Category: 7. Science

Experiment setup on day 0 of perennial flax postharvest performance experiment (photo credit: Julia Stuenkel). Scale Bar = 5 cm.

St. Paul, MN – A recent study investigates the effect of Oasis® Floral Foam on the postharvest longevity and quality of perennial flax (Linum perenne) cut flowers, providing valuable insights for the floral industry. The findings offer a better understanding of how floral foam influences water uptake, flower freshness, and overall vase life.

Perennial flax, appreciated for its delicate blue flowers and vibrant colors, has growing potential in cut flower markets. However, maximizing vase life remains critical for commercial success. This study evaluated whether Oasis® floral foam-commonly used in floral arrangements for structural support and water supply-enhances or hinders the postharvest performance of flax stems.

Anchorage of flower and foliage stems is critical to keep the materials in place in floral design artistry as well as maintain turgor pressure in the stems, leaves, and flowers by supplying water and floral preservatives to the cut stems for uptake by the xylem. While numerous types of materials can be used (e.g., rockwool, coir, Oshun PouchTM), floral foam is the most widely used mechanic worldwide to anchor flowers and foliage in floral designs. Therefore, it is important to determine how perennial flax stems respond to floral foam and their postharvest life before the crop can be commercialized as a specialty cut flower

By analyzing factors such as stem blockage, moisture retention, and flower wilting, the study highlights best practices for maintaining floral quality in commercial and retail settings. Proper hydration methods are key to extending the postharvest life of perennial flax, with implications for florists and floral designers seeking to enhance display longevity.

These findings contribute to improving handling techniques for cut flowers, supporting floriculture professionals in optimizing the freshness and aesthetic appeal of their arrangements. The study also underscores the importance of postharvest care in reducing waste and maximizing the value of specialty cut flowers.

Dr. Anderson is a Professor in the Flower Breeding & Genetics, Microbial & Plant Genomics Institute at the University of Minnesota. His program focuses on winter-hardy herbaceous perennials with ornamental value as well as R&D on ornamental plant crops which produce natural compounds useful as green pesticides.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX scrubbed today’s (July 31) launch attempt of the Crew-11 astronaut mission for NASA.

Launch officials called the scrub just over a minute before liftoff, due to a bank of cumulus clouds that appeared over in the skies over NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here.

“Unfortunately, the weather is just not playing alongside with today’s excitement on the launch for NASA SpaceX’s Crew-11,” NASA commentator Derrol Nail said during today’s launch coverage.

“We could literally see the clouds kind of going over top of our heads, getting close to the pad, and the standoff area is a 10-mile radius around the pad for these dark clouds, cumulous clouds, and that is a safety factor,” Nail added. “That is because you don’t want to send a rocket through a tall cloud like that — that could generate some energy from the rocket passing through it.”

Deep in the heart of our Galaxy lies one of the most chaotic and mysterious regions in space. Now, scientists have created the first detailed map of magnetic fields in this turbulent zone, providing crucial insights into how stars form and evolve in extreme environments.

The research, led by University of Chicago PhD student Roy Zhao, focused on a region called Sagittarius C, located in the Central Molecular Zone near the centre of the Milky Way. This area serves as what researchers call an astrophysical “Rosetta Stone”, an area key to understanding the complex interactions between dense gas clouds, star formation, and powerful magnetic fields that shape our Galaxy.

The Galactic center and the surrounding Central Molecular Zone. Molecular Hydrogen gas is shown here as purple while cold dust associated gas is orange. (Credit : NRAO/AUI/NSF)

The team used NASA’s now retired flying telescope SOFIA to study infrared light emitted by tiny dust grains scattered throughout the region. These microscopic particles act like compasses, aligning themselves with magnetic field lines and by analysing the polarised light they emit, it’s possible to map the invisible magnetic fields for the first time.

