An unprecedented analysis of how cancers grow has revealed an "almost infinite" ability of tumors to evolve and survive, say scientists. The BBC reports: The results of tracking lung cancers for nine years left the research team "surprised" and "in awe" at the formidable force they were up against. They have concluded we need more focus on prevention, with a "universal" cure unlikely any time soon. The study -- entitled TracerX -- provides the most in-depth analysis of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread. More than 400 people -- treated at 13 hospitals in the UK -- had biopsies taken from different parts of their lung cancer as the disease progressed.

The evolutionary analysis has been published across seven separate studies in the journals Nature and Nature Medicine. The research showed:

- Highly aggressive cells in the initial tumor are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body
- Tumors showing higher levels of genetic "chaos" were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the body
- Analyzing blood for fragments of tumor DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scan
- The cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive. "I don't think we're going to be able to come up with universal cures," said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London. "If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse."

Last week, Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions by 2030. The new analysis reported on by the BBC casts doubt on that timeline.

"I don't want to sound too depressing about this, but I think -- given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumor can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumor, which could be several hundred billion cells -- then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task," said Swanton.

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation. Universe Today reports: a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe. Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos.

Normally gravitational waves are exceedingly weak. We have to build detectors that are capable of measuring distances less than the width of an atomic nucleus to find gravitational waves passing through the Earth. But researchers have pointed out that in the extremely early universe these gravitational waves may have become very strong. And they may have even created standing wave patterns where the gravitational waves weren't traveling but the waves stood still, almost frozen in place throughout the cosmos. Since gravitational waves are literally waves of gravity, the places where the waves are the strongest represent an exceptional amount of gravitational energy.

The researchers found that this could have major consequences for the electromagnetic field existing in the early universe at that time. The regions of intense gravity may have excited the electromagnetic field enough to release some of its energy in the form of radiation, creating light. This result gives rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the production of light from gravity alone. There's no situation in the present-day universe that could allow this process to happen, but the researchers have shown that the early universe was a far stranger place than we could possibly imagine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Red sand shifts under the boots of the crew members. In the distance, it appears that a rocky mountain range is rising out of the Martian horizon. A thin layer of red dust coats the solar panels and equipment necessary for the year-long mission. This landscape isn't actually 145m miles away. We are in a corner of the Nasa Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a large white warehouse right next to the disc golf course and on the tram route for tourists and school groups. But starting this June, four volunteer test subjects will spend a year locked inside, pretending to live on Mars. Nasa researchers say they're doing everything they can to make it as realistic as possible so they can learn the impact that a year in isolation with limited resources has on human health. "As we move from low Earth orbit, from moon to Mars, we're going to have a lot more resource restrictions than we have on the International Space Station and we're going to be a lot further from Earth or any help from Earth," said Dr Grace Douglas, the principal investigator for the Crew Health Performance Exploration Analog, or Chapea for short.

The four crew members will live in a small housing unit that was constructed using a huge 3D printer to simulate how Nasa may create structures on the Martian surface with Martian soil. They'll conduct experiments, grow food and exercise -- and be tested regularly so scientists can learn what a year on Mars could do to the body and mind. "This is really an extreme circumstance," said Dr Suzanne Bell, who leads the Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at the Nasa Johnson Space Center. "You're asking for individuals to live and work together for over a one-year period. Not only will they have to get along well, but they'll also have to perform well together."

Watching four people spend a year in a 3D-printed box is Nasa's next small step toward landing humans on the surface of Mars. Nasa says it hopes to send humans to the red planet as early as the 2030s. The first mission could be a nine-month trip one-way, and could leave the astronauts on the surface for two and a half years before starting the long trip back home. Preparations for that trek are already well under way with the agency's Artemis program. Artemis is sending astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since 1972, including the first person of color and woman to walk on another celestial body. As part of the Artemis missions, Nasa is also launching Gateway, a space station that will orbit the Moon and serve as a pit stop for Mars-bound missions. Getting to the Moon means getting to Mars, and getting to Mars means testing the physical and behavioral health of a crew in isolation. That's where Chapea comes in.

