「膵臓がん」と聞くと、私は今でも少し身構えてしまいます。2011年に亡くなったスティーブ・ジョブズが患っていた病気として、その名前を知った人も多いのではないでしょうか。当時報じられたのは、進行の速さや予後の厳しさでした。後に、ジョブズが患っ…

2025年10月21日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。車についた鳥のフン掃除してる気がしている方へ。2025年10月初め、アメリカ・バージニア州に拠点を置くAlan’s Factory Outlet社が「鳥のフン報告書」を発表しました。こ…

2025年10月19日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。待って。その木は何で切ったらいいの？ ちょっと削りたいときはどうすれば？ 気になる…。木材のように見えて、鋼鉄のように強い。そんな夢のような素材が、ついに市場に登場しましたよ。メリーラ…

月に新しい穴がひとつ増えただけ…で、いいのか？2026年8月5日、SpaceXのファルコン9ロケットの上段機体が月面に激突しました。狙って撃ち込んだわけではありません。2025年1月にFirefly Aerospaceの月着陸船「Blue …

A team of researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale engineered yeast to create cookies that were 3D printed out of plastic waste, reports Futurism: The yeast breaks down the components of plastic compounds and agricultural byproducts like discarded plant stalks into proteins, fats, acids, and flavorings that we can eat. When these are combined together, the mixture is fed into a 3D printer that spits out cookies of any desired shape. The researchers chose to print their cookies as the Greek letter Â, creating what they call "ÂBites" — or micro bites. They haven't actually eaten one of their ÂBites yet, as they wait for university approval... "I think it has a pleasant, appealing aroma," Lahiru Jayakody, a microbiologist at SIU who led the research, told NewScientist. "And it will taste good, too. We've not tasted it, but it smells good — that's for sure — like a real cookie...." The researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to reprogram yeast strains to eat polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a widely used form of plastic commonly found in disposable water bottles, food packaging, and clothes, which is rich with carbon. Before the yeast can start feasting, the PET plastics are subjected to a process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution to break them down into smaller bits that the microbes can digest. The purported advantage of this approach is that it's environmentally friendly, using only heat, water, and oxygen. The yeast feasts on these stripped-down plastic bits, turning them into a slurry of proteins, fats, and acids that're combined with fiber, starch, and sweetener to make them more palatable. One of the yeast strains in particular was able to turn plant biomass into tasty vanilla flavorings... [R]ight now, it's an expensive process, costing around $60 to produce a kilogram of cookies, The Guardian reported. And some experts say it's wishful thinking to believe we can 3D-print, and then eat, ourselves out of these global problems with 3D-printed, delectable treats. "We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies," Jason Hallett at Imperial College London told New Scientist. "So it's not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis. There's no way you could do this commercially. We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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肉と脂が多くて野菜が少ない、いわゆる欧米型の食事は、体に良くないなんて話を聞きますよね。でも、良くないと言われる具体的な理由はご存知ですか？実は、欧米型の食事と大腸がんが関係しているところまではわかっているのですが、具体的な理由まではわかっ…

イマイチ勢いに乗れない燃料電池にとって飛躍のチャンス。AIブームの影響で、アメリカの電力網にはかつてない負荷がかかっています。2030年までにデータセンターの電力消費量は国内の総消費量の12％近くに達する可能性があるそうです。専門家は、急増…

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery. If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research. "Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher," study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science's Victoria Atkinson. Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that "steal" electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems. In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers' analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News' Anirban Mukhopadhyay. The findings show that "decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms," the researchers write in the paper.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation -- the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies. [...] The consequences of this discovery are pretty significant. If you buy an antibody believing it will generate clean, clear data and find it doesn't, many researchers will assume the problem is them. That often leads them to spend time troubleshooting the procedure and trying slightly different conditions to get useful data. If the antibody can't produce those results, all the troubleshooting will have been a waste of time and money. Nature's coverage of the new findings includes quotes from several companies that sell these antibodies that, paraphrased, range from "we'll look into it" to "we don't think it's a problem." Researchers who have spent time frustrated while failing to get an antibody-based experiment to work may think otherwise.