SOFIA, Flying Infrared Observatory (Credit : NASA/Jim Ross)

What they discovered was remarkable. The magnetic field wraps around an expanding bubble of hot, electrified gas that has been blown outward by the powerful winds from a cluster of massive young stars. This bubble structure helps explain one of the Galaxy’s most puzzling features, thin streams of high speed electrons that race through space at nearly the speed of light.

These mysterious radio emitting filaments were first discovered in the 1980s by Zhao’s advisor, Professor Mark Morris, but their origin remained unclear. The new magnetic field measurements support the leading theory that these electron streams form when magnetic field lines collide and reconnect, accelerating nearby particles to incredible speeds.

The findings reveal how different components of our Galaxy interact in this extreme environment. Cold gas clouds where new stars are born, hot ionised regions heated by stellar winds, and powerful magnetic fields all influence each other in a cosmic ballet that determines the fate of matter in our Galaxy’s centre.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the research showed how different astronomical surveys of the same region tell a consistent story. The magnetic field boundaries perfectly matched observations of ionised carbon emissions from another study, and the team even identified a specific type of massive star called a Wolf-Rayet star at the centre of the expanding bubble.

James Webb Space Telescope image of the Wolf–Rayet star WR 124 and the nebula M1–67 surrounding it. NIRCam and MIRI composite. (Credit : NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)

This study helps astronomers understand not just our own Galaxy, but similar processes occurring in galaxies throughout the universe. By studying this galactic Rosetta Stone, scientists can decode the fundamental physics governing how galaxies evolve, how stars form in extreme environments, and how magnetic fields shape the structures we see today.

Source : Galactic Rosetta Stone

The double-slit experiment and its variations is one of the weirdest results humans found as we began to study the world scientifically. In 1801, Thomas Young took a light and shone it through a double-slit onto a screen behind it. At the time the corpuscular idea of light, proposed by Isaac Newton, was the prevailing hypothesis about what light is, suggesting that light was a massless particle dubbed a “corpuscle”.

But when Young shone a light through the double-slits, the pattern it made on the screen behind it was not what you would expect if light were simply a particle. Rather than two blobs of light, it produced an interference pattern, as if two ripples of waves were emerging on the other side of the slit and interfering with each other.

This helped scientists learn of the wave-like nature of light, but the experiment got stranger still the more that scientists looked into it. For an obvious example, when you attempt to detect which slit the light went through, the interference pattern disappears and you are left with a pattern which suggests that light is in fact acting like a particle.

Einstein, who won his Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect demonstrating that light acts as both a wave and a particle dubbed a photon, was well aware of this effect and debated at length with Niels Bohr on the topic. Einstein thought that with the right experimental setup – for example using a screen attached to sensitive springs to detect which slit the photon went through – it would be possible to detect the path the photon took, without disturbing the interference pattern. Bohr, meanwhile, used Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – which states that the more we know about a particle’s position, the less we know about its momentum – to show that detecting the path would always wipe out the interference pattern.

Unfortunately for Einstein, all work done subsequently – including experiments that used springs – does point to the interference pattern disappearing when the photon’s path is detected. In the latest blow, scientists have done so during the most “idealized” double-slit experiment so far.

The researchers from MIT were actually studying ultracold atoms, and how the scattering of light off them can reveal their properties. 

“We realized we can quantify the degree to which this scattering process is like a particle or a wave,” first author Vitaly Fedoseev explained in a statement, “and we quickly realized we can apply this new method to realize this famous experiment in a very idealized way.”

In the experiment, they cooled over 10,000 atoms to microkelvin temperatures in a cloud, and used laser beams to manipulate them into a crystal-like lattice. In this setup, each individual atom was far enough away from its neighbor that you could see it as a single, isolated atom. When they shone a weak beam of light through the atoms, as it passed between two neighboring atoms, this was like it passing through two slits in the classic experiment.

“What we have done can be regarded as a new variant to the double-slit experiment,” Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics, added. “These single atoms are like the smallest slits you could possibly build.”

