlight and turn them into new leaves. The two seem unrelated -- but a new study from the University of Chicago suggests that these processes aren't so different as they might appear on the surface. The study, published in PRX Energy on April 28, found links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates -- a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. The finding is scientifically intriguing and may suggest new ways to think about designing electronics, the authors said.

When a photon from the sun strikes a leaf, it sparks a change in a specially designed molecule. The energy knocks loose an electron. The electron, and the "hole" where it once was, can now travel around the leaf, carrying the energy of the sun to another area where it triggers a chemical reaction to make sugars for the plant. Together, that traveling electron-and-hole-pair is referred to as an "exciton." When the team took a birds-eye view and modeled how multiple excitons move around, they noticed something odd. They saw patterns in the paths of the excitons that looked remarkably familiar. In fact, it looked very much like the behavior in a material that is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, sometimes known as "the fifth state of matter." In this material, excitons can link up into the same quantum state -- kind of like a set of bells all ringing perfectly in tune. This allows energy to move around the material with zero friction. (These sorts of strange behaviors intrigue scientists because they can be the seeds for remarkable technology -- for example, a similar state called superconductivity is the basis for MRI machines).

According to the models [...], the excitons in a leaf can sometimes link up in ways similar to exciton condensate behavior. This was a huge surprise. Exciton condensates have only been seen when the material is cooled down significantly below room temperature. It'd be kind of like seeing ice cubes forming in a cup of hot coffee. "Photosynthetic light harvesting is taking place in a system that is at room temperature and what's more, its structure is disordered -- very unlike the pristine crystallized materials and cold temperatures that you use to make exciton condensates," explained [study co-author Anna Schouten]. This effect isn't total -- it's more akin to "islands" of condensates forming, the scientists said. "But that's still enough to enhance energy transfer in the system," said Sager-Smith. In fact, their models suggest it can as much as double the efficiency. The findings open up some new possibilities for generating synthetic materials for future technology, said study co-author Prof. David Mazziotti. "A perfect ideal exciton condensate is sensitive and requires a lot of special conditions, but for realistic applications, it's exciting to see something that boosts efficiency but can happen in ambient conditions."

Arianespace CEO Stephane Israel says Europe will have to wait until the 2030s for a reusable rocket. Space.com reports: Arianespace is currently preparing its Ariane 6 rocket for a test flight following years of delays. Europe's workhorse Ariane 5, which has been operational for nearly 30 years, recently launched the JUICE Jupiter mission and now has only one flight remaining before retirement. Ariane 6 will be expendable, despite entering development nearly a decade ago, when reusability was being developed and tested in the United States, most famously by SpaceX.

"When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket," said Israel, according to European Spaceflight. The delays to Ariane 6, however, mean that Europe lacks its own options for access to space. This issue was highlighted in a recent report from an independent advisory group to the European Space Agency. Israel stated that, in his opinion, Ariane 6 would fly for more than 10 years before Europe transitions to a reusable successor in the 2030s.

Aside from Arianespace, Europe is currently fostering a number of private rocket companies, including Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar Aerospace, PLD Space and Skyrora, with some of these rockets to be reusable. However the rockets in development are light-lift, whereas Ariane 6 and its possible successor are much more capable, medium-heavy-lift rockets.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME, a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug -- SNIPR001 -- is currently in clinical trials. The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream.

The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15-20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli, and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections. The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance. After testing the ability of these eight engineered phages to kill the E. coli panel alone and in combination, they decided that a group of four of them was the most effective, naming the mixture SNIPR001. But four engineered phages do not make a drug; the team confirmed that SNIPR001 remains stable for five months in storage and that it does not affect any other gut bacteria.

Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from LiveScience: Cosmic rays and lasers have revealed that deep underneath the city streets of Naples, Italy, lie the remains of the Greeks who originally settled the area, as well as the catacombs of Christians who lived there during the Roman era nearly two millennia ago, a new study finds...

