Pills that communicate from the stomach could improve medication adherence

Two photos show the gelatin-coated capsules (left) and the capsule without the coating (right). The capsule can be broken down and absorbed by the body.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In an advance that could help ensure people are taking their medication on schedule, MIT engineers have designed a pill that can report when it has been swallowed.

The new reporting system, which can be incorporated into existing pill capsules, contains a biodegradable radio frequency antenna. After it sends out the signal that the pill has been consumed, most components break down in the stomach while a tiny RF chip passes out of the body through the digestive tract.

This type of system could be useful for monitoring transplant patients who need to take immunosuppressive drugs, or people with infections such as HIV or TB, who need treatment for an extended period of time, the researchers say.

Cosmic Lens Reveals Hyperactive Cradle of Future Galaxy Cluster

The galaxy cluster lens J0846 in optical light (bottom right), the ALMA view of dust-enshrouded, star-forming galaxies strongly lensed into bright arcs (top right), and a composite view (left) revealing at least 11 dusty galaxies in a compact protocluster core more than 11 billion light-years away, magnified by the foreground cluster’s gravity.
Image Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton; NSF/NOIRLab

Galaxy clusters are formed by a dense packing of many galaxies, making them the most massive structures in the Universe. Their progenitors, protoclusters, show these galaxies in their infancy, offering a window to study how they all formed. This early “settlement” of galaxies will eventually evolve into a sprawling metropolis by the present day. Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered a rare protocluster that was exceptionally bright, all when the Universe was 11 billion years younger. The system, called PJ0846+15 (J0846), is the first strongly lensed protocluster core discovered, revealing how some of the most massive galaxy clusters in the present-day Universe began their lives.

Researchers uncover molecular roots of fibrosis or tissue scarring in inflammatory bowel disease

Spatial mapping of intestinal tissue from patients with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis (shown here) allowed the researchers to characterize the cell types (shown as different colored dots) involved in fibrosis. In this image, inflammation-associated fibroblasts that deposit scar tissue roughly align with the cellular niche displayed in royal blue.
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Xavier lab

When inflammation in the body goes unchecked, it can cause fibrosis, or tissue scarring that may lead to organ dysfunction or even failure. This can happen in conditions such as inflammatory bowel diseases (ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease), chronic viral infections, interstitial lung fibrosis, chronic autoimmune skin diseases such as scleroderma, and scars associated with heart disease. Patients have few options for treating fibrosis, but new research points to a molecular pathway that could open the door to future treatment possibilities.

In earlier work, a team led by researchers at the Broad Institute and Mass General Brigham discovered a key cell type underlying fibrosis in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Now, in a new study in Nature, the team has characterized the crosstalk between this and other types of cells that leads to fibrosis. Their work also points to a molecule, GLIS3, that regulates this cell-to-cell communication and hadn’t been linked to IBD before. The findings suggest that interrupting this cellular pathway could one day help prevent or reduce fibrosis in patients with IBD or other diseases marked by chronic inflammation such as lung disease. 

Natural physical networks are continuous, three-dimensional objects, like the small mathematical model displayed here. Researchers have found that physical networks in living systems follow rules borrowed from string theory, a theoretical physics framework.
Illustration Credit: Xiangyi Meng/RPI

For more than a century, scientists have wondered why physical structures like blood vessels, neurons, tree branches, and other biological networks look the way they do. The prevailing theory held that nature simply builds these systems as efficiently as possible, minimizing the amount of material needed. But in the past, when researchers tested these networks against traditional mathematical optimization theories, the predictions consistently fell short. 

The problem, it turns out, was that scientists were thinking in one dimension when they should have been thinking in three. "We were treating these structures like wire diagrams," Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) physicist Xiangyi Meng, Ph.D., explains. "But they're not thin wires, they're three-dimensional physical objects with surfaces that must connect smoothly." 

Naturally occurring “space weather station” elucidates new way to study habitability of planets orbiting M dwarf stars

Artist's renditions of the space weather around M dwarf TIC 141146667. The torus of ionized gas is sculpted by the star's magnetic field and rotation, with two pinched, dense clumps present on opposing sides of the star.
Illustrations Credit: Navid Marvi, courtesy Carnegie Science.

How does a star affect the makeup of its planets? And what does this mean for the habitability of distant worlds? Carnegie’s Luke Bouma is exploring a new way to probe this critical question—using naturally occurring space weather stations that orbit at least 10 percent of M dwarf stars during their early lives. He is presenting his work at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week. 

We know that most M dwarf stars—which are smaller, cooler, and dimmer than our own Sun—host at least one Earth-sized rocky planet. Most of them are inhospitable—too hot for liquid water or atmospheres, or hit with frequent stellar flares and intense radiation. But they could still prove to be interesting laboratories for understanding the many ways that stars shape the surroundings in which their planets exist.

“Stars influence their planets. That’s obvious. They do so both through light, which we’re great at observing, and through particles—or space weather—like solar winds and magnetic storms, which are more challenging to study at great distances,” Bouma explained. “And that’s very frustrating, because we know in our own Solar System that particles can sometimes be more important for what happens to planets.” 