For the experiment, the team could also adjust how tightly the atoms were held in place. Allowing them more freedom, making them “fuzzier”, the atoms would become rustled more easily by the light beam, and as such you would expect increased probability that the light would behave as a photon rather than a wave. Looking at the data collected behind the cloud of atoms by an ultrasensitive detector, the team found that the results closely matched theoretical predictions by quantum mechanics. This appears to agree with the evidence that Einstein was wrong on this topic, and an idealized experiment using a spring would yield the same result.

“In many descriptions, the springs play a major role. But we show, no, the springs do not matter here; what matters is only the fuzziness of the atoms,” Fedoseev added. “Therefore,  one has to use a more profound description, which uses quantum correlations between photons and atoms.”

All these years after the birth of quantum mechanics, its predictions are still the best we have, as well as baffling to observe. This is unlikely the last you will hear of its most famous experiment.

The study is published in Physical Review Letters.

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Researchers have identified a previously unknown quantum state of matter at the boundary between two specialized materials. 

The study, published in Science Advances, examined how a Weyl semimetal interacts with spin ice, an insulating magnetic material, when exposed to strong magnetic fields.

The new quantum state appears to offer characteristics that could pave the way for advanced technological applications.

Discovery of quantum liquid crystal

The new state has been dubbed “quantum liquid crystal,” a state of matter distinct from solid, liquid, gas or plasma. This emerged when electronic properties of the Weyl semimetal were influenced by the magnetic properties of spin ice at their interface.

Both Weyl semimetal and spin ice have separately been the subject of much research, due to their unique properties.

“Although each material has been extensively studied, their interaction at this boundary has remained entirely unexplored,” said study first author Tsung-Chi Wu, who earned his doctoral degree in June from the Rutgers graduate program in physics and astronomy. “We observed new quantum phases that emerge only when these two materials interact. This creates a new quantum topological state of matter at high magnetic fields, which was previously unknown.”

The researchers observed that at the interface of these two materials, the electronic properties of the Weyl semimetal are influenced by the magnetic properties of the spin ice. This leads to “electronic anisotropy,” where the material conducts electricity differently in different directions. Within a circle of 360 degrees, the conductivity was markedly lower at six specific directions.

Under an increasing magnetic field, other strange phenomena were seen. For example, electrons unexpectedly began flowing in two opposite directions, which is characteristic of another quantum phenomenon known as “rotational symmetry breaking”.

Implications for materials science

The findings expand understanding of how material properties can be altered and manipulated under extreme conditions. Insights into electron movement within such special materials could potentially help guide the development of devices designed for operation in challenging environments, such as ultra-sensitive quantum sensors that can operate in the oppressive conditions of space or inside powerful machines.

The research builds on earlier work from the Rutgers team, which described a novel method to design and build a unique, tiny, atoms-thick structures composed of a Weyl semimetal and spin ice using a purpose-built “quantum phenomena discovery platform”, or Q-DiP.

“In that paper, we described how we made the heterostructure,” said co-author Jak Chakhalian, the Claud Lovelace Endowed Professor of Experimental Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “The new Science Advances paper is about what it can do.”

The research relied on ultra-low temperature and high magnetic field conditions, achieved at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) in Florida. 

“We had to initiate the collaboration and travel to the MagLab multiple times to perform these experiments, each time refining ideas and methods,” Wu said. “The ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields were crucial for observing these new phenomena.”

“The experiment-theory collaboration is what really makes the work possible,” Wu continued. “It took us more than two years to understand the experimental results. The credit goes to the state-of-the-art theoretical modeling and calculations done by the Pixley group, particularly Jed Pixley and Yueqing Chang, a postdoctoral researcher. We are continuing our collaboration to push the frontier of the field as a Rutgers team.”

Reference: Wu TC, Chang Y, Wu AK, et al. Electronic anisotropy and rotational symmetry breaking at a Weyl semimetal/spin ice interface. Sci Adv. 2025;11(24):eadr6202. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adr6202

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A Ludwig Cancer Research study has identified a complex chain of molecular chatter by which cancer cells, exploiting ordinary metabolic processes, program one set of noncancerous cells to manipulate another set of such cells to support their growth and survival.