The layers of contemporary buildings make it difficult to access ancient sewers, cisterns and tombs 33 feet (10 meters) underneath the streets, so a group of Italian and Japanese researchers hypothesized that they could identify previously unknown burial hypogea from the Hellenistic period using 21st-century techniques. Their study, published April 3 in the journal Scientific Reports, details how they used muography to detect underground voids that were unknown to archaeologists... In 1936, scientists discovered that muons are produced by cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere, and that these tiny particles can easily penetrate walls and rocks, scattering in open spaces. In this study, the muons' tracks were recorded using nuclear emulsion technology, in which extremely sensitive photographic film is used to capture and visualize the paths of the charged particles.

By measuring muon flux — how many muons arrive in a particular area over time — and direction using a particle detector, researchers can peer into volcanoes, underground cavities and even the Egyptian pyramids through muography... Valeri Tioukov, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics, and his colleagues placed the muon tracking devices 59 feet (18 m) underground, in a 19th-century cellar that was used for aging ham, where they recorded the muon flux for 28 days, capturing about 10 million muons... 3D laser scans of the accessible structures can then be compared with the measured muon flux. Anomalies in the muon flux images that are not visible in the 3D model can be confidently assumed to be hidden or unknown cavities.

Muography revealed an excess of muons in the data that can be explained only by the presence of a new burial chamber. The chamber's area measures roughly 6.5 by 11.5 feet (2 by 3.5 m), according to the study, and its rectangular shape indicates it is human-made rather than natural.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism: We'd need an astronomical amount of resources to construct a Dyson sphere, a giant theoretical shell that would harvest all of a given star's energy, around the Sun. In fact, as science journalist Jaime Green explores in her new book "The Possibility of Life," we'd have to go as far as to demolish a Jupiter-sized planet to build such a megastructure, a concept first devised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960...

Not everybody agrees that constructing a Dyson sphere would end up being such a huge undertaking. In an interview with Green, astrophysicist Jason Wright compared such an effort to [the city of] Manhattan, a human and interconnected "megastructure," which was constructed over a long period of time, bit by bit... "It's just every generation made it a little bigger...."

"If the energy is out there to take and it's just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn't someone take it?" Wright told Green.

For the first time, astronomers have observed a star swallowing a planet. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. MIT News reports: The planetary demise appears to have taken place in our own galaxy, some 12,000 light-years away, near the eagle-like constellation Aquila. There, astronomers spotted an outburst from a star that became more than 100 times brighter over just 10 days, before quickly fading away. Curiously, this white-hot flash was followed by a colder, longer-lasting signal. This combination, the scientists deduced, could only have been produced by one event: a star engulfing a nearby planet.

What of the planet that perished? The scientists estimate that it was likely a hot, Jupiter-sized world that spiraled close, then was pulled into the dying star's atmosphere, and, finally, into its core. A similar fate will befall the Earth, though not for another 5 billion years, when the sun is expected to burn out, and burn up the solar system's inner planets. "For decades, we've been able to see the before and after," says lead author Kishalay De, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. "Before, when the planets are still orbiting very close to their star, and after, when a planet has already been engulfed, and the star is giant. What we were missing was catching the star in the act, where you have a planet undergoing this fate in real-time. That's what makes this discovery really exciting."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: The creamy fruit and nectar-rich flowers of the milk fruit tree are irresistible to Xenohyla truncata, a tree frog native to Brazil. On warm nights, the dusky-colored frogs take to the trees en masse, jostling one another for a chance to nibble the fruit and slurp the nectar. In the process, the frogs become covered in sticky pollen grains -- and might inadvertently pollinate the plants, too. It's the first time a frog -- or any amphibian -- has been observed pollinating a plant, researchers reported last month in Food Webs.

