Omega fatty acids have long been recognized for their benefits: supporting cardiovascular health, reducing systemic inflammation, and promoting brain development and cognitive function. But scientists now warn of a long-unrecognized downside to these compounds when it comes to cancer and immunotherapy.

New preclinical experiments by medical investigators in the Vascular Biology and Therapeutic Program at Yale University School of Medicine show that omega fatty acids can blunt the cancer-killing capabilities of the immune system’s natural killer cells.

Their research is part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that well-known—and largely beneficial—fatty acids can circumvent the body’s defenses and promote cancer growth.

A unifying he...

Magnetic fields in the chromosphere above a quiet-Sun region observed by the SCIP instrument onboard Sunrise-III (right box), and magnetic structures reproduced by a numerical simulation (left box). The thin, thread-like magnetic structures detected by SCIP are reproduced in the simulation as twisted magnetic field lines (enlarged view inside the circle at the lower left). （Credit: NAOJ / MPS / Sunrise-III/SCIP）

A team of researchers led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan discovered unexpectedly intricate magnetic structures above quiet-sun regions by observing the sun with the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise-III during its 2024 flight in Earth’s stratosphere. The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Threads within the magnetic canop...

When scientists assess how dangerous a bacterium is, the first question often seems simple: Can it be stopped or killed? In microbiology and antibiotic research, one of the classic readouts has been whether a bacterium can grow in the presence of a given treatment. The bacterium either grows or it does not. The drug either stops it or it does not.

But infection is not just a survival contest...

Four and a half billion years ago, Earth and Mars were born in the rotating cloud of gas and dust that would eventually become our solar system. Yet exactly how the planets formed remains one of the most disputed questions in planetary science.

Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen are adding new evidence to the debate. Using a novel approach, they have reconstructed the earliest stages of the planets’ formation by analyzing their chemical composition.

And the results surprised them.

“The most surprising result was that Earth and Ma...