Findings will help better identify Earth-like planets that could sustain life. Astronomers have identified more than 4,000, and counting, confirmed exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than the sun – but only a fraction have the potential to sustain life.

Now, new research from UBC’s Okanagan campus is using the geology of early planet formation to help identify those that may be capable of supporting life.

“The discovery of any planet is pretty exciting, but almost everyone wants to know if there are smaller Earth-like planets with iron cores,” says Dr...

Through T cell engineering, researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center show that it’s possible to arrest tumor growth for a variety of cancers and squash the spread of cancer to other tissues. This research will be published in tomorrow’s print edition of Cancer Research.

The paper builds on decades of research by study co-senior author Paul B. Fisher, M.Ph., Ph.D., a member of Massey’s Cancer Biology research program, who discovered a protein called IL-24 that attacks a variety of cancers in several different ways.

In this latest study, Fisher teamed up with his colleague Xiang-Yang (Shawn) Wang, Ph.D...

One-of-a-kind tool helped solve anode puzzle that thwarted previous attempts. The Washington University in St. Louis lab of Peng Bai, assistant professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, has developed a stable sodium ion battery that is highly efficient, will be less expensive to make and is significantly smaller than a traditional lithium ion battery due to the elimination of a once-necessary feature.
“We’ve found that the minimal is maximum,” Bai said. “No anode is the best anode.”
The research was published May 3, 2021, in the journal Advan...

Scientists have recreated the reaction by which carbon isotopes made their way into different organic compounds, challenging the notion that organic compounds, such as amino acids, were formed by isotopically enriched substrates. Their discovery suggests that the building blocks of life in meteorites were derived from widely available substrates in the early solar system.

Their findings were published online in Science Advances on April 28, 2021.

Carbonaceous meteorites contain the building blocks of life, including amino acids, sugars, and nucleobases. These meteorites are potential providers of these molecules to the prebiotic Earth.

The small organic molecules found in meteorites are generally enriched in a heavy carbon isotope (13C)...