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Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles

Jupiter’s intense northern and southern lights pulse independently of each other according to new UCL-led research using ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatories. The study found that very high-energy X-ray emissions at Jupiter’s south pole consistently pulse every 11 minutes. Meanwhile those at the north pole are erratic: increasing and decreasing in brightness, independent of the south pole.

This behaviour is distinct from Earth’s north and south auroras which broadly mirror each other in activity...

Artist’s impression of the V404 Cygni black hole jet. Credit: G Perez Diaz IAC

They are nature’s very own Death Star beams – ultra-powerful jets of energy that shoot out from the vicinity of black holes like deadly rays from the Star Wars super-weapon. Now a team of scientists led by the University of Southampton has moved a step closer to understanding these mysterious cosmic phenomena – known as relativistic jets – by measuring how quickly they ‘switch on’ and start shining brightly once they are launched.

How these jets form is still a puzzle. One theory suggests that they develop within the ‘accretion disc’...

Researchers showed that FAP (middle panels) is overexpressed in pancreatic tumors compared to normal pancreatic tissue. Particularly high levels of FAP expression were associated with poorer outcomes. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

New findings from a University of Pennsylvania-led team offer a promising target for future therapies that could potentially root out even well-hidden metatstatic cancer lesions. When they deleted the gene encoding this protein in mice with the disease, the animals lived longer, and the cancer’s spread to other organs was reduced...

Three-Dimensional Printing with Biomass-Derived PEF for Carbon-Neutral Manufacturing. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2017; DOI: 10.1002/anie.201708528

3D printing with a biobased polymer for CO2-neutral manufacturing. In our modern world, eliminating plastics is inconceivable. Unfortunately, they do have disadvantages, including the formation of CO(2) in both production and combustion, depletion of fossil feedstocks, and growth of landfills. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Russian researchers introduce a new way forward, a polymer made entirely from biomass that can easily and inexpensively be used in 3D printing. Objects produced in this way are of high quality, easily recyclable, and highly solvent-resistant.

Conventional “subtractive” processes involve cutting, sawing, turni...