According to the BBC, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile has traced the distribution of dark matter "on a quarter of the sky and across almost 14 billion years of time." From the report: In the image [here], the colored areas are the portions of the sky studied by the telescope. Orange regions show where there is more mass, or matter, along the line of sight; purple where there is less. Typical features are hundreds of millions of light-years across. The grey/white areas show where contaminating light from dust in our Milky Way galaxy has obscured a deeper view. The distribution of matter agrees very well with scientific predictions.

ACT observations indicate that the "lumpiness" of the Universe and the rate at which it has been expanding after 14 billion years of evolution are just what you'd expect from the standard model of cosmology, which has Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) at its foundation. Recent measurements that used an alternative background light, one emitted from stars in galaxies rather than the CMB, had suggested the Universe lacked sufficient lumpiness.

Another tension concerns the rate at which the Universe is expanding - a number called the Hubble constant. When [the European Space Agency's Planck observatory] looked at temperature fluctuations across the CMB, it determined the rate to be about 67 kilometres per second per megaparsec (A megaparsec is 3.26 million light-years). Or put another way - the expansion increases by 67km per second for every 3.26 million light-years we look further out into space. A tension arises because measurements of the expansion in the nearby Universe, made using the recession from us of variable stars, clocks in at about 73km/s per megaparsec. It's a difference that can't easily be explained. ACT, employing its lensing technique to nail down the expansion rate, outputs a number similar to Planck's. "It's very close - about 68km/s per megaparsec," said Dr Mathew Madhavacheril from the the University of Pennsylvania. ACT team-member Prof Blake Sherwin from Cambridge University, UK, added: "We and Planck and several other probes are coming in on the lower side. Obviously, you could have a scenario where both the measurements are right and there's some new physics that explains the discrepancy. But we're using independent techniques, and I think we're now starting to close the loophole where we could all be riding this new physics and one of the measurements has to be wrong."

Papers describing the new results have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and posted on the ACT website.

The New York Times added a new daily puzzle game to its library in the form of Digits. GameSpot reports: This collection of math conundrums tasks you with reaching a designated number by using six numbers that you're free to multiply, divide, subtract, or add up to reach the final result, so long as your process doesn't create any fractions or negative numbers.

Currently in beta and only available for this week, there'll be five of these math puzzles to solve every day. These aren't one-and-done puzzles like Wordle, and depending on the path you choose to solve one of these math mysteries, you'll be awarded 1-3 star ratings. If Digits proves to be popular with its readers, the New York Times will then start work on the further development of the game.

When Dr. Makenzie Lystrup was sworn in as the new director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center last week, she didn't take her oath of office on the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, but rather on a tome revered by space enthusiasts everywhere: Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. From a report: The book, published in 1994, is named after an iconic image of Earth, snapped by the Voyager I probe, that depicts the planet as a small speck smothered by the emptiness of space. That photo inspired astronomer Carl Sagan to write: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." For many, the book serves as a reminder of humanity's place in the universe and the need to preserve our home planet, which makes it similar to holy scripture for a newly appointed NASA director. On Thursday, when Lystrup chose to place her left hand on a copy of Sagan's book while being sworn in by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a photographer captured the moment, and NASA Goddard's social media shared the image. The constitution does not require that government officials be sworn in using a particular text, just that they "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution." Most U.S. politicians and officials end up using the Bible.

schwit1 shares a report from Inverse: On March 23, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was a reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called "space weather." Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon. At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth's surface. They didn't last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet's magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun. The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites -- including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it -- made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth's magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they'd delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Keeping enough qubits in their ideal state long enough for computations has so far proved a challenge. In a new experiment, scientists were able to keep a qubit in that state for twice as long as normal. Along the way, they demonstrated the practicality of quantum error correction (QEC), a process that keeps quantum information intact for longer by introducing room for redundancy and error removal. The idea of QEC has been around since the mid-90s, but it's now been shown to work in real time. Part of the reason for the experiment's success was the introduction of machine learning AI algorithms to tweak the error correction routine.