Researchers led by Ping-Chih Ho, Xiaoyun Li and Sofie Hedlund Møller of the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research have discovered that certain fat molecules secreted by cancer cells prompt fibroblasts—workhorse cells often coopted by tumors—to ramp up production of the amino acid glutamine. They report in the Journal of Experimental Medicine that this amino acid switches immune cells known as macrophages into a functional state in which they promote cancer cell proliferation and suppress anti-tumor immune responses.

“Our findings offer new insights into the complexity of the tumor microenvironment and illustrate a previously unknown mechanism by which cancer cells sculpt their metabolic environment to serve multiple needs,” said Ho. “They also suggest potential strategies to reprogram that microenvironment to support anti-tumor immune responses and improve the efficacy of immunotherapy.”

Researchers have a growing appreciation for the sophisticated roles seemingly humdrum cells like fibroblasts—which, among other things, crank out the fibrous stuff of tissues—play in tumor biology. Recruited and reprogrammed by cancer cells, cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) have been shown to secrete multiple immune factors that can alter the function of immune cells like tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) to enable tumor growth and survival. CAFs also support cancer cell metabolism, providing nutrients essential to generating the energy and cellular building blocks that sustain their rapid proliferation.

In exploring how the metabolic profile of tumors shapes their immune landscapes, the Ludwig Lausanne researchers found glutamine to be particularly abundant in melanoma tumors. This was of immediate interest to them because the amino acid is known to modulate the function of TAMs. Further study revealed that glutamine synthetase (GS), an enzyme essential to its biosynthesis, is expressed at especially high levels by CAFs in these tumors.

Møller, Li, Ho and colleagues discovered that palmitic acid (same as the fat in palm oil) produced by melanoma cells engages receptors on the surface of CAFs that trigger their expression of genes involved in inflammation. One of those genes is for interleukin-6 (IL-6), a factor that acts on the inflamed CAFs themselves to ramp up their expression of GS. This in turn elevates glutamine levels in the tumor microenvironment, pushing TAMs into an immunosuppressive and pro-tumorigenic state.

“Our findings reveal a new way that cancer hijacks surrounding cells to protect itself and grow,” said Møller. “Glutamine metabolism is already being studied as a potential target for cancer treatment due to its effects on both cancer cells and immune cells. Our findings suggest that targeting glutamine production in fibroblasts may contribute to the benefits of such therapies.”

The researchers describe in their paper the biochemical signaling cascades in CAFs that lead to inflammatory responses, such as the production of IL-6 and GS. They also show that knocking out the gene for GS in fibroblasts reprograms TAMs and restores anti-tumor immunity, impairing tumor growth in mouse models of melanoma.

Notably, the researchers also show that CAFs expressing genes required for glutamine synthesis are closely associated with pro-tumorigenic TAMs in genomic datasets from breast cancer patients.

“Components of the signaling pathway that we found to be triggered by palmitic acid—such as glutamine synthetase and proteins involved in the inflammatory CAF responses—could be useful as biomarkers,” said Li. With further study and confirmation of our findings, such markers could help clinicians identify tumors that have an immunosuppressive microenvironment and are likely to resist immunotherapy.”

Reference: Li X, Møller SH, Park J, et al. Tumor-instructed glutamine synthesis in cancer-associated fibroblasts promotes pro-tumor macrophages. Journal of Experimental Medicine. 2025;222(9):e20241426. doi:10.1084/jem.20241426

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source. Our press release publishing policy can be accessed here.

Imagine a material where electricity races like lightning with no energy loss, thanks to particles behaving like they’ve stepped out of Einstein’s playbook. That’s a Weyl semimetal, powered by quirky little speedsters called Weyl fermions.