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「日本は資源のない国です」。そう習って、そのまま大人になりました。その"ない"はずの資源が、日本最東端・南鳥島の沖、水深5,569メートルの海の底から、泥といっしょに上がってきています。内閣府とJAMSTEC（海洋研究開発機構）が7月24日…

2026年7月17日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。ガレージDIYの域を超えた。アメリカ・バージニア州の高校生、ミア・ヘラーさんは、家族や自分のためにある「考えたくもない現実」を自宅のガレージとキッチンで解決しようとした一人です。しかも、…

地球は、まだまだわからないことだらけ。グリーンランド東部の「ガイキー高原」に、これまで考えられていたより倍近い量の氷があることがわかりました。掘ったわけでも、飛行機を飛ばして確認したわけでもありません。機械学習モデルが「ここはこのくらい厚い…

水道管、窓のサッシ、床材、そしてカード類。ポリ塩化ビニル（塩ビ／PVC）は身の回りのあちこちに使われていますが、実は捨てるときには「プラスチックの中でもいちばん厄介」という裏の顔を見せます。アメリカ・バージニア工科大学の研究チームが、その厄…

月のような過酷な環境では、生物は長く生存できないと考えられてきました。なにしろ月の気温は激しく変動し、人間が呼吸できる大気はなく、絶えず太陽放射線や宇宙放射線にさらされています。さらに、月面にはガラスのように鋭い粉塵であるレゴリスが堆積して…

Gluons are the quantum 'Gorilla Glue' involved in binding quarks together, ScienceAlert reminds us. But for nearly 50 years, physicists have hunted for "glueballs", exotic particles predicted by this theory of the strong interaction — the only type of particle in nature composed entirely of force mediators: Now, a collaboration working at a collider in Beijing says it has the clearest evidence yet that a known particle called X(2370) is dominated by one of these elusive states... Physicists sifted through the wreckage of high-energy particle collisions to find strong evidence of this glueball, made predominantly of gluons — massless force carriers of the strong interaction between quarks... The new evidence for this exotic, unstable glueball's ephemeral existence comes from a recent preprint on arXiv, presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil... This collaboration uses the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II, a particle accelerator and collider that smashes electrons into their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, to probe perplexing particle physics. The resultant glueball is an "unprecedented form of matter," says Jin Shan, a particle physicist at Nanjing University and one of the research team's leaders. "It not only enables the theory describing strong interactions to pass its most rigorous test, but also vastly expands the boundaries of our understanding of the physical world," he told Fan Chen at South China Morning Post... Previously, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2024, the researchers analyzed 10 billion meson decay events. They measured the X(2370) particle's mass and spin parity — a property that dictates its interactions and almost-instantaneous decay — for the first time, finding complete agreement between their experimental values and predictions. Now, they've identified its additional decay modes and determined its flavor-singlet nature, "the most important characteristic of a glueball...." The authors describe their work as the clearest experimental result to emerge from nearly 50 years of glueball searches, supporting the long-standing theoretical prediction that gluons can bind together into a new form of matter. The discovery ""highlights advances in technology and analytical techniques that have recently revealed another decades-in-the-making physics mystery," the article points out. "More experiments are needed to further confirm and constrain the prototypes of the highly esoteric glueball; in other words, more particle smashing."

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2026年3月5日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。夏場に多い電力不足も困ったものですよね。作った電力をどうにか貯めておければいいのに。でっかいバッテリーを作る？家庭に配備する？色々考えられそうですが、実は、世界最大の蓄電システムは山と水を…

太陽の光がまったく届かない、水深2,000mの海の底。そこには、地面から噴き出す熱水の化学エネルギーだけを頼りに生きる、地球でいちばん人間から遠い生態系があります。そこに暮らす貝の体を調べたら、発泡スチロールの粒が出てきました。えぇ、マイク…

サメもクーラーとか欲しがっているかもね…。アメリカの沿岸部では、サメの目撃件数が過去最高を記録しているそうです。海水温の上昇を受けて、海の食物連鎖の頂点に君臨する捕食者であるサメが、涼しい海域を求めて移動しているのだとか。この夏、ニューヨー…

ナマズの代わりに光ファイバーケーブル。アメリカ太平洋岸北西部（アメリカ西海岸）に縁がある人じゃなければ、｢ShakeAlert｣について耳にしたことなんてないと思います。アメリカ地質調査所（USGS）が運用する、お堅い機関のわりにちょっと愛…

コンピュータの方じゃなくて、生物学的なウイルスを作っちゃったのね。やばみしかない。AIに向けられた大きな期待のひとつは、人類を悩ませてきた病気の根絶に貢献することですが、まだその段階には至っていません。でも今回、AIがすごいことをやってのけ…