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    Dietary restriction fuels T-cells with ketones, boosting their cancer-fighting stamina

    December 11, 2025, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    T cell
    Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

    Reducing calorie intake helps cancer-fighting immune cells do their jobs more effectively, reports a study by Van Andel Institute scientists and collaborators. The findings lay the groundwork for developing dietary strategies to boost the effects of a powerful class of cancer immunotherapies.

    “Growing evidence suggests dietary restriction has anti-cancer effects but the ‘why and how’ are not well understood. Our new study reveals one way this relationship may work: by providing T cells, the soldiers of the immune system, with the right mix of nutrients to more effectively fight cancer,” said Russell Jones, Ph.D., chair of VAI’s Department of Metabolism and Nutritional Programming and corresponding author of the study.

    “Additional research is need...

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    NASA-JAXA XRISM finds elemental bounty in supernova remnant

    December 11, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Observations of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant by the Resolve instrument aboard the NASA-JAXA XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft revealed strong evidence for potassium (green squares) in the southeast and northern parts of the remnant. Grids superposed on a multiwavelength image of the remnant represent the fields of view of two Resolve measurements made in December 2023. Each square represents one pixel of Resolve’s detector. Weaker evidence of potassium (yellow squares) in the west suggests that the original star may have had underlying asymmetries before it exploded.
    NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Milisavljevic et al., NASA/JPL/CalTech; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt and K...
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    ‘Ready-made’ T-cell gene therapy tackles ‘incurable’ T-cell leukemia

    December 10, 2025, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    CRISPR
    Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

    A new treatment using genome-edited immune cells, developed by scientists at UCL (University College London) and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), has shown promising results in helping children and adults fight a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer called T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL).

    The world-first gene therapy (BE-CAR7) uses base-edited immune cells to treat previously untreatable T-cell leukemia and help patients achieve remission, offering new hope for families facing this aggressive cancer. Base-editing is an advanced version of CRISPR technology, that can precisely change single letters of DNA code inside living cells.

    In 2022, researchers from GOSH and UCL delivered the world’s first treatment made using “base-edi...

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    Speech-to-reality system creates objects on demand using AI and robotics

    December 10, 2025, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Researchers 'speak objects into existence' using AI and robotics
    A robotic arm builds a lattice-like stool after hearing the prompt “I want a simple stool,” demonstrating how the system translates speech into real-time fabrication. Credit: Alexander Kyaw and the researchers

    Generative AI and robotics are moving us ever closer to the day when we can ask for an object and have it created within a few minutes. In fact, MIT researchers have developed a speech-to-reality system, an AI-driven workflow that allows them to provide input to a robotic arm and “speak objects into existence,” creating things like furniture in as little as five minutes.

    With the speech-to-reality system, a robotic arm mounted on a table is able to receive spoken input from a human, such as “I want a simple stool,” and then construct the objects out of modular components...

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