"For the first time, we have shown that making the system more redundant and actively detecting and correcting quantum errors provided a gain in the resilience of quantum information," says physicist Michel Devoret, from Yale University in Connecticut. [...] Like many quantum physics experiments, this one was run at ultra-cold temperatures -- a hundred times colder than outer space, in this case. The setup has to be carefully controlled in order to protect the qubit as much as possible. The error-corrected qubit lasted for 1.8 milliseconds -- only a blink as we might experience it, but an impressive span for a qubit operating on the quantum level. Now the research team will be able to refine the process further. "Our experiment shows that quantum error correction is a real practical tool," says Devoret. "It's more than just a proof-of-principle demonstration." In this case the breakthrough was down to several different factors, rather than one change. The QEC code was actually one from 2001, but improvements to it as well as upgrades to the quantum circuit fabrication process made a difference.

"Our experiment validates a cornerstone assumption of quantum computing, and this makes me very excited about the future of this field," says Volodymyr Sivak, a research scientist at Google and formerly at Yale University.

The research has been published in Nature.

"There's an invisible monster on the loose," NASA wrote on Thursday, "barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. " This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy... Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut...

The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to... Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole... Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new stunning image of ice giant Uranus, with almost all its faint dusty rings on display," reports CNN: The image is representative of the telescope's significant sensitivity, NASA said, as the fainter rings have only been captured previously by the Voyager 2 spacecraft and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii. Uranus has 13 known rings, with 11 of them visible in the new Webb image. Nine rings are classified as the main rings, while the other two are harder to capture due to their dusty makeup and were not discovered until the Voyager 2 mission's flyby in 1986.

Two other, faint outer rings not shown in this latest image were discovered in 2007 from images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and scientists hope Webb will capture them in the future.... "The JWST gives us the ability to look at both Uranus and Neptune in a completely new way because we have never had a telescope of this size that looks in the infrared," said Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, a postdoctoral research scientist and solar system ambassador for the Webb space telescope at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The infrared can show us new depths and features that are difficult to see from the ground with the atmosphere in the way and invisible to telescopes that look in visible light like Hubble."
"When Voyager 2 looked at Uranus, its camera showed an almost featureless blue-green ball in visible wavelengths," NASA explains. "With the infrared wavelengths and extra sensitivity of Webb we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is." On the right side of the planet there's an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus — it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanish in the fall; these Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb's NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory....

This was only a short, 12-minute exposure image of Uranus with just two filters. It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet.

The search for life beyond Earth "follows the water," reports the Economist (since water is vital for earth's lifeforms, and the laws of chemistry are universal). "For most of the space age that insight led scientists to Mars." But... More and more, though, planetary scientists are following the water to other places — and in particular to the so-called "icy moons" that orbit Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, the solar system's quartet of giant gas planets. Many of those moons are either known or suspected to have oceans beneath their icy shells, kept liquid by gravitational squeezing from the planets they orbit.

On April 13th, if all goes well, a new spacecraft will blast off from French Guiana en route to Jupiter with the aim of investigating some of those watery moons up close. The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (given the slightly contrived acronym "JUICE ") will slingshot once around Venus and three times around Earth before arriving at Jupiter in 2031.... JUICE will investigate three of the so-called Galilean moons — Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, all of which are thought to have subsurface oceans. (The fourth, Io, is arid, and so not of interest.)

Ganymede is the probe's primary target. Despite being a moon, it is bigger than the planet Mercury. Its subsurface ocean may contain more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The probe's cameras will add much more detail to the existing, low-resolution maps of Ganymede's surface. An ice-penetrating radar will scan several kilometres below the ground. A magnetometer will take advantage of the fact that Ganymede, apparently uniquely among the solar system's moons, has a weak magnetic field that interacts with the much bigger field generated by Jupiter itself. The subtleties of that magnetic field were an early clue for the existence of an ocean, hinting at the presence of a large chunk of conductive fluid — such as salty water — beneath the surface. Better readings of the magnetic field will help scientists estimate just how big the ocean is....