Scientists long thought only insects and birds served as pollinators, but research has revealed that some reptiles and mammals are more than up to the task. Now, scientists must consider whether amphibians are also capable of getting the job done. It's likely that the nectar-loving frogs, also known as Izecksohn's Brazilian tree frogs, are transferring pollen as they move from flower to flower, the authors say. But more research is needed, they add, to confirm that frogs have joined the planet's pantheon of pollinators.

The World Health Organization ended the global emergency status for COVID-19 on Friday more than three years after its original declaration, and said countries should now manage the virus that killed more than 6.9 million people along with other infectious diseases. From a report: The global health agency's Emergency Committee met on Thursday and recommended the UN organization declare an end to the coronavirus crisis as a "public health emergency of international concern" -- its highest level of alert -- which has been in place since Jan. 30, 2020. "It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that the end of the emergency did not mean COVID was over as a global health threat. During a lengthy conference call to brief the press on the decision, some WHO members became emotional as they urged countries to reflect on lessons learned during the pandemic.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent decades, NASA has sent large spacecraft -- Galileo and Cassini, respectively -- to fly around Jupiter and Venus to explore the dozens of moons that exist in those planetary systems. The spacecraft investigated all manner of intriguing moons, from little radiation-saturated hellholes to a world covered in volcanoes. But the most consistently interesting discovery made by these probes was that Jupiter and Venus are surrounded by small and large moons covered in ice, possessing large water oceans below, or both. This was exciting because where there is water in its liquid state, there is the possibility of life.

In response to these discoveries, NASA is planning to launch a mission to Europa, an ice-encrusted moon in the Jovian system, as early as 2024. Another mission may launch to Saturn's moon Titan a few years later, where there are oceans of liquid methane on the surface. And just last month, the European Space Agency launched a spacecraft, Juice, to explore several icy moons at Jupiter. Now, NASA may need to add the moons of Uranus to its exploration hit list. Besides being known for its funny name and its brilliant cyan shade, Uranus has at least 27 moons. And they're pretty intriguing, too. The space agency has only ever flown one spacecraft, Voyager 2, by the seventh planet in our Solar System. The Voyager spacecraft flew by Uranus a long time ago, in 1985. But in light of the discoveries made by the Cassini, Dawn, and New Horizons spacecraft, scientists have been revisiting the data collected by Voyager in addition to the data obtained by ground-based telescopes. This has led NASA scientists to conclude that four of Uranus' largest moons -- Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon -- probably contain water oceans below their icy crusts. These oceans are likely dozens of kilometers deep and probably fairly salty in being sandwiched between the upper ice and inner rock core.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Fast-rising fungal attacks on the world's most important crops threaten the planet's future food supply, scientists have said, warning that failing to tackle fungal pathogens could lead to a "global health catastrophe." Fungi are already by far the biggest destroyer of crops. They are highly resilient, travel long distances on the wind and can feast on large fields of a single crop. They are also extremely adaptable and many have developed resistance to common fungicides. The impact of fungal disease is expected to worsen, the researchers say, as the climate crisis results in temperatures rising and fungal infections moving steadily polewards. Since the 1990s, fungal pathogens have been moving to higher latitudes at a rate of about 7km a year. Wheat stem rust infections, normally found in the tropics, have already been reported in England and Ireland. Higher temperatures also drive the emergence of new variants of the fungal pathogens, while more extreme storms can spread their spores further afield, the scientists say.

The scientists said there was also a risk that global heating would increase the heat tolerance of fungi, raising the possibility of them hopping hosts to infect warm-blooded animals and humans. The warning, issued in an article in the scientific journal Nature, said growers already lost between 10% and 23% of their crops to fungal disease. Across the five most important crops -- rice, wheat, maize, soya beans and potatoes -- infections cause annual losses that could feed hundreds of millions of people. Fungi made up the top six in a recent list of pests and pathogens with the biggest impact. Fungi are incredibly resilient, the researchers say, remaining viable in soil for up to 40 years, and their airborne spores can travel between continents.

