A group of immune proteins called the inflammasome can help prevent blood stem cells from becoming malignant by removing certain receptors from their surfaces and blocking cancer gene activity, according to a preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

The study, published in Nature Immunology, may lead to therapies that target the earliest stages of cancer. The findings bolster the idea that the inflammasome has a dual role: It promotes inflammation associated with poor outcomes in late cancer stages, but early on, it can help prevent cells from becoming cancerous in the first place.

“What was striking was that the in...

A tool developed by Keele University researchers has been shown to help detect fake news with an impressive 99% level of accuracy, offering a vital resource in combating online misinformation

The researchers Dr. Uchenna Ani, Dr. Sangeeta Sangeeta, and Dr. Patricia Asowo-Ayobode from Keele’s School of Computer Science and Mathematics, used a number of different machine learning techniques to develop their model, which can scan news content to give a judgment of whether a news source is trustworthy and genuine or not.

The method developed by the researchers uses an “ensemble voting” technique, which combines the predictions of multiple different machine learning models to give an overall score.

Impressively, this technique was accurate in identi...

New observational data from the James Webb Space Telescope and simulation models have confirmed a new type of planet unlike anything found in the Solar System. This provides another piece of the puzzle to understand how planets and planetary systems form.

To date, more than 5000 exoplanets have been confirmed around stars other than the Sun.

Many exoplanets are unlike any of the planets in the Solar System, making it difficult to guess their true natures.

One of the most common types of exoplanets falls in a size range between Earth and Neptune.

Astronomers have debated whether these planets are Earth-like rocky planets with thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres, or Neptune-like icy planets surrounded by water-rich atmospheres, called water worlds.

Previous studies have been ...

The operation and performance of quantum computers relies on the ability to realize and control entanglement between multiple qubits. Yet entanglement between many qubits is inherently susceptible to noise and imperfections in quantum gates.

In recent years, quantum physicists and engineers worldwide have thus been trying to develop more robust protocols to realize and control entanglement. To be most effective for real-world applications, these approaches should reliably support long-range entanglement, or in other words ensure that qubits remain entangled even when they are separated by large distances.

Researchers at IBM Quantum, University of Cologne and Harvard University set out to demonstrate one of these protocols in an experimental setting.

Their paper, published in ...