Nor is JUICE the only probe on its way to Jupiter. Next year NASA will launch Europa Clipper, focused, as its name suggests, on Europa. Despite its later launch, it will take a quicker route to Jupiter, arriving a few months before JUICE . And, because there are limits to what can be discerned from orbit, both NASA and the Europeans are sketching plans for future landers that would descend to the surface of such moons to sample the seawater directly.

SpaceX plans to carry out a launch rehearsal next week of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, and its first test flight possibly the following week, the private space company said Thursday. Phys.Org reports: SpaceX published photos of the massive Starship, which is designed to eventually send astronauts to the Moon and beyond, on its launchpad at the company's base in Texas. "Starship fully stacked at Starbase," SpaceX said in a tweet. "Team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week followed by Starship's first integrated flight test ~ week later pending regulatory approval."

SpaceX will need a green light from the Federal Aviation Administration before being allowed to carry out the orbital test launch. SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster of Starship in February. The 230-foot (69-meter) Super Heavy booster was anchored to the ground during the test-firing, called a static fire, to prevent it from lifting off.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Millions of lives could be saved by a groundbreaking set of new vaccines for a range of conditions including cancer, experts have said. A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030. Studies into these vaccinations are also showing "tremendous promise", with some researchers saying 15 years' worth of progress has been "unspooled" in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab.

Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for "all sorts of disease areas" in as little as five years. The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumor types. Burton said: "We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world."

He also said that multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection -- allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) -- while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs. Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body's immune response against disease. Burton said :"I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology." But scientists warn that the accelerated progress, which has surged "by an order of magnitude" in the past three years, will be wasted if a high level of investment is not maintained.

A NASA instrument to provide unprecedented resolution of monitoring major air pollutants -- down to four square miles -- lifted off on its way to geostationary orbit at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality from space. From a report: "The TEMPO mission is about more than just studying pollution -- it's about improving life on Earth for all. By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will help improve air quality across North America and protect our planet," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. [...] From a fixed geostationary orbit above the equator, TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to measure air quality over North America hourly during the daytime and at spatial regions of several square miles -- far better than existing limits of about 100 square miles in the U.S. TEMPO data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution, including studies of rush hour pollution, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, and even the effects of fertilizer application.

TEMPO's observations will dramatically improve the scientific data record on air pollution -- including ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde -- not only over the continental United States, but also Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and part of the island of Hispaniola. "Our TEMPO slogan is 'It's about time,' which hints at TEMPO's ability to provide hourly air pollution data," said Xiong Liu, deputy principal investigator for TEMPO at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "After working on the TEMPO for more than 10 years, it is about time to launch TEMPO to produce real TEMPO data and start the new era of air quality monitoring over North America."

China has invited Venezuela to join its lunar research station project as the country works to gain partners for the endeavor. SpaceNews reports: Venezuela would be the first country to join China and Russia in the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which is planned to be constructed in the early 2030s using super heavy-lift launch vehicles. The launches will follow smaller, precursor missions later this decade. Marglad Bencomo, executive director of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), visited China's new, national Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) March 30 to discuss cooperation and exchanges. She was met by Wu Yanhua, former deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and now executive vice chairman of DSEL. The two sides exchanged in-depth views on international cooperation in the field of deep space exploration, according to a DSEL statement.

Bencomo said that Venezuela was willing to sign a China-Venezuela Memorandum of Understanding as soon as possible to jointly promote the construction of international lunar research stations, according to the DSEL statement. ABAE has been invited to attend an international forum hosted by DSEL during China's national "space day," held annually on April 24 since 2016, potentially providing a platform for signing an MOU. China and Russia presented a roadmap for the joint ILRS in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2021 and opened the project to interested parties.