Fungicides are widely used but the pathogens are well equipped to rapidly evolve resistance to treatments that target only a single cellular process. Existing fungicides and conventional breeding for disease resistance are no longer enough, the researchers say. One solution is planting seed mixtures that carry a range of genes that are resistant to fungal infection, rather than monocultures of a single strain. In 2022, about a quarter of wheat in Denmark was grown in this way. Technology may also help, the scientists say, with drones and artificial intelligence allowing earlier detection and control of outbreaks. New pesticides are being developed, with a team at the University of Exeter recently discovering compounds that could lead to chemicals that target several biological processes within the fungi, making resistance much harder to develop. The approach has already been shown to be useful against fungi infecting wheat, rice, corn and bananas. "While that storyline is science fiction, we are warning that we could see a global health catastrophe caused by the rapid global spread of fungal infections," said Sarah Gurr, professor at the University of Exeter and co-author of the report. "The imminent threat here is not about zombies, but about global starvation."

An experimental Alzheimer's medication slowed declines in patients' ability to think clearly and perform daily tasks by more than a third in a large clinical trial, drugmaker Eli Lilly said Wednesday. From a report: Based on the results, in people with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease, Lilly said it plans to file for approval from the US Food and Drug Administration by the end of June. The medicine, donanemab, works by removing plaque buildups in the brain known as amyloid that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. However, there were some side effects reported; there were three deaths in the trial among people taking the drug, two of which were attributed to adverse events such as brain swelling or microhemorrhages, known as amyloid-related imaging abnormalities or ARIA. The trial was run in more than 1,700 patients for 18 months.

"For every medicine, for every disease, there are potential risks and potential benefits," said Lilly's chief scientific and medical officer, Dr. Daniel Skovronsky. But he noted that almost half of the participants taking the drug, 47%, showed no decline on a key measure of cognition over the course of a year, compared with 29% of people taking a placebo. That's "the kind of efficacy that's never been seen before in Alzheimer's disease," Skovronsky said. Alzheimer's affects more than 6 million Americans, with an estimated 1.7 million to 2 million people over 65 in the early stages of the disease, according to Lilly. Drug development for Alzheimer's has been riddled with failures, but Lilly's drug is among a new group showing promise. The first, Eisai and Biogen's Leqembi, received accelerated FDA approval in January.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water vapor around a distant rocky planet located 26 light-years away. "The water vapor could indicate the presence of an atmosphere around the extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, a discovery that could be important for our search for habitable worlds outside the solar system," reports Space.com. "However, the scientists behind the discovery caution that this water vapor could be coming from the world's host star rather than the planet itself." From the report: The exoplanet, designated GJ 486 b, orbits a red dwarf star located 26 light-years away in the Virgo constellation. Although it has three times the mass of Earth, it is less than a third the size of our planet. GJ 486 b takes less than 1.5 Earth days to orbit its star and is probably tidally locked to the red dwarf, meaning it perpetually shows the same face to its star.

Red dwarfs like the parent star of GJ 486 b are the most common form of stars in the cosmos, meaning that statistically speaking, rocky exoplanets are most likely to be found orbiting such a stellar object. Red dwarf stars are also cooler than other types of stars, meaning that a planet must orbit them tightly to remain warm enough to host liquid water, a vital element needed for life. But, red dwarfs also emit violent and powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation when they are young that would blast away the atmospheres of planets that are too close, potentially making those exoplanets very inhospitable to life.

That means astronomers are currently keen to discover if a rocky planet in such a harsh environment could manage to both form an atmosphere and then hang on to it long enough for life to take hold, a process that took around a billion years on Earth. [...] Even though GJ 486 b's host star is cooler than the sun, water vapor could still concentrate in starspots. If that is the case, this could create a signal that mimics a planetary atmosphere. If there is an atmosphere around GJ 486 b, then radiation from its red dwarf parent star will constantly erode it, meaning it has to be replenished by steam from the exoplanet's interior ejected by volcanic activity. The research appears in a paper on arXiv while it awaits publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read more about it via NASA.

Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material. From a report: The removal makes "a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education," says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials. The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India's 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a "content rationalization" process.

NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was "irrelevant" in the "present context.") NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India's Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Some recall bright lights at the end of a tunnel, feeling the presence of loved ones or floating above their body after a near-death experience. Now, scientists say they have captured "conscious-like" brain activity in dying patients in findings that give new insights into the process of death. The study used data from four patients who had died in hospital while their brains were being monitored using EEG recordings because they had previously suffered suspected seizures. All four of the patients were comatose and unresponsive and had been deemed beyond medical help. With their families' permission, life support had been withdrawn and they had subsequently suffered cardiac arrest and died.

The scientists retrospectively analyzed the brain activity data in the moments after life support was withdrawn until the patients' deaths. Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness. The activity was detected in the so-called hot zone, an area in the back of the brain linked to conscious brain activity. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies. The other two patients did not display the same increase in heart rate or brain activity, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists said it was impossible to know exactly what the brain activity might correspond to as a subjective experience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures coarse, colorful snapshots of the brain in action. While this specialized type of magnetic resonance imaging has transformed cognitive neuroscience, it isn't a mind-reading machine: neuroscientists can't look at a brain scan and tell what someone was seeing, hearing or thinking in the scanner. But gradually scientists are pushing against that fundamental barrier to translate internal experiences into words using brain imaging. This technology could help people who can't speak or otherwise outwardly communicate such as those who have suffered strokes or are living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Current brain-computer interfaces require the implantation of devices in the brain, but neuroscientists hope to use non-invasive techniques such as fMRI to decipher internal speech without the need for surgery.

Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy. "There's a lot more information in brain data than we initially thought," said Jerry Tang, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and the study's lead author, during a press briefing. The research, published on Monday in Nature Communications, is what Tang describes as "a proof of concept that language can be decoded from noninvasive recordings of brain activity."

The decoder technology is in its infancy. It must be trained extensively for each person who uses it, and it doesn't construct an exact transcript of the words they heard or imagined. But it is still a notable advance. Researchers now know that the AI language system, an early relative of the model behind ChatGPT, can help make informed guesses about the words that evoked brain activity just by looking at fMRI brain scans. While current technological limitations prevent the decoder from being widely used, for good or ill, the authors emphasize the need to enact proactive policies that protect the privacy of one's internal mental processes. [...] The model misses a lot about the stories it decodes. It struggles with grammatical features such as pronouns. It can't decipher proper nouns such as names and places, and sometimes it just gets things wrong altogether. But it achieves a high level of accuracy, compared with past methods. Between 72 and 82 percent of the time in the stories, the decoder was more accurate at decoding their meaning than would be expected from random chance. Here's an example of what one study participant heard, as transcribed in the paper: "i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness." The model went on to decode: "i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn't see anything and looked up again i saw nothing."

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

The number of known mountains in Earth's oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science. From a report: Just as mountains tower over Earth's surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity. That's in part because their craggy walls -- formed from volcanic activity -- provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They're like "stirring rods in the ocean," says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

More than 24,600 seamounts have been previously mapped. One common way of finding these hidden mountains is to ping the seafloor with sonar. But that's an expensive, time-intensive process that requires a ship. Only about 20 percent of the ocean has been mapped that way, says Scripps earth scientist Julie Gevorgian. "There are a lot of gaps." So Gevorgian, Sandwell and their colleagues turned to satellite observations, which provide global coverage of the world's oceans, to take a census of seamounts. The team pored over satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface. The researchers looked for centimeter-scale bumps caused by the gravitational influence of a seamount. Because rock is denser than water, the presence of a seamount slightly changes the Earth's gravitational field at that spot. "There's an extra gravitational attraction," Sandwell says, that causes water to pile up above the seamount.