But astronomers can’t set up a space weather station around a distant star. 

The Mechanical Ratchet: A New Mechanism of Cell Division Uncovered

A zebrafish embryo during the first cell division cycle, with the structural protein actin labelled, which marks the cell boundary and ingressing furrow. The image shows a time course from dark orange (before ingression) to brighter orange and finally white as ingression proceeds.
Image Credit: © Alison Kickuth, Brugués Lab

Cell division is an essential process for all life on earth, yet the exact mechanisms by which cells divide during early embryonic development have remained elusive – particularly for egg-laying species. Scientists from the Brugués group at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) at Dresden University of Technology have revealed a novel mechanism that explains how early embryonic cells may divide without forming a complete contractile ring, traditionally seen as essential for this process. The findings, published in Nature, challenge the long-standing textbook view of cell division, revealing how parts of the cytoskeleton, and material properties of the cell interior (or cytoplasm) cooperate to drive division through a ‘ratchet’ mechanism.     

We finally know how the most common types of planets are created

Astronomers have now witnessed four baby planets in the V1298 Tau system in the process of becoming super-Earths and sub-Neptunes.
Image Credit: Astrobiology Center, NINS  

Thanks to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets to date, we know that planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune orbit most stars. Oddly, our sun lacks such a planet. That’s been a source of frustration for planetary scientists, who can’t study them in as much detail as they’d like, leaving one big question: How did these planets form? 

Now we know the answer. 

An international team of astrophysicists from UCLA and elsewhere has witnessed four baby planets in the V1298 Tau system in the process of becoming super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. The findings are published in the journal Nature. 

“I’m reminded of the famous ‘Lucy’ fossil, one of our hominid ancestors that lived 3 million years ago and was one of the ‘missing links’ between apes and humans,” said UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and second author Erik Petigura. “V1298 Tau is a critical link between the star- and planet-forming nebulae we see all over the sky, and the mature planetary systems that we have now discovered by the thousands.”

Oil residues can travel over 5,000 miles on ocean debris, study finds

Petroleum residues can survive long-distance transport by adhering to floating debris, dramatically extending how far oil pollution can travel in the marine environment.
Photo Credit: Diane Buhler, Friends of Palm Beach

When oily plastic, glass, and rubber washed ashore on Florida beaches in 2020, it appeared at first to be a local mystery. But through a collaboration that paired community observations with world-leading oceanographic and chemical expertise, scientists traced the contamination across more than 5,200 miles of ocean.

In a new study published in ACS Environmental Science & Technology, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Northeastern University, in collaboration with community scientists from Friends of Palm Beach, show that petroleum residues can survive long-distance transport by adhering to floating debris, dramatically extending how far oil pollution can travel in the marine environment.

Using advanced ocean current modeling and chemical fingerprinting developed at WHOI, the team linked the Florida debris to a massive oil spill that occurred along Brazil’s coastline in 2019.

“This study demonstrates how plastic pollution fundamentally changes the fate of oil in the ocean,” said Chris Reddy, chemical oceanographer at WHOI and a global authority on oil spill forensics. “By hitchhiking on debris, petroleum residues can persist and move far beyond what we previously believed possible.”

Sediments of the Ahr river show recurring high-magnitude flood events

The extreme summer flood of 2021 in the Ahr Valley caused catastrophic damage.   
Photo Credit: Physical Geography working group, Leipzig University

Sedimentary archives provide evidence of four extreme flood events in the last 1,500 years 

Recurring high-energy flood events are not the exception but the rule in the Ahr Valley in western Germany – and this occurs over periods of centuries to millennia. This is shown in a study published in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms and led by Leipzig University, in which researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), among others, were also involved. The examined river sediments document the extreme summer flood of 2021 as well as at least three other flood events in the past 1,500 years, which – measured by sedimentological parameters – exhibited comparable intensity. The Ahr floodplain is characterized by high-energy flood deposits. Flood events of low to moderate intensity are not detectable there. 

Cardiovascular risk score predicts multiple eye diseases

Routine heart health screening tool identifies people at higher risk for age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and other vision-threatening conditions
Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / AI generated

A new study from UCLA Health shows that a cardiovascular risk score already used routinely in primary care can predict who will develop serious eye diseases years later. Researchers found that people with higher cardiovascular risk scores were significantly more likely to develop conditions including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, retinal vein occlusion, and hypertensive retinopathy. The study appears in Ophthalmology. 

Why it matters

Millions of Americans lose vision to eye diseases that often go undetected until significant damage has occurred. Early identification of at-risk individuals could enable timely screening and preventive interventions before irreversible vision loss occurs. This study demonstrates that information already collected during routine doctor visits could help identify patients who would benefit from earlier eye exams, potentially preventing blindness in high-risk individuals. The findings offer a practical way to improve eye disease prevention without requiring additional testing or specialized equipment in primary care settings.