Now, meet spin ice, a magnetic crystal where tiny magnetic fields are frozen in place, mimicking how hydrogen atoms are spaced in real ice. Strange, right? But wildly cool.

When scientists at Rutgers combined these two into a layered structure called a heterostructure and blasted it with an ultra-high magnetic field, they unlocked a whole new level of quantum weirdness. The goal? To understand how this electric speedster material interacts with magnetic ice under intense conditions.

At their atomic interface, something wild happened: matter started behaving in a completely new way. The big reveal? A brand-new state of matter called quantum liquid crystal doesn’t quite follow the usual rules of physics. Instead of electrons flowing evenly like water in a pipe, this state makes them move with a stylish slant: they prefer specific directions over others.

New material allows elusive Weyl fermion study

This leads to a quirky behavior called electronic anisotropy, where electricity flows differently depending on the direction, like a road with hidden speed bumps. In a full circle (360°), there are six directions where electricity slows down.

Crank up the magnetic field, and bam! Electrons suddenly reverse course, flowing in two opposite directions, a total plot twist.

This discovery is consistent with a characteristic seen in the quantum phenomenon known as rotational symmetry breaking. That’s a hint that the system has entered a new, mysterious quantum phase, especially when exposed to powerful magnetic fields.

Tsung-Chi Wu, who earned his doctoral degree in June from the Rutgers graduate program in physics and astronomy and is the first author of the study, said, “Although each material has been extensively studied, their interaction at this boundary has remained entirely unexplored. We observed new quantum phases that emerge only when these two materials interact. This creates a new quantum topological state of matter at high magnetic fields, which was previously unknown.”

The mystery of the Hall effect in a Weyl antiferromagnet unveiled

The findings are significant because they reveal new ways to control material properties by studying how electrons move in special materials. This knowledge could help them create highly sensitive quantum sensors that detect magnetic fields in harsh environments.

Researchers have found that new states of matter appear under extreme conditions, including very low temperatures, high pressures, or high magnetic fields, and behave in strange and fascinating ways.

To uncover these effects, researchers used advanced lab experiments along with powerful computer models and calculations.

Journal Reference:

1. Tsung-Chi Wu, Yueqing Chang, ANg-Kun Wu et al. Electronic anisotropy and rotational symmetry breaking at a Weyl semimetal/spin ice interface. Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr6202

Astronomers have concerns over SpaceX’s Starlink connection, as the world is interlinked by the Starlink internet service, but there are big concerns about it. The satellite is interfering with the universe’s observation, and these fears have been confirmed by Curtin University. As per the analysis of 76 million images from the prototype station, it was found that the Starlink satellite emissions affect up to 30 percent images in some datasets. This kind of interference could change the outcome of the research that depends on that data.

Starlink’s Unintended Emissions Threaten Astronomical Research

As per NASA, it was found that from 1,806 Starlink satellites, there occurred 112,000 radio emissions. Further, it was observed that much of the interference is not deliberate. Some satellites detected emitting data in bands in which no signals are present at all. This includes 703 satellites that were identified at 150.8 MHz. This is meant to be protected for radio astronomy, as said by study lead Dylan Grigg.

Grigg observed that these unintended emissions might have come from onboard electronics. Astronomers can’t easily predict or filter these out as they are not part of the intentional signal. The International Telecommunication Union regulate the satellite emissions for protecting astronomical observations, current rules, and focuses on the intentional transmissions and does not address these unintended emissions, as said by Steven Tingay. Executive director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy.

Calls Grow for Policy Updates to Safeguard Radio Astronomy

The problem is not just the Starlink Satellite; the team found that it currently has the most expansive constellation, including around 7,000 satellites, which can be deployed during the survey. However, the satellite network can release non-deliberate transmissions too.

Tingay said that it is crucial to note that Starlink is not disturbing the current regulations, so there is nothing wrong with it. He further added that we hope this study adds support for the international efforts and updates the policies which control the impact of this technology on the radio astronomy that is currently going on.